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Old Wed, Dec-20-17, 20:41
M Levac M Levac is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,498
 
Plan: VLC, mostly meat
Stats: 202/200/165 Male 5' 7"
BF:
Progress: 5%
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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When measuring ketones, or any single parameter, context is most important. Take blood pressure for example. White coat syndrome - BP goes through the roof. Measuring BP at that point is meaningless and can lead to unnecessary treatment. We just discussed this not long ago on this forum. Even with standard medical care, context is important. They talk about ketoacidosis in conjunction with hyperglycemia, in the context of diabetes type 1 especially.

So what's going on with ketones, what's the context that makes it mean something? In that article that I won't read, there's still lots we can take from it to answer that question. For example, it says that ketones level should go really high after a reasonably lengthy fast (which I agree). Well, that gives us a tool we can use to determine if ketones metabolism, especially in the liver, works as it should. Measure ketones, fast for a day or two, measure ketones again, see the difference. See? Context.

Now that we're aware that context is important, and we're aware that certain contexts give us certain expectations or predictions, we can use that to control what happens to ketones, or even better we can use it to find out if something's going on that we don't know about yet.

Take that fasting context again and see what we can do with that. We expect ketones to rise much higher than otherwise, right? Now what if they don't? Right then we know there's something else going on we don't yet know about. Let's find it, fix it, done.

So, ketones isn't something to worry about, instead it's something that speaks to us. Personally when my ketones numbers were through the roof coming out my wazoo, it was telling me all is quite well thank you very much. I didn't really need to know the ketones number, I had a bunch of other things that were telling me the same thing, all together all at once. For example, blood glucose was 3.5 (67mg/dl), at the very limit of low BG. BP, the same, low enough to diagnose low BP - 90/60. Not bragging, just illustrating context. I'm certainly not bragging now when I say that at some point everything went south. My health took a bad turn, still trying to figure it out. The point is, if then a fast would shoot up my ketones, today it will not - something else is going on that interferes with normal ketones metabolism. Now because the context of fasting predicts that ketones rise significantly, if at some point they do, then I will have figured out - and fixed - what's wrong with me. But then so will everything else that speaks to me, tell the same story ketones do.

In essence, I'm trying to make diet become the only thing that has any effect on ketones, by fixing and eliminating all other causes.
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