How Athletes Are Reaping the Benefits of Keto Without Actually Giving Up Carbs

You’ve definitely heard of the ketogenic diet — starving your body of carbs to force it to burn fat and produce the mind-clarifying, brain-healing compounds known as ketones. You may have even heard of people and athletes ingesting ketone salts or drinks to propel them into or keep them in a state of ketosis. And if you were paying close attention during the Tour de France this year, you may have spied Team Jumbo-Visma openly drinking ketones mid-race.

The funny thing is, these athletes are not on a ketogenic diet. They are not fat adapted.

“For the last three years or so, we’ve seen Tour athletes fueling with carbs and then supplementing with exogenous ketones to score a two to three percent boost in performance from dual-fueling,” says Matt Johnson, a former competitive cyclist and co-founder of The Feed, an online sports nutrition shop and leading supplier of exogenous ketones in the U.S. “June was insane with team’s placing $10,000 to $20,000 orders for ketone esters and rush shipping them to France. We could barely keep up with it.”

Elite athletes biohacking to score a tiny edge? Nothing new.

But this is: a study in the Journal of Physiology says everyday athletes who aren’t on a keto diet, who aren’t fat-adapted, may improve their recovery by a whopping 15 percent just from drinking exogenous ketones after intense training days. And the news is spreading.

“We have also had a huge spike in individual athletes ordering the product that seems to be only growing,” Johnson adds.

Ketones, explained.

Now, will this approach work for you? Here’s everything you need to know.

First, a quick biology lesson slash crash course in the trendiest diet of the twenty-teens: in an ideal world, your body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, which is then transported and used or stored as energy for your muscles, organs and, most importantly, your brain.

Your brain is at the top of the pecking order — it gobbles about 20 percent of your total energy expenditure, a lot for a single organ — and if it’s not fueled, everything else stops functioning. When you deprive your body of carbohydrates, your muscles can use fat for fuel, but your brain can’t. Instead, your body has a fail-safe to prevent total shutdown: the liver starts converting fat into a superfood designed to save your starving brain: ketones.

Ketones are essentially a fourth macronutrient — your blood sugar is stable, your body is burning fat and your brain has entered an almost elevated state of functionality. In ketosis — the state you reach when adhering to a keto diet — your brain starts producing more mitochondria (the little powerhouses of energy in your body) and better regulating neurons. Staying in a state of ketosis has been shown to help clear the brain of proteins that can lead to and worsen Alzheimer’s disease, reduce seizures in about half of people with epilepsy and even extend the lifespan of mice.

In athletes, staying in ketosis via a ketogenic diet can increase fat utilization during exercise (great, considering your body can store way more fat for fuel than carbs), help reduce body fat and sometimes improve endurance time trials and sprint peak power.

The catch: it all rides on you steering clear of carbs — with no slip-ups. If you eat more than your allotted count — typically 50 grams, which is one cup of pasta or just two bananas — your body falls out of ketosis and you don’t get any of these benefits. And pretty much all nutritionists agree that even if your body can adapt to burning fat quickly to fuel long runs and rides, it would still prefer to burn carbs.

Which is why the notion of professional athletes downing exogenous ketone drinks without having to give up carbs is completely bonkers.

So what are exogenous ketones, exactly?

In the early 2000s, as part of a DARPA program to enhance U.S. soldier performance, Oxford professors Kieran Clarke and Richard Veech set out to distill the exact molecular structure of one of the ketones our body produces. The resulting ketone ester is a specific molecule, butanedial, that converts directly to beta hydroxybutyrate, the ketone our liver naturally produces in the ketogenic state, when you digest it, explains Geoffrey Woo, co-founder and CEO of HVMN.

HVMN is currently the only company to produce ketone esters, as they lease the patent to Clarke and Veech’s molecular structure.

Now, keto followers are probably familiar with other brands of keto drinks (usually based on MCT oil) and ketone salts. But esters are different than these aids. MCT oils don’t produce ketones; they help put your body in a state of ketosis so it can start producing its own — but since that requires carbohydrate starvation, that’s not an option for dual-fueling athletes, Johnson explains.

Ketone salts, meanwhile, use beta hydroxybutyrate as well, but by their nature, they’re bound to a mineral. “Because you have to take so much ketone to raise your blood levels enough to see an effect, you’re also gaining a lot of mineral load. This leads to a lot of GI issues in athletes,” explains Woo. That, plus the fact that the salts don’t raise your ketone levels that much, leaves a lot of room for a superior product. “There has been minimal testing on the aids but the HVMN esters have been tested and verified,” Johnson says.

“Ketone esters are a way to eat ketones directly that’s going to convert 100 percent to ketones in your body,” Woo adds.

Why athletes are fueling with both carbs and ketones

Woo says professional athletes drinking exogenous ketones during a race report about a two to three percent increase in performance. That matters in an event like the Tour — but the real benefit for athletes, especially everyone other than Egan Bernal or Geraint Thomas, seems to be in downing a bottle once the race is over.

The aforementioned Journal of Physiology study, conducted by seemingly impartial Belgian researchers, simulated a Tour with everyday athletes: 20 fit men trained twice a day (HIIT or intermittent endurance training in the morning, then 1.5- to 3-hour endurance sessions at night), six days a week for three weeks. Half drank a ketone ester after each workout while half drank a placebo.