PUSHING THE LIMITS PODCAST

R3HBG: The Bioidentical Ketone That Bypasses the Liver

Guest: Mike Chesne, Founder of Tecton

Lisa: Well, hey everybody. Welcome into Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited. I've got Mike Chesne to guest with me. Mike, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you with me.

Mike: Oh, Lisa, it's amazing to be here. I appreciate you bringing me on.

Lisa: We've got some exciting stuff to talk about today, haven't we, Mike? Before we get into the real science of ketones, which is what we're going to be talking about today — and specifically Tecton ketones and a very novel molecule that you've been working on for a number of years — Mike, can you first give us a bit of the lay of the land, a bit of your background? You're a bit of a legend in the military, army ranger, medic. Give us a bit of that background before we get here.

Mike: So it's kind of an odd journey. I tell everybody whenever I talk to them, I say, "Look, I'm just a knuckle dragger who came up with a really good idea." That's not exactly true, but if you think about it the long way — at 17 years old I graduated from high school in the United States. I was looking for a little direction. College sounded good. The military had this great program where they would give you money to go to college. So I said, "I'll sign up for a couple of years, get some money, go to college, see how that works out."

When I went to sign in, they asked me what job I wanted. I said, "Well, I want to be an airborne ranger." And they were like, "No, no, no. You can have any job you want in the army. You want to be a computer programmer, a communication specialist?" I said, "No. I want to be an airborne ranger. That's all I want to do." So they said, "Okay, here you go."

So I joined the military. Went to the army's basic training. Ended up at Fort Lewis, Washington, went to the army's Airborne School, Ranger School, and absolutely fell in love with being a soldier. It was just what I was made to do. I think some people find that in their life, and I did. I found it and it was amazing.

So I said, "Okay, what's the next thing?" I went to special forces selection. I went through their very rigorous process, which was quite interesting. We started with about 400 people. About 90 or 92 guys finished the selection. 60 of them were selected, although only 30 actually graduated from the course and became Green Berets.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: So we're talking about less than 10% of the people that started the process even made it out. But for me it was fun. I enjoyed it. It was great. There's a kind of funny story that goes with it. I wanted to be a combat medic. I was an infantryman — which is just a grunt, a ground pounder in the military. But I wanted to be a medic. I always had this idea that I wanted to be a doctor. That was a long-term plan for me at the time.

When I went through the selection process, I was a young E5 sergeant in the army. I was airborne qualified, Ranger qualified, had my expert infantry badge. I had all the right prerequisites to be a weapons specialist in special forces. So they told me, "Well, you can come back and be a weapons specialist or you can continue being an infantryman." I said, "Okay, I'll see you guys in a couple of months. When I come back to the course, I'll become a weapons specialist."

So I went through that course. It was a little over a year long, including the language portion and some other things. I ended up in the Fifth Special Forces Group. Absolutely amazing place to be. I stayed there for two years on different teams, and then applied to become a special forces medic. Went back to that school, which is almost two years long.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: When I graduated from that, I came right back to the Fifth Special Forces Group and stayed there. I was there almost 10 years, from 1990 to around 2000. Then I got asked to go to a selection process for an army special mission unit. Made it through their selection process and became a Delta medic, and did my career there. I spent nearly three years in combat between 2002 and 2008.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: I was wounded a couple of times. Obviously I spent a lot of time in combat so I got a lot of experience. Learned a lot of things, saw a lot of good and bad, but it was absolutely amazing. The best place in the world to work was there at that special mission unit. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. But unfortunately, I got injured far too catastrophically to stay there.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: I had a couple of traumatic brain injuries from blasts. My troop was in, if I remember correctly, somewhere around 14 different IED attacks plus a breaching course and everything else. A lot of different things happened, but I ended up getting injured to the point where I couldn't operationally work anymore. I became an instructor for a few years, did a lot of good things. I really enjoyed that. But again, the military realised I wasn't going to be able to continue being an operator. It just wasn't going to work. So I got medically retired in 2010.

While I was going through all the rehab and surgeries, I finished college. I like to tell people I took my first college class at 17 and I got my bachelor's degree the week after I turned 40. So it was a long college process. People say they go to college five or six years. I went for 23. I got an undergraduate degree in applied science. Again, I was thinking about going to medical school, but made a conscious decision not to do that. I was a healthcare provider in the military, saw a lot of different things, and realised that physicians — and this is not a dig on physicians, I love doctors, some of my favourite people — their lives belong to their patients. They don't belong to their families, their friends. They belong to their patients. If you want to give your life to other people, have no control over your own timelines, then you become a doctor.

I would have missed out on much more of my children's childhood than I did being in the military, by going to med school and then residency. Eight years, and my kids are now married and have children of their own. Conscious decision not to do that.

When I did get out of the service, I had quite a bit of mental deficits. I had short-term memory loss, troubles with my eyesight, terrible headaches, light sensitivity — all the things that happen from having a brain injury. So the military was kind enough to send me to a brain injury rehab center down in Houston, Texas, called TIRR Memorial Hermann. It was a project back then called Project Victory. It was an amazing process. I learned how to cope with the deficits I had, and then how to reattach those neural pathways.

While I was there, one of the biggest things I learned was that it's not just chemicals and medication that can help get you better. It's nutrition. I always tried to eat well while I was in the military, but I didn't even know what that really was. We didn't have on-call dieticians. We didn't have nutrition specialists. We had doctors who had two hours' worth of nutrition training in their entire four years of medical school. That's who we got our diet information from.

I learned a lot about eating, how to eat right. And I was first introduced to the ketogenic diet. I didn't try it out at that time because that was a little too much for me. Pizza was a little too much to give up at the time. But I learned a lot about it.

When I got out of the military, I had to find some other things to do. I had a lot of experience at the strategic level in healthcare systems. I spent time in all the great places where everybody goes to vacation — Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, all those lovely places. I spent about three years doing healthcare consulting with their ministries of health, ministries of defense, trying to help build up their healthcare systems. Frankly, I just got tired of seeing people steal money from the governments and walked away from it.

So I needed something completely different. While I was doing a consulting deal, I ran into a gentleman who had created a product for oncology — a medical food. It was a high-protein, low-carbohydrate meal replacement shake. He didn't realise the business side — how do you procure all your supplies? I talked with him and made a deal: he gives us a little bit of equity in his company, we build his business plan, show him where to go. And that's what we did.

In the process, I learned a lot about supplementation. What is he putting into these things that makes this so much better than everything else out there?

Then I ran into a study that had been done. This was in 2012. The study started nine years before that, in 2003. It was a study where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — DARPA — funded a project off what's called a combat mission needs statement. What that means is the commander of a unit — and not a small unit — says the people in the military need something that makes them run faster, swim better, and think better. They wrote this program. They wanted a nutritional supplement that would increase physical and cognitive performance by 30%.

Lisa: A big ask.

Mike: It is. That's a huge ask.

Lisa: A ridiculous ask, to be fair, but a good goal.

Mike: Those are the things the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency does. They're the ones that invented the internet, GPS, all that stuff came from somebody saying, "Hey, I wish I knew where it was all the time, everywhere in the world." 30 years ago you wouldn't have thought that was possible. Now everybody has it on their phone.

Lisa: Exactly.

Mike: So I read about this project and saw that it wasn't funded anymore. But they had all the contact information. One of the guys who helped write the project I had worked with in DARPA before. So I called him up, got the information, and I called up Dr Kieran Clarke, who was the inventor of the first ketone and part of this supplement, and asked her what she was doing with her ketone. At the time, she was doing nothing.

