My guess is yes. IF is a sort of low-carb, so BG is allowed to drop to a certain extent. I mean, if we're already doing LC, IF won't do much more. My point was that raising them above normal can't be done just with diet. The best we can expect from diet alone is to get them back to normal. Think of insulin. Can we lower it below normal just with low-carb? Of course not, but it will drop and at best in the low-normal range. My guess is the lowest possible insulin level we can get just with diet is about 2 mcU/ml, which is the lower limit of what's considered normal if I'm not mistaken. With testosterone and HGH, they won't drop, they gonna rise, so it's a sort of opposite here but it's still all regulated by feedback loops so there's still an upper limit.

With fasting (not IF, but actual fasting), GH goes as high as it can, fasting is a GH stimulator, and there's no incoming carbs to raise BG which is an inhibitor. Not sure about testosterone and fasting or IF, but it should also rise, if it was below normal to begin with, since fasting returns everything to normal, that includes all hormones that were otherwise disrupted by a high-carb diet for example. I'm guessing here but it makes sense to me.

A quick search reveals fasting does have an effect on luteinizing hormone and testosterone, but the paper (PMID: 2686332) I just skimmed through is about a GnRH test (Relefact, read up on it, it's quite interesting what it's used for). Basically, fasting makes the pituitary more sensitive to GnRH, therefore should secrete more LG when otherwise stimulated normally. Also, that experiment shows a significant difference in responses between lean men and obese men (much higher before fasting, much much much higher after). If I were to conclude anything, it's that injecting 50ng of Relefact after a 56h fasting period is meh for lean men, but really really good for obese men. This seems to confirm my point about a feedback loop that regulates hormones. So basically, the closer to normal, the lower the stimulus response. And the farther from normal, the higher the stimulus response.

For our purpose - that HVMN ketone drink - this basically means a top level cyclist already doing all out keto will see pretty much no effect.

I find it refreshing to hear all this as a few years ago no one in sports thought anyone low carbing could excel in competition, you had to carb up!! lol

I turned the corner after the bread isle the other day to look in the "health" section. On the end-cap they had big bottles of "MCT oil" never noticed that in my grocery store before. Not sure I need it, but it was interesting. More expensive than my coconut oil though.

Agreed. I am already seeing the traditional pasta dinner pre-race becoming less popular. Thing about sports, the results are not arguable... once something is shown to be useful, it gets adopted no matter what they used to believe.