Michael Brandt is the Founder-CEO of HVMN, a company that makes exogenous ketones. In this clip from our interview on the Singletrack Podcast, he discusses when it makes sense to measure ketone levels.
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Transcript:
Finn:
Is it important for runners to measure their KE levels and is it easy to do?
Michael:
It's fun. I think you can measure it or not. The way that you do it is, and we have a bunch of these videos on our website and on my own Instagram -he best way to know your ketones levels is to do a little blood finger prick.
I think it's really fun. I like all this biohacking stuff, so I think it's really cool to see what's going on inside of your body. You do a little finger prick and you draw a bead of blood. You have this device you can buy on Amazon and you draw this bead of blood into this little strip and then it just tells you you're number of ketones per liter of blood.
I think it's super interesting. You can do the same thing with blood glucose. There's more and more people wearing continuous glucose monitors. There's brands like Levels, Supersapiens all doing super cool stuff where you basically have this patch that lives on your arm and it's like a semi-implant where it's got a little prick that lives inside your arm and does a blood glucose reading every 15 minutes.
So it's continuous and you can really see how your diet, how your sleep, how your workouts are affecting your glucose levels. They're coming out with a continuous ketone monitor that's gonna be really cool. Glucose and ketones, if people haven't gotten the point by now, are these two complimentary en energy systems. They kinda work in tandem together.
If I could tomorrow get an implant that I never had to take out, that would just tell me ongoing my blood glucose, my blood ketone levels for the rest of my life - in an instant, I would pay $500 for that. That is super cool to me, to be able to have a dashboard into your key biomarkers.
But yeah, I'm really into measuring. It's not that hard. I think right now you do have to draw that bead of blood until the continuous ketone monitor arrives or the implant arrives and we all go fully bionic.
But yeah, I think it's worth doing. Who out there is running ultra-marathons and afraid of a little bit of a finger prick? It's fun to just be a little bit of a biohacker on yourself. It paints the whole picture, right?
If you do Mafetone method, you know, what is my cadence? Am I hitting the ground 180 beats per minute? At this level of running, I assume most people are interested in any kind of facts or figures around their performance.
I think it's interesting to just go on some runs and do a little bit of just basic blood biomarker measuring and just know what's going on in there. See what's my fasted blood glucose when I wake up in the morning? What does it look like after a run? Just kind of 101 owner's manual of being a human being in 2023. I think the tools are out there. It's really fun to see what's going on inside your body.
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