So I flew to Oxford, sat down with her, and ended up working with Dr Clarke for about three years.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: Trying to bring what ended up being Delta G — her product — to the US to give to soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, fighting forces. But in the process, I had some reservations about the way it was designed. I'm kind of a purist when it comes to what you put into your body. If you're going to give yourself something that's going to make you better, you don't want it to have any adverse effects.

Lisa: Sounds fair.

Mike: So long story short, I ended up walking away from the deal I had with Dr Clarke and sat down and said, "Okay, I love the idea of ketones." And the idea that I had — this is where it started from — was ketones' neuroprotective effect. That's what I knew about it at the time. I knew it was good for you and it did some things for your endurance and made you think better. But to me, what was important was: if I had been in ketosis when I got blown up...

You know, that's where the bad things happen from brain injuries. It's what they call the secondary neurometabolic cascade. It's what happens after you get injured. It's the metabolic things that go on in your brain. Your brain does what brains do — it's the most important part of your body. As soon as it gets hurt, all the fuel goes straight to it. All your glucose goes to your brain and it starts burning through it trying to heal itself. That's fine on a normal basis. Your body has all the mechanisms to use up the metabolites made from gluconeogenesis. But when you're in an injured state, it overwhelms the system. And that's where you get those long-term effects — the short-term memory loss, the eye issues, the headaches, the no sleep, all the bad things that come from brain injuries.

If I had been on ketones, I think probably 50% of what happened to me would have been better. So that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to create something I could give to the soldiers so that if they got injured, it wouldn't be as bad.

So I said, "Okay." Now this is going to sound strange, but I said, "If God was going to create something outside the body that you could use, what would he do? Would he take something out of the ether and make it? Or would he take what your body already has, what it already uses, what it already creates?" And that's where I came up with the idea of binding beta-hydroxybutyrate to glycerol. Glycerol is also an energy substrate. Your body breaks it down, turns it into glucose, it becomes fuel, and there aren't any negative side effects of glycerol breakdown.

So the idea came about — I drew it up on a napkin. And when we talk a little later, I'll try to tell you exactly why I designed it the way I did. But it was a novel idea. I had a friend that worked at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. I went to Georgia Tech, met with this scientist named Steven France — amazing scientist — and said, "Hey, can you make this? This is what I've dreamed of. Can you make it?" He said, "Yeah, give me a few months and write me up a statement." So I wrote him up a statement of work, and in about four months he came up with about one or two milliliters of the ketone ester.

We sent it out, had it tested, and it was exactly what we had drawn up. It was the BHB, most of it on the SN2 position on the molecule. So when it's cleaved off at different times within its metabolism, the majority of it gets used up by the body quickly. That's what he created. The problem was he created it in a laboratory using chemicals. That chemical process, when you scale it, makes a lot of hazardous materials and it's extremely cost prohibitive.

That's why, from 2014 when he made that first batch until just maybe the last two years, we had to make a process that was environmentally friendly, clean, efficient, and inexpensive. That's what's taken the most time. Over those years we ended up coming up with an enzymatic process that breaks this down. It's very efficient, very smooth. And of course we continue to make it better as we go along. But that's where we got to having an ingredient that is BHB bound to a glycerol backbone. That's the basis of our technology. It's R3HBG.

Lisa: Yeah, that's R3HBG. I've been in the ketone space for a long time. I've been fascinated, obviously, with my mum's story, which my listeners know. Mum had a massive aneurysm and then concussions, and after the concussions, brain tumors — half a brain was full of cancer. Everything you can possibly go through with a brain, she's been through. I knew from very early on — I interviewed Dr Dom D'Agostino, Frank Llosa, the guys at HVMN, and some others — so I knew the whole arch of all the different types of ketones, the BHB salts, all of that. One of the later ones was R-1,3-butanediol, but it goes through the ethanol pathway. It's enzymatically the same as the ethanol pathway, which has its problems, as we now know.

I've tried various things out with mum, and I work with Dr Elizabeth Yurth at the Boulder Longevity Institute, who's been my mentor and friend and mum's physician for a number of years. She was absolutely pounding the table — "ketones, ketones, ketones" — being very important. So I was very much aware. When I found your product, I was just like, "Oh, hallelujah, this is pretty amazing." This R3HBG that doesn't have to go through the liver — which for elderly people, that R-1,3-butanediol has some good things about it but also can cause some suppression of the central nervous system, which when you've got a brain injury is probably not the best thing.

When I came across your research and your company, I was really excited because I've been surprised in the ketone space at how slow this story has been to get out into the world. I've been trying to do the education on it because I know how powerful this is — from kids with epilepsy to adults with TBIs and concussions and neurodegeneration, also for athletes from a performance perspective, for metabolic health, for inflammation, even infection. All of these things are influenced through having the right ketones.

I've got a brother who's an ex-professional rugby player, had multiple concussions. I'm really keen to try him on these ketones because his brain is starving for energy. There is a research paper — I've forgotten the name of the scientist behind it — but it showed in a PET scan that the ability to uptake glucose into the brain, once you've had a brain injury, is very much impaired. But the ketone transporter is not. So you can get the ketones as an alternative fuel source. Because, as you mentioned, the body tries to take all this glucose up into the brain when you've had a brain injury, but it doesn't. It causes a hell of a mess basically.

Unfortunately, when my mum had the aneurysm, they pumped in Ensure via a feeding tube — which is the worst thing you could possibly do to a brain-injured patient. I'm working with someone with an aneurysm at the moment, with the family, trying to get them the ketones in the feeding tube so they're not taking that crap, because that's not going to fix that. Or rugby players going onto the field — if you had the ketones on board, wouldn't that be powerful? Wouldn't that be an amazing thing to protect them before they get hit? Because they're going to get hit.

Mike: Yeah. Just like with people in the military, they're going to get hurt. It's just a matter of: can we help mitigate the amount of damage that's done? We spend millions of dollars on research for new helmets, new body armor, new weapons. How much money do we spend on research on better nutrition options or better supplements that will help people when they get injured?

Lisa: Exactly. We don't spend enough. I've been working with a couple of doctors down here who want to get a concussion center going and want to have packs in every pharmacy that would help — the right supplements, things like N-acetylcysteine. I think ketones should be a part of that package, so that as soon as you're hit, at least you can go into the pharmacy and get one of these concussion packs. Or ideally you'd have it on board before you go and get on the field, before you take the field, if you're going to be playing those dangerous sports. Because you can protect yourself to a large degree. It's pretty hard to get a brain injury if you've got a lot of ketones on board.

So let's now dive in. We've set the scene of your incredible persistence and your incredible history. Your service is just absolutely amazing — to get in the Green Berets and all of that. Those are the heroes of our society, so hats off to you. I've been an ultramarathon runner and extreme athlete, and that's nothing compared to what you guys go through.

It also shows your persistence, because this was 10 years in the making, this R3HBG molecule. You sort of skipped over 10 years of hard yards getting things approved. You've got — what is it, the FDA approval thing? I don't know the right word, but can you explain it?

