Exogenous Ketones-Claims vs Reality with Brendan Egan, PhD. #194

View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.

Episode overview:

Brendan is an Associate Professor of Sport and Exercise Physiology and Head of School for the School of Health and Human Performance at DCU. His current research investigates skeletal muscle function and adaptation across the life course, with special interest in the synergy between nutrition and exercise interventions ranging from athletes to older adults. His research group performs human trials involving both acute and chronic interventions for outcomes around performance (physical and cognitive), recovery, and adaptation. It has employed various experimental designs and has been complimented by molecular analysis tools, including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Nutrients recently and presently under investigation include caffeine, creatine, omega-3 fatty acids, resveratrol, leucine, protein hydrolysates, beetroot juice, and exogenous ketones.

Brendan received his BSc in Sport and Exercise Science from the University of Limerick in 2003, MSc in Sport and Exercise Nutrition from Loughborough University in 2004, and Ph.D. from Dublin City University in 2008 before completing two years of post-doctoral training with Prof. Juleen Zierath’s Integrative Physiology group at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. His doctoral studies focussed on skeletal muscle adaptation to exercise, and in particular, the continuity between acute molecular responses to individual bouts of exercise and adaptations induced by exercise training, whereas his post-doctoral training utilized animal models and in vitro cell systems to investigate the transcriptional regulation of skeletal muscle development and mechanisms of insulin resistance. He joined the faculty in the School of Public Health, Physiotherapy, and Sport Science at University College Dublin in 2011, where he spent five years before moving to DCU. He is also a Visiting Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FL, USA, and a Principal Investigator at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at DCU.

Outside of academia, through his sporting career as an inter-county Gaelic footballer with Sligo from 2003 to 2017, Brendan has had a lifelong association with sport, training, and performance at all levels of competition, from grassroots to elite level, and also practices in the field as a performance nutritionist with emphasis on field-based team sports, and endurance athletes.

Episode highlights:

(25:27) The “preferred energy source”: media sources, ketones become the dominant fuel in the brain during starvation, dominant does not mean preferred, ketogenesis is a survival mechanism, exogenous ketones can rescue heart failure

(35:30) Ketones as glycogen sparing: Tour de France background, mechanistic basis, two existing relevant studies, one showed glycogen sparing and one showed no difference, differences in methods, the theory is solid but the proof is lacking

(57:27) Ketones for protein generation study: design, downstream markers from mTOR increase with ketones, protein synthesis was not measured directly but is likely, once again the mechanistic theory is promising but the proof is pending, ketones for sleep

Additional  resources:

Papers discussed-

Exogenous Ketone Supplements in Athletic Contexts: Past Present and Future

Ketone monoester ingestion increases postexercise serum erythropoietin concentrations