Dr. Duncan French

You know, we rarely advocate a high performance athlete in a high intensity intermittent sport like MMA being totally ketogenic.

Because at the end of the day, some of those high intensity efforts usually require carbohydrate fueling for the energy produced at those high intensities.

The use of ketones that I'm primarily aware of in our sport is after the event, in terms of the brain health with athletes potentially taking trauma to the brain, et cetera, and looking to maintain the fueling and the energy supply to the brain.

But yes, it's probably a little bit out of my remit.

So I don't want to talk on that because I'm not fully familiar with that.

To come back to your original question, if it's a general population, then yes, I think there's a place to argue that actually being on a ketogenic diet at times, and maybe it's a cycling exercise, maybe not, I don't mean cycling a bike, I mean cycling ketosis is beneficial because I think it's going to lead to better metabolic management and metabolic efficiency.

at those lower intensities where we should be fueling our metabolism with lipids and fats.

Clearly the Western diet and the modern day diet is heavily driven by processed foods and carbohydrates that people become predisposed to utilization of that fuel source.

above lipid use, fat use, intensities that are very low.

So some of our data with the fighters shows that as well.

But I think the challenge for us is that we're working with a clientele that require high intensity bouts of effort.

So, you know, fueling appropriately is very important for that.

Now, we use tactics here where we essentially have athletes on what you would say kind of is largely a ketogenic diet.

But then we will fuel carbohydrates around training sessions.

So we'll do very timed exposure to carbohydrates.

So it's not post-training.

Post-training, immediately pre-training.

During and then immediately post.

And then the rest of their diets, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner, what would look like ketogenic type approaches.

So we're trying to be very tactical in the exposure to maximize the intensity for the training and then return to a metabolically efficient diet, which is heavily reduced in carbohydrate because we've fueled the sessions that need it.