Mike: I'm glad you brought that up, because that's one of the very meticulous and systematic things we've done with this process. We did all of the safety testing. We did 90-day toxicity tests, all the Ames tests, everything you can do, and we did our GRAS certification. We went through a long, lengthy process. It was almost two years long.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: I won't even tell you how much money it is, because it'll just blow your mind. What it did is prove how safe this particular molecule was. Once we got that, we started doing our own clinical tests. We did glucose uptake tests, used a glucose tolerance test as our baseline. Measured glucose, insulin, IL-6, IL-12, TNF-alpha. If we could imagine something that it would change, we measured it to see how it would come out.

Then recently, within the last couple of years, we went through a process which in the US is called the New Dietary Ingredient notice process. Any dietary ingredient that wasn't in the market before 1994 — when DSHEA, that act, was passed — basically grandfathered in and wrote an act on the regulatory process of dietary supplements. Our NDI number is 1354. They started doing NDIs way back in the day, and there's only been about 1,300 of them. Ours is one of the few in the world with a New Dietary Ingredient notice, which was extremely hard to get. You have to have all of the safety data. You have to have done part of your phase one clinical trials so that you have all that safety data, and then apply for it.

Now we're in the process of doing our Investigational New Drug application, which is the next step in the regulatory process, so that it can be food, can be used as a supplement, and later on can be used as a pharmaceutical agent — so we can treat patients with acute head injury, acute strokes, acute MIs with intravenous ketones, or even, if they have a feeding tube, through their feeding tube, which works very well. That's the way we did it. Very systematically walked through to make sure we had the safest product out there. We've done human safety trials, laboratory animal safety trials, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies. We've got the data to back up everything.

Lisa: And that's novel in this space, isn't it? Nobody else has got that, because it's an arduous process to go through.

Mike: Yeah. And the beauty of it is the people who have backed me in this believe in what we're doing. I'm sure they get frustrated that it's been this long. However, the longer we go with this, the more opportunities and the more things we can help treat people for.

The thing about ketones — and I know you've heard this story before, but most people don't realise ketones are an evolutionary process. Human beings have created ketones in their body. They've burned their own fat for fuel for 300,000 years, since the first humans stood upright and started chasing their next meal. It's your body's ability to adapt to stress, to an unknown environment, to starvation and fasting. How do you get to your next meal if you're a caveman?

Lisa: How do you get to your next meal?

Mike: I know that's oversimplifying, but how do you get to your next berry patch? How do you get to the next animal you're going to harvest so your family can eat? You have to have fuel. And if you haven't eaten in two or three days — which was normal back then — your body produces this super fuel. That's the way I've always looked at this. Ketones are super fuels. They're much more efficient. They burn hotter and they run through such a short metabolic process. There are basically three steps before it enters the citric acid cycle, the Krebs cycle. They use no NAD in the process. It uses no ATP to break itself down. Whereas in glycolysis, breaking down glucose uses four or five ATP in the process. So in the end, the net is you get just as much or more ATP — the fuel of your body — from ketones, and you get it much more efficiently, and it doesn't create any radicals. No reactive oxygen species, nothing.

Lisa: I want to double down on that, because I want people to understand. We make ATP in every single cell of our body. Our mitochondria go through the electron transport chain, the Krebs cycle. All of these things have to happen for you to get the energy at the end of it, and it's 36 molecules it produces at the end. But what you're saying is that glucose is a very expensive way to make the fuel, with a lot of exhaust fumes — the free radicals, the oxidative stress that comes out the back of it. I like an analogy, because I'm simple-minded. I like to keep it like a combustion engine with exhaust fumes coming out the back. And basically ketones are like the jet fuel — the ultimate fuel that doesn't have any burn-off, doesn't have any exhaust fumes damaging the environment, if you think about it.

I've done a lot of study in evolution, in how we evolutionarily progressed. And this is a key factor now in our day and age, in our society. We have food on tap. We've got it on every street corner. We eat multiple times a day and we think we're dying if we don't get a feed every four hours. People's blood sugars show that they're up and down, and people think they need to eat to keep going. Actually the opposite is true — we should have periods of fasting.

Mike: Yeah, we should be.

Lisa: It's harder to do because we all love our food. But the fasting period upregulates things like autophagy, where you're eating the damaged cells and recycling it. So you're not doing that if you're not fasting at least for periods of time during the day. Even intermittent fasting will be useful, but even longer fasts. As we went from cave people into the modern world, we now have food everywhere, so our blood sugars are just dysregulated, leading to metabolic health problems, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is known as type 3 diabetes because it basically is diabetes in the brain. This can all be helped by changing to — initially the keto diet was a great way to do it, and it still is. It's a very powerful tool, but it has limitations.

Number one, older people often don't get into a therapeutic state of ketosis because their machinery is not as good as it was. When I had mum with cancer, we went full-blown keto diet on top of the ketones, but from diet alone I could never get her into a therapeutic state of ketosis because her body just was unable. The machinery was so broken she couldn't do that. So you need to supplement with exogenous ketones.

The other problem is, who wants to do the keto diet for very long? It's a pretty damned hard, restrictive diet. You're also losing a lot of your vegetables. I had a client this week who was doing well on the keto diet but really missing his vegetables. His microbiome is suffering because he's not getting the variety of vegetables he's used to eating. And there are genetic components as well — some people don't do so well on saturated fats. So keto diet, great, but it's not the only way to get into ketosis. These exogenous ketones are a way to either support your keto lifestyle, or if you can't do the keto lifestyle for whatever reason, this is the better way to do it. You'll get into a therapeutic level of ketosis, which is very important.

Can you explain what a therapeutic level of ketosis is, versus just having a tiny bit of ketones in your blood?

Mike: Absolutely. When we talk about a therapeutic level of ketones, it's basically the amount of beta-hydroxybutyrate that's free-floating in your blood system. That's how it's measured, and that's usually measured at 0.5 millimoles per deciliter of BHB free-floating in your circulatory system. That's the minimum, the baseline, where you're in therapeutic ketosis. Now, anywhere from there to about three millimoles is where I call it the sweet spot. That's where you're getting the best therapeutic level. You're getting the best for your endurance for athletes, the most anti-inflammatory effects, and your cognition.

That's the thing I wish I could figure out how to quantify — the clarity you get in your brain. I'm talking to you now. I was smart enough to take about 30 minutes ago, so now it's in my system and I am focused, hyperfocused on what we're doing. I wish I could explain to people how and why that works. We just haven't been able to figure it out, but it does. And mine — we just go back to evolution. It gave you the ability to focus and get to your next meal. It's as simple as that.

The keto diet was developed by physicians back in the 1920s to treat drug-resistant epilepsy. To treat children, especially, because it's almost impossible to have a child stay on a ketogenic diet. You can't make a child eat that much butter, bacon, fat, and meat and maintain it. So they needed something. That was a keto diet back then, but it just wasn't sustainable. If you are going to be in ketosis, doing it through the ketogenic diet is 100% the best way. I'm a guy who invented an exogenous ketone, but I will tell you, if you want to be in ketosis, the keto diet is the way to do it, because your body slowly gets into ketosis. All those signaling mechanisms are working in tandem.

You've seen it after you fast for — I don't know if you've done long-term fasting — but you fast for 48, 72 hours and you are so clear and so laser-focused. You're tired, of course, but that mental clarity you get from fasting. I can't tell you you're going to get that from exogenous ketones, but from a keto diet you can, but you can't maintain it. I did a keto diet for about 18 months strictly. I really stayed on it, and it was very good for me. I was healthy, I felt great. But at the same time I was having microbiome issues.

Lisa: I bet you were, yeah.

