Something tells me I will not find it so I think I will spare the effort.

What I have wanted to understand myself for some time is how blood ketone levels respond to different levels of dietary carbohydrate and what is required to get blood ketone levels into the range of 1.25 to 2.75 mmol/L …. assuming this is the desirable ‘optimal ketone zone’ according to P&V's cartoon.

However, I think you are well justified in your skepticism about the P&V cartoon and it’s vagueness about what is ‘good ketosis’. My reason for saying this is based on the experimental results reported in the paper
“Breath acetone is a reliable indicator of ketosis in adults consuming ketogenic meals” http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/76/1/65.full

The 12 subjects of the experiment reported in this paper were fed extreme ketogenic diets consisting of ~ 4% carbohydrate, ~6% protein and 90% fat (in order to mimic the kind of diet used for treating intractable epilepsy) but over a 12 hour dietary study period total blood ketones (AcAc + b-HBA) ranged from 0.3 to 1.1 mmol/liter (see following charts extracted from Figure 1 of the paper) , which according to the P&V cartoon only corresponds to the start of nutritional ketosis but is not inside the ‘optimal ketone zone’.


Question: How does one get into P&V's 'optimal ketone zone' if an extreme ketogenic diet can only generate total blood ketone levels in the range of 0.3 to 1.1 mmol/liter?

By way of interest I also present the following charts which show my personal ketonix measurements collected over the last 17 days but aggregated within 2 hourly time intervals to show the average trend within a daily period starting around 7:00 am until just after mid-night.


Notes:
1) Blood ketones have been estimated from the ketonix readings using the correlation I explained in earlier posts.
2) My average macros during the 17 day observation period were, total CHO 68g/d, Protein 94g/d Fat 172g/day, energy 2228 kcals/d
3) The dotted vertical lines in the charts indicate average meal times.
4) The meal around 3:30pm is really just a mid-afternoon snack consisting of a small amount of fruit with lot’s of dairy and/or coconut cream. It consistently causes the ketonix readings to spike within about 1 hour.

I'm now tempted to try an extreme ketogenic type diet for a few days in order to see what impact it has on average ketone levels over the daily cycle.