Qualy #120 - What is the difference between ketone salts and esters?

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Maybe explain for people what the difference is between a salt and an ester. So we'll leave acetoacetate out of that for a moment. But if you talk about beta-hydroxybutyrate.

**Dom D'Agostino** (0:49)
But you can have acetoacetate salt too. So I can mention that.

**Peter Attia** (0:52)
I didn't know that. I thought it was only a diester. So we'll definitely want to hear about that. So on the BHB front, people are sort of inundated with ketone salts, ketone esters, and then a whole bunch of complete weird stuff like raspberry ketones and stuff. But let's just leave the nonsense off the table.
But if you just talk about comparing a BHB ester to a BHB salt, what's the chemical difference?

**Dom D'Agostino** (1:13)
Yeah, so a salt is just an ionic bond between the ketone molecule, beta hydroxybutyrate, a monovalent or a divalent cation, or an alkaline amino acid like arginine, citrulline, histidine, lysine. So you can literally ionically bond beta hydroxybutyrate to a number of different things.
The easiest thing to do is to bond it with sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium.

**Peter Attia** (1:40)
Now calcium and magnesium have two positive charges.

**Dom D'Agostino** (1:42)
You could put two BHBs on them.
That's the advantage, sort of an advantage. A disadvantage, I guess, with magnesium BHB, which is actually is very bioavailable magnesium. I measured my magnesium after taking it. It went up quite high. Disadvantage is that your GI tolerability to something like magnesium beta hydroxybutyrate may be only somewhere between one to three grams. Three grams max per dose.

**Peter Attia** (2:11)
Which is not that much.

**Dom D'Agostino** (2:12)
One gram three times a day, at least for me, has no issues. I could probably tolerate two or three grams per day. So it's nice. I mean, it's something that's contributing, but ideally what you want to do with a ketone salt is, because salt has a stigma, I call them ketone electrolyte formulations, is to spread the beta-hydroxybutyrate out across monovalent and divalent cations. And they're the four that have the most utility.

**Peter Attia** (2:39)
And then an ester, of course, is a covalent bond, not an ionic bond, right?

**Dom D'Agostino** (2:44)
Yeah.
So you can take 1, 3-butane diol, and you could create a monoester with beta-hydroxybutyrate, right? And just add it, do a transesterification reaction, and combine that beta-hydroxybutyrate to 1, 3-butane diol, or acetoacetate, you can combine with 1, 3-butane. Or you could take glycerol. So with glycerol, you can come up with a triester of glycerol, which we have.

**Peter Attia** (3:10)
Basically, you're creating a triglyceride that is instead of three fatty acids, you put three BHBs.

**Dom D'Agostino** (3:15)
It's pretty cool molecule, yeah. So we have some experience using that.

**Peter Attia** (3:20)
I told a story many, many years ago, probably four or five years ago, on Tim Ferriss' podcast about how I drank this jet fuel and almost thought I was gonna go blind. Of course, what I may or may not have omitted from that story was that you gave it to me.
And so the ketones today taste a heck of a lot better than that earlier gen stuff. And even when I told you that I just took the 50ml vial you sent and chugged it in one sitting, even you were sort of horrified. You're like, wait, wait, wait. You didn't read the note I wrote you explaining how to dilute it and mix it.

**Dom D'Agostino** (3:51)
I thought we had talked about it.

**Peter Attia** (3:52)
We had assuredly talked about it.

**Dom D'Agostino** (3:55)
I know you're very enthusiastic about getting started.

**Peter Attia** (3:57)
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't resist.

**Dom D'Agostino** (3:59)
I was, too.

**Peter Attia** (4:00)
That stuff's unbearably bad. So what, I mean, whereas the ketone salts actually don't taste bad.

**Dom D'Agostino** (4:05)
They're obviously strong, but they're awesome.

**Peter Attia** (4:08)
Yeah, yeah. So why does the ester, is there an obvious reason from an olfactory slash taste perspective why they are so staggeringly horrible?

**Dom D'Agostino** (4:18)
Yeah.

**Peter Attia** (4:18)
Or at least they were. I mean, I'm told they're better today.

**Dom D'Agostino** (4:21)
Yeah, I would say the ketogenic potency is inversely proportional to taste. So it just seems like the more potent these compounds get, even the triester beta-hydroxybutyrate is pretty nasty stuff.