Mike: And I wasn't supplementing correctly at the time. I wasn't taking the right probiotics, wasn't doing the things I needed to do to keep my microbiome straight. So I ended up getting off of it. Now I just do intermittent fasting. I don't do it every day, but I do it at least three days a week, and I try to do 16 to 18 hours of fasting in those three days. It works very well for me. I'm able to maintain my weight. But the keto diet is what gets all those signaling mechanisms going slowly. The exogenous ketones give you, I would say, 90% of those effects.

And some people can't — like you talked about with your mum. Their NAD stores are not high enough for them to be able to metabolise their fat and turn it into BHB. It uses NAD to do that, and their NAD pools are just depleted. That's one of the things about aging — your NAD pools. NAD is in every single cellular mechanism. Doesn't matter what it is, every single one uses NAD. Ketogenesis uses NAD as it breaks that stuff down. So that's maybe another reason why the keto diet doesn't work as well in elderly people, whose NAD pools are depleted.

Lisa: I'm just bringing out a next-generation NAD product myself with our biotech company. It's a really crucial pathway to keeping the energy going — the sirtuins, the repair of the DNA, the methylation, the whole shebang. As you get older, that pool shrinks. So when you go into doing a keto diet but you have a depleted pool of NAD because you're older or sick, then you're chasing your tail. This is a way to do that. And then the NAD supplementation, that's another whole conversation, because that's a very nuanced conversation as well. But you have to have the machinery, in other words.

Let's look at some of the things it's used for. I've got colleagues that are Bredesen-trained for Alzheimer's. I've been talking to a couple of them this week about Tecton ketones, because I'm like, "You guys have got to get this into your regime." So Alzheimer's is a very strong use case for these ketones. There's a well-documented glucose uptake problem — Cunnane's group showed that with the PET imaging, that they couldn't get the sugar in there. They've got starving neurons. They're starving for food, and then you bring in the ketones and you've got some food. It's not a permanent fix — you've got to keep taking them, unfortunately — but it helps.

Mike: Same with glucose. You have to keep fueling your body with it. At a certain point, your body still has some glucose through gluconeogenesis, where your body makes its own glucose, but that's a small fraction compared to when our bodies break carbohydrates down. You break carbohydrates down into glucose and fuel. You need to continue to fuel that system. Like endurance athletes — I would never in my life tell you, as an ultra-endurance athlete, to get away from carbs. You can't. You have to have both ketones and carbs for you to do really well. If you use them in combination, you're going to do really well.

Lisa: Where were you when I was competing, mate? I could have done with this.

Mike: It would have helped you quite a bit. We've got quite a few athletes out there using it and they swear by it. Marathon runners especially, and the older athletes. In the athletic world, over 40 are considered seniors. Those guys are doing great. Some of those people make me feel — in my 20s I couldn't keep up with them, and they're in their 40s.

Lisa: Because we have a bit more knowledge now. I competed up to the age of 48 and I only stopped because of mum's situation, and my body had had enough at 48. Probably from 45 I should have knocked the extreme stuff on the head, because it did a lot of damage. But if I'd had this knowledge and been able to have this as an extra fuel support... I love watching the Tour de France, the cycling. Those guys are on ketones and carbs. They need both to get into full ketosis.

I interviewed Professor Grant Schofield here in New Zealand, who's a specialist in ketosis and ketones and works with a lot of athletes. He said it takes him a full 12 months to convert one of his athletes fully into a keto diet, to get the machinery going to the level. In that year they're not performing well. That's if you want to go the full-blown keto diet route without the exogenous ketone. So basically for 12 months their performance is not the best while their body changes into a fully ketotic state. And these are very disciplined top athletes. So if you don't want to lose a whole year of your athletic career while you change the machinery over, a hybrid situation is a much better use for athletes — using the ketones.

And of course, the athletes doing contact sports — definitely you want to be in a state of ketosis naturally, or on exogenous ketones, for the reason we talked about before. That's something I'm passionate about because it's affected my family. I know many of the rugby boys I've known over the years who've been affected by this, and some of them have committed suicide through the trauma of what they're going through — the CTE, all of that horrific stuff. I wonder if we could have helped them if we'd had this information out there. I know the doctors working in this space in New Zealand are trying to get the rugby powers that be to listen, and they're just not listening. It pains me.

Mike: Professional athletes — probably 10, 12 years ago there was the concussion issue that came up, that movie about football. And it just kind of went away. It's sad, because there are doctors — some of the physicians in the players' associations know and understand that supplementing with ketones and giving these guys the right things they need is paramount to them not having these long-term effects. Look at some of the legends of the athletic community that we lost to CTE — guys to the point where they don't even know who they are anymore, or they're completely different than they were when they were younger, and they end up taking their own lives or doing crazy things that put them in jail.

Lisa: Exactly. And it's just sad and wrong that they're not getting the support. I know of quite a number of cases around here. We put these young guys and girls on a pedestal, we hero-worship them, we watch them in the peak of their athletic abilities, and then when they're no longer at the peak they're just thrown and discarded by the wayside, and then the family has to deal with the consequences afterwards. To me that's not good enough. But you're fighting it. Let's get on to a more positive topic.

So, TBI, concussion.

Mike: Sorry, you were asking about different things we can use these ketones for. I'm one of those people — this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. There are so many advantages to using this that it's hard when you start telling people about it. As a person who has researched it and understands ketones, you'll get it right off the bat. But when I start telling people, "Hey, I have the ability to lower your inflammatory markers, or raise the inflammatory markers that go up" — we have the ability to do that with one simple product. So now your inflammation is going to go down. Not only systemic inflammation — not just "I twisted my knee and it's swollen" — but systemic inflammation, which is like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, those things that cause inflammation in the brain. And aging.

We've now proven we can change IL-12 and IL-6 levels, IL-1 beta and IL-18. All these things are affected by ketones. There are so many different things for you and for your mum. The reason I started was as a neuroprotective thing. Now, for me, that is literally this much of what I look at when I'm studying this stuff. I want to know: what cancers can I treat with this? What types of cancer can I take that glucose piece out of? How can I affect the Warburg effect in cancer and change it by using ketones to change the microenvironment?

Lisa: Well, that's what I did with mum. Mum had terminal cancer. Weeks to live. Nothing you can do. Stage four. Nothing offered. We're now five years later and she's got no cancer. Nobody asked me why.

Mike: Magic. It was magic.

Lisa: Well, they asked me, but when you tell them, they don't believe you.

Mike: No.

Lisa: And it was many things. I did many things. But the Warburg effect, the starving of the cancer, the metabolic approach — I even used off-label drugs that would block different pathways, et cetera. It was complex. My brain was exploding trying to understand it. Ketones were a big part of that. She beat the odds, and touch wood, we'll keep beating the odds. So far five years — nobody survives a brain cancer of that type for five years, and not at 84, and not after an aneurysm. This just doesn't happen. But nobody's been told this, and this is what frustrates me. All these great things that I know and I can't get across, can't educate. I do my best on here to bring across these things, because I could save so much suffering. I talk to friends who have, "Oh, my dad's got cancer," and I've stopped even saying anything anymore because nobody wants to hear it. And I'm just like, why? Because they only believe what they're told by the local clinic and that's all there is in the world. Well, I've got news for you — there's a lot of other doctors doing a lot of other different things that you should be looking into. It's very frustrating. But the information is out there, and that's what we're trying to do here — bring that across. Because the ketones are a big piece of the puzzle that's going to help with a lot of areas, like you were saying, from Alzheimer's through to cancer through to athletic performance.

