My Experience With Exogenous Ketones & Red Wine

Yesterday was the 8th day of my journey into ketosis. I started on Monday 11th July and was intending to go for a couple of weeks. See my first post here. My first 2 days were the most ‘painful’ in terms of hunger pangs and headaches. I also struggled to sleep well when I finished eating before 9pm and went to bed on an empty stomach.

I was in Ketosis on Wednesday and proved this by using ketone strips. These are strips that detect ketones in your urine. I was going ‘darker’ on Thursday and Friday and at a fitness convention in LA called IDEA Fit, I came across exogenous ketones. Find my Facebook live video here which I filmed there.  You might have to like the page to see the videos. These are a ketones that you take in externally that put you into, what I think can be called, a ‘false’ state of ketosis, within 30 minutes. This means your liver is actually producing ketones without being starved of carbohydrates for several days.

This seems like a very cool bio-hack as it apparently puts you into fat burning mode. I’ve come across these before but I haven’t tested them. The main point about them, is that they help you to get through the “keto flu” – this is when you experience headaches, hunger pangs, dizziness and inability to think properly. Your body literally has to transition energy source from glucose to ketones and it’s a little uncomfortable to say the least.

I had heard that you can take these exogenous ketones whilst still eating carbohydrates so I posed this question to this ketone expert at the conference. He confirmed that you can still produce ketones whilst eating carbohydrates using these exogenous ketones. I then asked about alcohol as I said I’d like to have a glass of wine or two that night (it was Friday after all). He said “It’s funny you should ask that as I’ve just been to Vegas on a lads’s weekend which involved a lot of alcohol, and we all drank these throughout the weekend to keep us in ketosis.” I felt I had just been given a wild card to have a few glasses of wine that night. So….I tested it.

The beauty about the health industry – and about being a human – is that you can test this stuff for yourself. I drank 2 glasses of red wine on Friday night and sunk a sachet of Pruvit exogenous ketones. I also had a couple of small pork dumplings.  Saturday morning I tested my pee and was apparently still in ketosis. I drank 2 sachets on Saturday, went back to the conference, hardly ate actually as I couldn’t find any sugar-free food, had plenty of energy, and then on Saturday night, I drank 2 more glasses of wine with my evening meal. I stuck to a carb-free and sugar-free evening meal. Sunday morning, I measured my ketones and I appeared to have been “kicked out” meaning I was only showing trace amounts of ketones in my pee.

So what’s the deal? Red wine only has 0.9g of sugar per glass (147g serving). It also contains 3.8g of carbohydrates. In theory, that amount of sugar or carbohydrate should not kick you out of ketosis. In fact, you can have up to around 50g of carbs a day, and still remain in ketosis. What’s kicked me out? Well, more than likely, the alcohol. Your body burns alcohol before it burns ketones. So regardless of the trace amounts of sugar and carbs in the red wine, your body will burn alcohol for energy, before it burns ketones. This means that whilst you have alcohol in your system, you are not burning fat.

I then came across this in a forum from an expert:

“2.20 Can I drink alcohol in ketosis?

A: Alcohol consumption will not kick you out of ketosis. It’s effect on the liver results in more ketones being produced. Don’t confuse this with more fat being burned: the opposite is true – the more alcohol you consume, the less body fat you will lose. The alcohol becomes the source of ketone production instead of fat. Many people become intoxicated much more easily while in ketosis. [HC] ”  Read more on BodyBuilding.com.

And then this on another “red one and ketosis” search:

How does alcohol affect ketosis?

Alcohol does have an impact on weight loss through a ketogenic diet, even when you drink low carb or carb free alcoholic beverages. This is because the body can use alcohol as a source of fuel. It isn’t stored as glycogen, like carbs, so once it is burned off you will go straight back into ketosis, however this does mean you are losing some fat burning time when you drink. How much this affects your weight loss varies between individuals. Some people find their weight loss stalls if they drink anything alcoholic, whereas others find they can drink responsible amounts of wine, hard liquor or a low carb beer (they do exist) and keep losing weight. Read more on ketogenicdiet.org.

I then found this very interesting science on alcohol and ketosis:

Since fatty acids are oxidized to make the ketones, and alcohol suppresses fatty acid oxidation, alcohol will temporarily reduce new ketone formation. But perhaps b/c the alcohol must be metabolized “in real time”, excess acetyl CoA in the pike gets converted and “dumped” as ketones. In any case, once the alcohol is gone, the ketone production should pick up where it was left off provided that alcohol was not accompanied by any significant amount of carbs.

It would therefore appear that drinking one, maybe 2 glasses of red wine, will kick you out of ketosis whilst it’s in the system, and then you should pop straight back into ketosis. Hmmm. Maybe it’s the dumplings on Friday night that kicked me out of ketosis and it had absolutely nothing to do with the red wine! Thankfully, I’m still on my high fat, low to zero carb diet. When I tested on Sunday, it might not have been a very accurate measurement as it wasn’t first thing. I had drank a lot of water, a green tea and a coffee.

I now understand that a glass, maybe 2 of red wine should NOT kick you out of ketosis. And also other low to zero carb alcohols should not kick you out either. This is absolutely wonderful news, don’t you think?