Liquid Fuel

SOME SCIENTISTS THINK YOU CAN DRINK KETONES AND TAKE YOUR PERFORMANCE TO A NEW LEVEL – NO LOW-CARB DIET REQUIRED. IS THIS THE NEXT MUST-HAVE WORKOUT BEVERAGE? KRISTEN MASCIA TRIED IT..

- Kristen Mascia

Any product using the words ‘keto’ and ‘performance’ will turn people’s heads right now. Especially if it comes in a sleek, shot-like bottle with a chiselled cyclist on the front – at the we’re-not-just- playing-around-here price of R1 400 for three doses. Doesn’t hurt, either, that it’s billed as such potentially powerful fuel for your body that even NASA is exploring a similar supplement for astronauts on future missions to Mars.

Which explains the chatter around HVMN Ketone, a new energy drink that aims to be the SpaceX of sports nutrition. Its 500kJ, 65ml vial promises to upgrade athletic performance with a dose of fuel from ketones. So your body gets a boost not from the usual nutrients – protein, carbs, and fat – but from these ketones, which are thought to be extra-powerful, long-burning sources of energy. That’s seriously appealing to anyone who’s been on the sagging back end of a tough endurance workout.

Until recently, though, the only way to get a high level of ketones in your body was to make them yourself – you produce them when you don’t have enough carbs to burn, as keto-diet followers know. Figuring out how to create a safe, effective ketone that you could swallow eluded scientists for decades. But researchers have finally been able to develop the molecular-chemistry techniques to produce them in a lab – and then market them to you.

BEHIND THE BUZZ

As fuel, ketones are efficient. They produce more ATP – the intracellular currency that powers cell activity – per molecule than glucose does. When burned, ketones yield zero lactic acids (the compound created when glucose is used, causing the burning feeling at the end of a sprint). If they were cars, glucose would be a coal-rolling bakkie, ketones an electric-powered Tesla.