Another area is the GLP-1 agonists. Lots of people now are using the GLP-1 agonists, which are great and doing a lot of good for their metabolic health and even microbiome health. We're finding it's even helping with cognitive health. There are some downsides as well, and you certainly need to be counseled if you're using GLP-1 agonists. One of the things is you've got to provide the fuel store for the body. You've got a GLP-1 support line. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?

Mike: The reason we developed that one is that GLP-1 agonist treatment in America has absolutely exploded — I'm sure it's around the world. People can talk about the downsides to GLP-1 therapy, and there are downsides to every pharmaceutical treatment out there. What I have seen, especially with people that were pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic — as they lost the weight and started eating better, their numbers are so far down they're not even considered diabetic. The problem in the US now is, once your numbers get down so far, the insurance stops paying, and you bounce back up if you're not changing.

That's why we developed this GLP-1 agonist support. What we've done is we added 5-HTP to our ketone, so you get the benefits of both. They both work to help with GLP-1 agonist effects. This can act as an adjunct to you while you're on regular injectable GLP-1 therapy, or when you come off of it. This gives you something extremely affordable that you can take that will also curb your hunger.

You've seen the studies. Brianna Stubbs, who I absolutely love — she's a fabulous scientist and an amazing athlete, one of Dr Clarke's protégés at Oxford, now at the Buck Institute. Very smart lady, very good athlete. She did a study a few years back and definitively proved we can decrease ghrelin levels, so you don't feel as hungry. And it also increases leptin levels. So now you don't feel hungry and you're full. You've got the satiety and the appetite suppression all in the same product.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: So with this GLP-1 activator, as we call it, we increase leptin levels, decrease ghrelin levels — you don't feel hungry and you feel full. Most of the people I know that take it, take it in the morning before they have breakfast. Some of them don't have breakfast until two or three in the afternoon before they have to eat again. It really helps intermittent fasting. Now, purist fasters will say zero calories. The calories in what we have are 100% purely from the ketone itself, and those calories don't burn the way that the others do. So it doesn't break a fast — unless you're a purist. You're getting so few calories, and they're being used to help decrease your appetite, so you don't eat, and it stretches that fast out a few extra hours.

Lisa: Which is brilliant for people in conjunction with the GLP-1s, or transitioning off them, or if you're not doing the GLP-1s and you want that same effect. We all know the cravings — going back to evolution, we were programmed to chase fat and sugar because that was the scarce resource back then, and we're still unfortunately programmed to chase fat and sugar, but it's everywhere now. So that's where the mismatch comes in. You want to be able to help your biology not to have those cravings, because to stand up against those cravings is very hard. So this is a way to help yourself. And ketones generally take away the cravings.

One of the other things with the keto diet is you often get the keto flu — release of water, electrolytes out of balance. Does that happen on the exogenous ketones as well? You don't get that electrolyte loss?

Mike: Yeah. In fact, this will help if you are trying to transition into a keto diet. Use this exogenous ketone while you're transitioning for that first three to seven days and you won't get the keto flu. It will keep your body in ketosis without getting the keto flu. I always tell people, even people strict on the keto diet — they eat one pancake or a cupcake and that's it, they're out, and it's three days to get back in. Well, this — I hate to even tell people, but it's true — this will help you cheat. You take the exogenous ketone, it keeps your ketone levels up, and it almost tricks your body into staying that way, and you don't get that keto flu. You don't fall out of ketosis. Your body will continue to burn fat that way. It will also help you do the keto diet, because it'll make that transition from a normal diet to a keto diet a lot smoother, without the painful side effects of trying to get yourself into ketosis.

Lisa: A couple of the other things I wanted to touch on — the NLRP3 inflammasome. This is one that Dr Yurth has taught me a little bit about. The NLRP3 is essentially an alarm system inside your immune cells. When it detects danger signals — like infection or cellular damage, like you've had a stroke or an aneurysm like mum, or metabolic stress — it assembles and triggers an inflammatory cascade. It's one of the body's primary innate immune defense mechanisms. But the problem is, in chronic disease like neurodegeneration, like Alzheimer's, the alarm gets stuck in the on position. In the Alzheimer's brain, amyloid-beta plaques continuously trigger the NLRP3 activation, which produces a constant stream of pro-inflammatory cytokines like the interleukin-1 beta that you mentioned and interleukin-18. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle, where the plaques trigger inflammation, the inflammation damages the neurons, the damaged neurons produce more debris that triggers more inflammation. So you get this terrible cycle going, and the brain is essentially attacking itself. The NLRP3-driven neuroinflammation is now considered a central driver of Alzheimer's pathology, not just a bystander effect. This is quite a new shift in the field, understanding that. This is where Dr Youm's 2015 paper in Nature Medicine showed that BHB — the beta-hydroxybutyrate — specifically blocks the NLRP3 inflammasome from assembling. The mechanism prevents potassium efflux from the cell and reduces the oligomerization, so that when it can't assemble the inflammasome, it can't activate caspase-1, which means it can't produce interleukin-1 beta and interleukin-18, which is that cascade. So in brief, this is stopping that horrific cycle that we see in neurodegeneration. Have you got anything to add on that front?

Mike: Well, the beta-hydroxybutyrate blocks that NLRP3 activation, so it keeps it where it's short-circuited. When it's always on, the beta-hydroxybutyrate turns it back off. Also, NLRP3 is a key driver in quite a few — six or seven that I can think of off the top of my head — cancer cell types. Triple-negative breast cancer, small cell lung cancer. These are all things that, if you can block that NLRP3, you can help with those cancers as well. Because they don't only work off — there are certain cancers that work off that glucose system, the Warburg effect like you talked about, and then there are others like these that are driven by that NLRP3 activation.

Lisa: Wow. So these ketones are going to help with that whole process and stop that cascade. That's really important. The other one was HDAC, or histone deacetylase inhibition. Your DNA is wrapped around histones, and these are like a thread around a spool. When the histones are tightly wound, genes are silenced, and when they're loosened, genes are read and expressed. Acetylation loosens the spool and genes turn on, and deacetylation tightens it and the genes turn off. HDACs are the enzymes that remove the acetyl groups — they are the silencers. When BHB hits HDAC, it prevents them from tightening the spool, which means more genes stay switched on. And why this matters for neuroprotection — the specific genes that get upregulated when BHB blocks HDAC include FOXO3A, which is a longevity and stress resistance gene, and MT2, which is metallothionein, which protects against oxidative damage. So BHB is essentially telling your cells to turn up their own antioxidant and stress defense systems at the genetic level, rather than providing an external antioxidant. Also absolutely amazing.

Mike: That was a 2013 paper that came in Science magazine. And I've read that paper. I think a lot of that has to do with — to explain it — like you talked about earlier with the redox potential, the reactive oxygen species. It helps to mitigate those, keeps your cells from turning on that apoptosis switch, which is what happens when they get over-reacted. When there are too many free radicals — those ROS that are out there — the cells themselves, the signals they're getting, is that something's off, the balance is out, we're out of homeostasis. So we need to turn ourselves off and get washed out. That's part of that HDAC inhibition — it helps reduce the amount of ROS in your body, less free radicals, more antioxidants. That'll help you out in that sense.

Lisa: Absolutely brilliant. It's complex and very pathway-driven, but these are really important pathways for people with things like neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's.

