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

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 $99 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 500-kilojoule, 65-ml 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 carbohydrates to burn, as keto-diet followers well 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 acid (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 ute; ketones an electric-powered Tesla.