The Potent Brain & Body Ketone Fuel You’ve Probably Never Heard Of: The Science Of R3HBG With Tecton’s Dr. Mike Chesne

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

**Mike Chesne** (0:04)
Some of these products were used for things that you wouldn't want to eat it if you knew what they were using it for. It's almost magic. It's almost magic. People sometimes think I talk about it like it.
But as you learn more about this molecule and what it does for human bodies, it's hard not to. I mean, think about it. This is caveman fuel. This is what cavemen use to get to the next meal.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:28)
Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:50)
I spent 20 years measuring and optimizing everything about my body.
Deep performance metrics, cold stress, heat stress, sleep scores, blood panels, peptide protocols, testosterone, telomeres, VO2 max, you name it. And somewhere in the middle of building what looked like perfect life, I almost lost the life that I was building it for. Boundless, the man who became human with a brand new feature documentary that follows what happened when the optimization framework that I spent two decades constructing ran headlong into the things that metrics could never measure, my marriage, my sons, my faith. The private archive footage in this documentary has never been seen publicly. Some of it I debated even including at all. It shows basically the worst of what happens when longevity becomes the ultimate goal and how you and I can turn that around to become fulfilled by what's truly important in life.
Now this is not just another biohacking film. It's an honest look at what it costs to chase the ceiling on human performance told through real footage of one family, my family finding that out. And I'm giving you the chance to join me for the brand new live premier tour of this new film In A City Near You. Here's what the night looks like. You watch the film, me and my family in a theater and then you experience a live episode of the Boundless Life podcast on stage with open Q&A, real questions, no filters. My wife, Jessa and my sons, River and Taryn will be there with us as well.
VIP ticket holders get to join for an exclusive after party with upgraded food and drinks. This Boundless Life tour kicks off in LA on July 24th, Austin on August 20th, New York City on August 6th, Miami coming down the pipeline, London coming down the pipeline, more cities to be announced. Tickets are on sale now. Grab them now before they're gone at boundlessdoc.com. That's boundlessdoc.com and I hope to see you there.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:20)
Mike, a lot of people who are in the ketones, you know, they have some medical issue like a concussion or TBI or some people will turn to it as, you know, for something like cancer management.
Some people see the ads on the Internet. Some people have a friend hand them a bottle. What got you interested in this whole field?

**Mike Chesne** (3:40)
Well, the story is a little longer than just a quick intro. I was in the military for 25 years and I got a pretty significant brain injury while I was in Iraq.
Ended up costing me my career. Ended up having to be medically retired in 2010 So that is kind of the genesis of where this came from is learning that ketones were neuroprotective and the idea was if we could get that to soldiers before they got injured, there's a high probability that it wouldn't go down that secondary neuro metabolic cascade and cause additional damage later on. So that's kind of the very beginning genesis of it. But then learning more about real ketone, exogenous ketone research got me started learning about it, studying about it. And in fact, what made me turn into a biochemist.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:36)
So yeah, so originally before the whole idea of exogenous ketone supplementation, which is kind of how you and I met, were you mostly mostly trying out or utilizing or familiar with nutritional ketosis, just basically like, you know, extreme carb restriction, fasting, etc.

**Mike Chesne** (4:52)
Yes.
So where I where I first learned about it was I was in a four month long residential treatment facility in Houston for brain injury. So they had a very good program at Tier Memorial Hermann in Houston. It was a brain injury rehab center, the same one that Senator Gifford went to after she was shot. We were in the same cohort. That's where I learned that nutrition and what you put into your body has a lot to do with how well you heal and also whether or not you even get hurt seriously in the first place. And that's kind of where I learned about a ketogenic diet, tried it out a little bit back then, didn't really get serious in the keto diet until probably early 2020s. Did a lot of work on the ketone space, but I didn't personally use the diet until later on.