Mike, what have we missed? Did we explain the types of ketones before? A lot of people think of ketones — exogenous ketones — as just one thing. There's BHB salts, there's keto esters, there's the Delta-G variant from the professor you worked with, there's the R-1,3-butanediol. Just walk me through the pros and cons of each of those types, and how the R3HBG, which is your novel ingredient, is very different.

Mike: So the first BHB supplements out there were BHB salts. All of those are basically an alkali salt — magnesium, potassium, calcium — bound to the BHB molecule. The reason for that is beta-hydroxybutyrate by itself, BHB acid, is not bioavailable. I could take a whole glass of BHB acid, drink it, and 99% of it will just walk right through my body. It's not bioavailable. Your body doesn't have the ability to grab it and pull it into the central circulating system. BHB salts use that salt backbone to bind the BHB so that it is bioavailable.

The issue — and I'm not going to say it's a problem, but it's the issue — with the BHB salts is twofold. One, they use both enantiomers of BHB, both the R and the S. The body only produces the R enantiomer, and it's the only one your body can metabolise. The S enantiomer doesn't do anything. It's not bioavailable and your body can't use it. So you lose 50% of the BHB that's actually in the product — it's not even usable by the body. And the other 50% is bound to these salts. While that's not a bad thing — your body needs those electrolytes — in order to get a therapeutically high enough level of BHB in your body to get to that 0.5 millimoles per deciliter in your bloodstream, you have to take multiple grams of the alkali, of the salt. You have to take so much of it that your body is now overwhelmed, and it causes a lot of electrolyte imbalances and other imbalances within your body. That's the primary concern with the salts.

The second one is digestive stress. You can end up with diarrhea, actually causing you to lose more electrolytes. It changes your gut completely, because the way your body works — that osmolar balance — when you pound yourself with potassium or sodium, that goes out the window. So your mechanism can't even work because they're overloaded, out of balance.

The next one would be the Delta-G product, which is R-1,3-butanediol bound with a BHB molecule. Butanediol — 1,3-butanediol — is just what it says: it's a diol. It's an alcohol, not the kind you would drink, not like drinking vodka, but it is an alcohol that this BHB is bound to. The other thing about 1,3-butanediol is, as your body starts to metabolise it, it's metabolised in the liver 100% in the liver. In fact, the 1,3-butanediol can't be broken down into BHB until your liver metabolises it. And like we talked about earlier, when your liver starts metabolising 1,3-butanediol, it sucks up the NAD that your body's using to make those processes work, to break that 1,3-butanediol down.

The next part — the Delta-G product, the 1,3-butanediol and BHB bound together, the way they design and build it chemically, has three different mechanisms it can be metabolised through. Of those three mechanisms, one of them produces 50% S enantiomer and 50% R. So half of it — that's one of them. One of them produces 100% BHB that comes out of it. But at the same time, the other parts of the 1,3-butanediol that are broken down are broken down through what you talked about earlier — that alcohol dehydrogenase metabolic pathway, the alcohol breakdown pathway.

Lisa: And it's the same as if you took a shot of liquor, of vodka. You're using up all of that dehydrogenase?

Mike: Yeah. You're using up all your ADH. You really do burn through a lot of what your body's using. And you do have the same — now, there are much milder CNS depression effects than alcohol. It is the same effect as alcohol on a much lower basis. But you are putting something in your body that is not found in there. God didn't put 1,3-butanediol inside your body. That's a chemical that was created by somebody on the outside. It just happens to be able to be broken down in the liver and turned into BHB. That's the beauty of 1,3-butanediol. The problem with it is, one, you do have to take a large enough amount of it. And there are companies out there selling 1,3-butanediol as an alcohol that gets you high, I guess.

Lisa: Yep. And they use it for alcoholics, to get alcoholics off alcohol. They sometimes use R-1,3-butanediol to help them transition, which actually is probably a good use of it. If you're an alcoholic, maybe. But if you're not an alcoholic, then it's probably not the most efficient way to get your BHB going. And it's a load on the liver. It's using up the NAD, using up the ethanol enzyme that would be used for other things. I take, for example, dihydromyricetin, which is something that helps you break that down if you drink. People often take DHM if they've been drinking because it gives them more of the enzyme to help break it down. It's also a good sirtuin activator, which is why I take it. So you don't want to be using up your resources to break something down. You're also putting a load through the liver, and if you're older and your liver is not functioning at 100%, that's another reason not to do that.

So, the ester — explain the ester.

Mike: So that Delta-G is a monoester. The way the 1,3-butanediol is, it's a carbon chain that has two hydroxyl groups on it. It's a four-carbon chain with two hydroxyl groups, one on each end. So both ends have to be broken down before the BHB can be used.

Now, another reason why we went with the glycerol — it's a short molecule. It only has three SN positions on it: SN1, SN2, and SN3. And the way we designed it, in the enzymatic process that makes the molecule, we can produce the majority of it on the SN2 position, which is the one that goes through your system.

The lipases that break it down — some of them preferentially cut off the SN3 position, some cut off one and three, but very few of them even break down the SN2 position. So that BHB molecule that's attached right there will go directly through the gut and into your portal vein system, into your hepatic system, and your body starts to use it immediately. Goes right to the cells. That's why we designed it that way.

Let me try to explain how it breaks down. When you take a different ketone ester or a ketone salt, it goes into your body and doesn't begin to break down until it gets into the stomach, and then your stomach acids start to break it down. Ours is completely different. Ours is broken down by lipases, and it begins as soon as you put it in your mouth. The lingual lipases in your mouth start to break it down and prepare it to get into the stomach. Up to about 5% of the molecule can be broken down by the lingual lipases. Once it gets into the stomach, gastric lipases then start to break it down. And the pancreatic lipases come in a little bit later. Probably 20 to 50% of it is starting to be broken down by gastric lipases, but those are very selective — the majority work on the SN3 position of the ester. They break that ester bond on the SN3 position first, at a 10 times rate to SN1. So most of that SN3 position is cleaved off in the stomach before it even goes into the duodenum.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: Once it gets into the duodenum, the pancreatic lipases start to come in and break it down. And then at the very end, when it starts to get further down into the jejunum, your body can then — it's called carboxylester lipase. That's what's called the finishing or completion lipase. It's the one that breaks it down in the jejunum, and that way you get almost 100% breakdown of that molecule, the R3-hydroxybutyrate glyceride molecule. It breaks down the SN1 and SN3 positions, and that SN2 position is pulled through the intestinal lining and goes right into the circulating system. That's how it's broken down as it goes through.

Lisa: So does that help with a smoother transition? You're getting a little bit here, a little bit there going into the body — a smoother transition all the way through?

Mike: It gives you a longer — what I call a longer tail. It gives you a longer curve for the amount of BHB. It also depends — ethnicity has something to do with it too. It's crazy. We did a pharmacokinetic study with a very ethnically diverse background of people. We had 16 people in the study — East Asians, Asians, Caucasians, people who were Hispanic, people who were Black. Just about every race was covered. What was funny was to look at the numbers afterwards. We had two or three in each cluster, and Southeast Asian people metabolize it much quicker.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: I don't know exactly why. I'm going to have to go back and really dive into that to figure out. But there is some ethnic diversity too. Type 2 diabetes — the number one demographic for type 2 diabetes are Hispanic males. Hispanic males have a 55 to 60% chance of having type 2 diabetes, where the rest of the population is around 35%. Much higher, and it's something to do with the way they metabolize.

