Keto Supps & Weight Loss
Supplementing with ketone salts/esters is all the rage. Where’s the pudding?
TL;DR: There isn’t any.
Seems to be yet another marketing ploy based on a study with some serious flaws. This isn’t an attack on Dom D’Agostino (I think he does some good research), but this is an attack on the “Drink keto supps for weight loss” hack.
So, I’ve written before about how ketones inhibit fatty acid oxidation through activation of the HCA2 receptor. Cool, but I’d be joking if if I said that was all that mattered in a physiological system. There could be other factors at play, so it would be very presumptive to say that was the end of the discussion (though I still think that is a major mechanism, based on the available evidence).
So what evidence is there that exogenous ketones induce weight loss?
I’ll let you read the study. For the short version, rats were supplemented with exogenous ketones for 4 weeks. The groups containing exogenous ketones gained the least amount of weight. Not lost weight, just didn’t gain as much. Not that it really matters, though.
The biggest fall of the study is this:
Exogenously delivered ketone supplements significantly altered rat weight gain for the duration of the study (Fig. 6). However, rats did not lose weight and maintained a healthy range for their age. Rats have been shown to effectively balance their caloric intake to prevent weight loss/gain [97–99]. Due to the caloric density of the exogenous ketone supplements (Table 1) it is possible for the rats to eat less of the standard rodent chow and therefore less carbohydrates while maintaining their caloric intake. Food intake was not measured for this study.
Let me repeat: there was no data on caloric intake during this study. From what I can gather, the authors sort of assumed that the rats were eating the same amount of chow based on the assumption that levels of BOHB in the blood didn’t seem to reflect carb restriction.
Except…
I think the title says it all, there.
Lower appetite = less food = fewer calories = less weight gain.
I’ll wait for the bowl of pudding before I believe that exogenous ketones themselves (without some degree of caloric restriction) result in reduced weight.
On another note, sorry it’s been so long since posting. Life happened. A lot.
