Peter Attia

But it's a very indirect way to do it that comes with toxicity.

So the monoester is beta-hydroxybutyrate with a monoester bond to 1,3-butanediol?

Why is it that you don't experience the same negative issue with that molecule?

Is it because you just consume less of it because you're getting the BHB directly?

And why can't you just consume BHB?

Is that not stable enough by itself, other than in a salt?

So you just needed a positive cation.

And are those covalently bound or not?

Ionically bound.

Yeah.

Okay.

So again, just- Sodium's positive?

Trying to get everybody back to high school chemistry.

You can either take this highly, highly acidic BHB molecule and you can covalently bind it through an ester to 1,3-butanediol, or you can say, let's be done with that baggage of the 1,3-butanediol and let's have a non-covalent, an ionic bound to a salt.

And I just need a positive charge to offset the negative charge.

So then you were saying, okay, I want to do sodium because I can do a lot with it.

And then tell me where the potassium comes in because you want sodium and potassium.

Both of them are two positive charges instead of one calcium or one magnesium, which have two positive charges.

We should go back to that, Dom, because I think a lot of people have lived that experience and they don't understand why, which is in the early stages of a ketogenic diet, there's little room for error where as glucose levels are going down and ketone levels haven't come up enough to fill the gap,

you really feel lousy.