Lisa: We've got the same problem. We've got Maori and Polynesian descent, and our people have the same problem — much higher rates of type 2 diabetes. I think it's again coming from evolution. We didn't have a lot of sugar in our diet, and now we're programmed to go after that. It becomes problematic when you haven't had a thousand years of history of eating carbs. That's just my two cents on why that might be. But this would be really beneficial for those populations, to prevent diabetes.

This is so exciting. And you've done so much work. Credit to you and your perseverance to do all of these studies, because I know how much money, time, energy, persistence it takes. It astounds me that you've managed to do that. And 10 or 12 years sounds like a long time, but actually in the realm of this sort of thing, that's really building a body of knowledge around this molecule. It does take that time. And you're poised now — this brings me to the vision. You've talked about R3HBG becoming the global standard ingredient in every legitimate ketone product. That's a massive statement, and one I believe — after listening to the science, after studying this for five or six years, interviewing everybody, I think that's on the money. Why do you believe that to be the case, that you want to make this the number one ingredient of ketones in the world?

Mike: You can't argue with the evidence. You can't argue with the science. That's the biggest thing. Every time I think there's a problem we can't solve by using these ketones, somebody proves that I'm wrong. Somebody goes out and says, "Oh no, no, we can use this for" — I'm going to say movement disorders, essential tremors is what I'm thinking about. I never thought about it as something that would treat that. One of our ladies went out — she has essential tremors. She started taking the product and she said, "I was able to write a love note to my husband."

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: First time in three years. I'll tell you, Lisa, I had tears in my eyes listening to the stories that I heard. Most people think — some big bad army Green Beret — but my thing in the world is I want to help as many people as I possibly can. I really do. You can't take anything with you. When I die and I go away, there's not a luggage rack on top of the hearse that brings all my money and my fame and my notoriety with me. None of that goes with me. The only thing I can take with me is: did I try to help as many people in this world as I possibly could, without doing it in a bad way? Doing it morally, ethically, and legally. Those are the three pillars of me. And I learned that — I didn't come up with that on my own. I learned that from the military. If you do everything morally right, ethically right, and legally right — now, have I always done it? Absolutely not. Nobody's perfect. That's my goal. That's my vision. Let me help as many people as I can, doing it legally, ethically, and morally right, without shortcircuiting anything, not trying to fast-track anything. If we fast-track something, we're going to do it wrong. Which is why I've slowly but surely and methodically gone through this process to get to where we are now.

And you just mentioned, "Hey, I want to have my ketone in every product out there." Everyone you talk to — the people from HVMN, the people from Ketone-IQ — I'm telling you right now, if you want to use this molecule in your product, call me. Call me right now. We will make it happen, because the ketone space is too important for us to fight with one another. I wouldn't be where I am today had I not spent those years working with Dr Clarke and with Dr Stubbs and Dr Veech. Those people who are the backbone of that ketone science — they have pushed the limit of what they're doing. I wouldn't be where I am. But I will tell you right now, I think all of them have some applications. But if you want to come and use ours, I'm here to license it to you. We will make a great deal for you, and we'll get it out to everybody. Because the more people out there doing this, the more we're educating people on what this stuff does and what it's good for, the more people we're going to be able to help. That's my vision. That's the vision of everybody that I work with.

Lisa: I love it. This is absolutely beautiful, Mike. I can see your passion behind this. It's taken a long time to get to this point, and that's why I'm excited to be helping you with these educational pieces. I hope I can do some case studies with you guys. We've got a couple of ideas of things I want to try down here, because I want this product down here. I want people to get it here in New Zealand, Australia, this end of the planet. I know you're working on medical food and medical products as well. I'm excited to see where all of that goes.

So in five years' time, where is Tecton? What does the product line look like, and what does the clinical evidence base look like? What are you still working on? Where is your mind going with this whole thing?

Mike: It's amazing that you ask me that, because that's what I was doing earlier before we got started — I'm trying to position where we're going next. Everybody always has this thing: "My goal in life is to cure cancer." Well, I don't want to cure it, but I definitely want to be able to treat people with it. That's kind of my long-term vision for where I want to take the R3HBG molecule. I want to be able to see how many different cancers out there we can supplement their treatment with. You're not going to cure it by any means, but I know from all the clinical evidence — you put somebody on a ketogenic diet — I have seen glioblastoma patients who have zero chance of surviving. You can cut that glioblastoma tumor out, think you got every little piece of it, take extra, and six months from now it's going to be right back. I've seen those patients get on a ketogenic diet and go 18 months, two years without a single tumor regrow.

Lisa: Me too.

Mike: But I've seen them step off of it and come right back.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: If we can give them something — can you imagine being able to take a little 10-gram shot of this once or twice a day, it tastes nice, and your cancer doesn't grow back? There's a lot of work to be done, absolutely. But if you're looking for what I really would like to see five years from now: I would like to see as many supplement companies out there as I can get to license this molecule, so they can get it out in every form factor they can think of. There have got to be great companies out there that want to give this to fabulous endurance athletes like yourself. That's a great niche for it. For me, that's not my passion. I was an athlete, a hell of an athlete when I was younger — you can't do the job I did without being a good athlete. But for me, that's not my focus anymore.

I'm getting older. I want to live to be a hundred. And I want to say the reason I did that is because I supplemented with ketones, because I know it's going to help. There are anti-aging things that go with this. Like you said, people with type 2 diabetes. The biggest thing I wish I could do is turn the clock back to 1970 and not allow people to start eating all this hyperprocessed food. Because that's the number one thing — non-communicable diseases have jumped 3,000% in the last 50 years.

Lisa: Wow.

Mike: 3,000%. That's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ADHD, type 2 diabetes — all the metabolic syndrome diseases. Something's wrong in this picture. We don't have to be sick, but we do it because it's too easy, too convenient.

Lisa: And they get you — the big food industry gets you addicted. It's designed to make you addicted to the stuff. It all tastes good.

Mike: Nobody can say sugar doesn't taste good. It tastes amazing. That's why everybody wants it. The problem is it's not good for you. If you had a little bit, it's great. You have a lot — which we all do if we don't follow a strict diet — it's terrible for you. This is a way to help those cravings, help people transition off a bad diet. That's what I see even with the GLP-1s. A lot of people criticize them, but I'm like, if it's going to help people metabolically, microbiome-wise, brain-wise, and help them lose weight and get metabolically healthy, that's got to be a net plus. And then if you counsel them on the right things to take with it — like the ketones, like training, like getting your protein in — and they do it properly, and not just eat Doritos all day and stay on a GLP-1, that's not going to work.

Lisa: And the cancer side of it — my mum is living proof of that approach. We haven't got all the studies in yet, and that's what you'll hopefully be working on, some of those in the future. But when you're dying of cancer, you haven't got time to wait for the studies either. You go hard, and this is the metabolic approach — the Warburg effect, the NLRP3 inflammasome stuff, all of that could be part of that answer if you're dealing with that.

So for the practitioner listening to this right now, thinking about incorporating exogenous ketones into their protocols for the first time, what would you want them to know? Safety number one — this is a safe thing to do, because that's what clinicians and practitioners are always worried about. How do they use this in their clinical protocols? Where can they get more information besides this episode?

