The part about high ketosis increasing beta hydroxybutyrate over time sort of bugs me... since the highest levels of blood ketones are reached when beta hydroxybutyrate is at its highest, elevated beta hydroxybutyrate pretty much is high ketosis. Maybe high and sustained ketogenesis is what's meant here?

"Acetone indicates ketogenesis"--taken literally, I'd read this as acetone having a more direct relation to total ketone production than to blood ketones. Which certainly could make sense, if that's the claim. I don't know if the claim would be justified, or if they're actually making it, but it sounds potentially sensible.

Wikipedia shows acetone as a spontaneous breakdown product of the other ketone bodies... but you have to be a bit careful using the term spontaneous with biochemistry. No doubt all sorts of non-spontaneous variations in the cellular milieu might increase or decrease the rate of this reaction, even without more targeted enzyme activity etc.



Bintang said;



I'm not really sure how far I'd go with that. I would say that it's a very special oil, though--special enough that using it in the case of groups that eat large amounts of coconut as an illustration that saturated fat is generally safe is probably faulty. I'm not saying that saturated fat is dangerous, just that coconut oil is an inappropriate ambassador for butter and lard. And the idea that the medium chain fatty acids might protect vs. hypoglycemia in more than one way seems worth looking into. In the context of a more generally ketogenic diet, protection vs. hypoglycemia might be strong enough to make any contribution medium chain fats might make by being able to cross the blood brain barrier superfluous. The study suggested the more direct action of mct's was to help speed up recovery from a hypo, in addition to other fuels--where the ketones pretty much in and of themselves prevented and reversed hypos. So this might partly explain the effectiveness of a less ketogenic diet that includes mct oils vs epilepsy, or even the effectiveness in Alzheimer's that Mary Newport claims for her husband when coconut oil was stirred into his oatmeal.