Six Easy Ways to Elevate Your Blood Ketone Levels | Going Beyond the Ketogenic Diet

It’s not just about how high you can get your ketones. Here are some hacks for increasing and maintaining your blood ketone levels.

1. MCT Oil & C8 Oil

MCT stands for ‘Medium Chain Triglycerides’ which are chains of healthy fatty acids. You can find MCTs in coconut oil, palm oil, butter and even breast milk.

The amazing characteristic of concentrated MCT Oils, such as Capric and Caprylic acid (C8 Oil), is that the body quickly converts them into ketones and is less likely to store them as fat. These oils catalyse fat burning (ketosis) and they are an excellent fuel for the brain.

MCT Oil supplementation has even shown to boost your metabolism as they increase energy expenditure and fat oxidation. When consuming MCTs, men can burn up to 460 extra calories and women burn up to 190 extra calories per day.

In the diagram below, you can see how MCT Oil can increase blood ketone levels by up to 0.55mmol.

Full research paper.

2. Combine MCT Powder with Exogenous Ketones

When you add fats to sugar, protein or vitamins, you increase the bioavailability (how easily your body absorbs the nutrients) and slow down the absorption too.

The same goes for ketones. Combining MCT powder with exogenous ketones (BHB Salts) increases the bioavailability of the ketones and therefore sustains the length of time the ketone energy is present in the blood. This translates to you having more energy for longer, rather than a sudden, short burst of ketone energy.

As you can see in the diagram above, MCT by itself elevates blood ketone levels by 0.55mmol for up to 4 hours
A BHB Salt (Exogenous Ketone) supplement elevates blood ketone levels by 0.95mmol for up to 4 hours
And MCT combined with BHB Salts elevates blood ketone levels by 1.35mmol for up to 8 hours!

This means that you can get a lot more (ketones) out of your exogenous ketone supplement by combining it with MCT Oil.

You can easily combine them yourself. For example, shaking up an Exogenous Ketone Powder with an MCT Oil Powder. You can even just use half portions when you are combining them together, which means your supplements will last you longer.

Or

These products are pre blended with MCT Oil Powder and Exogenous Ketones:

3. Incorporate Intermittent Fasting

Another way of increasing your natural ketone production is to incorporate intermittent fasting and extended fasting into your routine. This trains your metabolism to convert body fat into ketones to fuel your body and mind.

When someone initially begins their ketogenic journey, they would typically have a low concentration of ketones in the blood – about 0.1 to 0.5 mmol/L. However, after prolonged periods of fasting or an extremely strict ketogenic diet (more than 5 consecutive days) and endurance exercise, blood ketone concentrations can exceed 7 mmol* without any supplementation.

4. Eat Lots of Healthy Fats

Ensure that you are consuming healthy fats in abundance. Once you eliminate carbohydrates and sugars, your brain will crave energy and you should aim to get your macros to 70-85% fat per day. This will support your fat adaptation and you will easily produce and utilise ketones.

Discover the healthy fats you could be eating in your Free 7 Day Ketogenic Meal Plan.

5. Endurance Exercise

High Intensity Training (HIIT) relies on glycogen stores to be mobilised from the muscles to fuel the body. Endurance exercise can initially rely on glycogen stores, and once those glycogen stores are depleted, if the athlete is fat adapted, fat stores will be oxidised and mobilised for energy. Thus, stored body fat will be converted into ketone bodies which are transported around the body and utilised as energy.

Regular endurance exercise, combined with a ketogenic diet, is a reliable way to catalyse fat adaptation and train your metabolism to readily oxidise fat stores for energy—thus releasing more ketones into the blood as and when you need them.

The key here is to encourage fat adaptation and easy ketone production, providing you with the energy you need, when you need it.

6. Add Caffeine

Another trick is to combine your ketones with caffeine. In general, caffeine increases the efficacy of supplements and also upregulates your metabolism so your body will more readily utilise ketones for energy.

These Exogenous Ketone Supplements contain caffeine:

And Pruvit Orange Dream cleverly includes Exogenous Ketones, MCT Oil Powder and Caffeine.

Combine Charged Pruvit Orange Dream with endurance exercise and intermittent fasting and you will be well on your way to becoming keto adapted!

Find out how to measure your ketones here.
And don’t make These Common Keto Mistakes.

Reference:

*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27430501