Mike: The biggest thing is, get them on an exogenous ketone. You don't need huge amounts of it. All the testing we've done so far — if you take doses above 25 to 30 grams in a single dose, you burn off some of it. You start to excrete it, so your body's not metabolizing it. So that's the sweet spot — about 25 grams in a single dose is the most you want to do. And you don't want to do more than a couple of those doses a day. You could do more, especially for somebody in a bad way — somebody that really needs it. You might want to start them off a little heavier and then taper off. But two 25-gram doses a day for a cancer patient or a patient with metabolic syndrome, a patient who is lipidemic, with high triglycerides — those patients will 100% get a benefit from using this. They can use the lower doses, which is why we went with the 10-gram dose in our commercial products. 10 grams twice a day is almost perfect. It keeps you in a lower state, somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 millimoles, in that lower end of the therapeutic level, but it'll keep you there for three to six hours depending on what your body needs. You do that twice a day — your waking time you're in ketosis. You go to sleep, and now your body produces ketones through your normal cycles.

We have a physician from the University of Missouri who is looking at it for acute brain injuries, acute strokes, ischemic strokes. He's using 20-gram doses, and he's using them to try to maintain a BHB level of about 2.0. If he maintains them at that level, their outcomes are much, much better. That's anecdotal — it's one study this gentleman is doing, Dr Nor Aurora — an amazing neuroscientist, neurosurgeon. But that's the study he's doing, and I think he's getting some really good results. A couple of times a day, 20 grams.

What I'd like to do — what we're working on now — is I'd like to get an IV form of this. We have some that we've used for animal studies, because your regulatory compliance for animal studies isn't quite as strict. But I'd like to see us get an IV form that we can get into more clinical trials, so we can get this with patients. You get somebody on an IV drip that can keep their BHB levels at about 2.0 — you're going to help people with trauma, brain injuries, cancer, acute MI, acute strokes. You are going to help them. It is just a better energy source. It's cleaner. You don't produce lactic acid from this, which you do when you metabolize glucose — lactate is part of that process.

Lisa: We've got clinical studies that this reduces lactic acid for an athlete. How much better can you get? That I can work out every day versus every other day? How much faster, how much better are you going to get?

Mike: So, caveat for ketones — I want to make sure athletes understand this. If you are a sprinter, a short-twitch muscle user, ketones aren't going to benefit you that much. They'll give you extra energy, but they're not going to benefit you for performance. If you're an endurance athlete, using those long-twitch muscles, riding like the Tour de France — there's a study that was done, and it kills me they did this. They gave an exogenous ketone to an athlete in the Tour de France, and they gave it to him for the sprint, and it didn't do anything for him. Everybody was blown out of their minds — this guy used exogenous ketones and his times were just the same. He's a sprinter. If you're doing a 20K race on a bike, that's a few minutes, the ketones aren't going to do any good. You're running a 25-mile or a 50-mile race and you're doing it uphill — ketones are when you're going to benefit. Ultramarathoners are going to benefit. You're doing an ultramarathon, a 24-hour race — by all means, keep the Skittles in one pocket and the ketones in the other. You need those carbs.

Lisa: I used to do that on long endurance events. I would use M&Ms or Skittles — people say whatever, it's a carb load. You get that sugar, get that carb in, and it gives you fuel.

Mike: It does. It's not going to hurt you to eat a pack of Skittles on a long run.

Lisa: No. The last 5Ks of a 100K race or 100-mile race, I would be pounding the sugar like no tomorrow. But you can't do it too early or you'll collapse. You've got to wait until the last 5Ks and then you hammer it in, whether it's Coca-Cola or Red Bull — which I would never do in my daily life, but in that last 5Ks of 100 miles, that's what gets you to the finish line, overtaking everybody, and then you collapse on the finish line. So you've got to do something afterwards.

Mike, just to wrap up this conversation, because we've gone on for a long time. The ketones come in the Tecton ketones, the commercial product available now, which I'm hoping to get down here shortly, guys — so bear with me while I work that out with the team over there. In the meantime, I've got a code that the guys have given me. I'll put that down in the show notes so you can order directly. They're 10-gram bottles. There are different types. We've got the Edge ones, we've got the GLP-1. The Edge is for the athletes. The GLP-1 ones, obviously, if you're trying to lose weight or coming off GLP-1s. And then you've got the other one — what's the other one?

Mike: Cognition.

Lisa: Cognition, yeah. With the Lion's Mane in it.

Mike: Exactly. That's the adjunct we added with the BHB — the Lion's Mane. Those are the four commercial products we have out there. We also have two medical foods. It's a separate company that does them, and I'll get you a code for them as well, but they're medical foods for people with movement disorders or essential tremors. And we are also doing that pure ketone, which is going to be for the same thing — for people with essential tremors — but it's a more concentrated dose. They're going to be 20, 24, 25 grams in each one.

Lisa: It'd be great to get a hold of those. When we're shipping — I think I talked to your team the other day about shipping the stuff over, and it's in glass — hopefully we can work those little nuances out to get it around the world in a cheaper format for shipping. From a cost perspective, if people are buying direct from Tecton ketones in the States, what are they paying now, without any discounts? For the eight in a box?

Mike: Eight. They come eight in a box, and it's roughly $4.99 per individual unit. So it's about $32 for an eight-pack.

Lisa: And then you've got your shipping on top of that if you're overseas.

Mike: And if you're on Amazon — we sell through Amazon as well. If you're on Amazon Prime, the shipping is free.

Lisa: There you go. And I hope to get these down here in New Zealand as well shortly, so bear with me, guys. That will be the goal. And yeah, you want to start off with a minimum of 10 grams — one of these shots a day for general health. And if you've got something like my mum's got, then obviously you want to go to the 20 to 30. But even if you can't afford that, even 10 grams will benefit those neurons. Something's better than nothing. And it is still — for the average person — expensive if you're taking it all the time. But it's a hell of a lot cheaper than it used to be. It used to be like $6,000 for a little wee bottle of this stuff. Over time, as more people get on it, hopefully some of the costs can come down as the scaling happens. But really, to protect your brain, it's pretty cheap. To protect your body and your metabolic health, it's pretty cheap.

So yeah, I think we've done a pretty good job today, Mike, of sharing all the science and all the exciting stuff you've been doing. I just want to thank you and the team — PJ, shout out to you for hooking us up and sorting all this out, getting Mike on the show. We're going to be doing another couple of episodes with you, Mike, as you progress and we do some stuff together. I'm really looking forward to doing a bit of a series with you. Very excited about this product. It has to get out into the world. If you're dealing with any of the things we've talked about today, or if you're human, then you need to try Tecton ketones. Thanks very much, Mike. Any last words before we wrap it up?

Mike: I absolutely want to thank you, Lisa, for having me on. You and your story and my story are so close, and there's so much synergy between us. It was amazing to have this conversation with you. I look forward to working with you — if there's any case studies you want to do, I'm a science geek. I literally read two or three research papers every single day just so I can learn something new. That's my thing. If there's anything I can do to help you out, if there's any way we need to get this down to New Zealand and Australia, get this to other people in the world who need it — anything I can do to help you out, let me know. I appreciate you.

Lisa: Amazing. And this is the thing — because it is a high-education product. People need to understand this complex science, and that's why we do these long-form content pieces. Because the people who actually take the time to engage with their health will start to understand this, learn this. And you're like me, you're an absolute science geek and love it. So we'll nerd out for you, and hopefully we've done it in a way that was well explained for everybody. Thanks, everyone, for joining me and Mike today. We really appreciate it. Mike, you're a legend.

Mike: Thank you.