Is Ketosis the Ultimate Biohack?
Dorian Greenow — Founder @ Keto-Mojo, Co-Founder & President @ The Ketogenic Foundation
In 2015, Dorian weighed 210 lbs, had all the markers for metabolic syndrome. He and his wife, Gemma embarked on the ketogenic lifestyle and began monitoring their glucose and ketones to dial in their nutrition choices. Within six months, Dorian had lost 47 lbs and came off all medications. The Ketogenic lifestyle changed their lives, but ketone testing was expensive and inaccessible. In 2017, Dorian successfully launched Keto-Mojo, lowering the cost of ketone testing by 75%, offering the first affordable, accurate blood glucose and ketone testing meter. With the launch of the GKI and GK+ meters, and the HIPAA and GDPR compliant MyMojoHealth, their platform now provides real time data for monitoring and compliance, resulting in better health outcomes. Dorian speaks at numerous conferences globally. He and Gemma also founded The Ketogenic Foundation, a non-profit charity, fostering Ketogenic Education, Medical Research, and Information Sharing for the benefit of improving the health of humankind.
Dorian Greenow explores why nutritional ketosis is considered the ultimate biohack.
Biohack yourself, because if you biohack yourself, you biohack the planet. Ketones are the ultimate biohack for us and the fellow people around us.
Summary
- Humans are biologically adapted to ketosis; newborns are born in a ketotic state, and the human species spent millions of years in this state before the agricultural revolution. - A well-regulated ketogenic diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, significantly reducing dependency on exogenous insulin and offering a solution to chronic metabolic diseases. - Ketosis enhances cellular efficiency by improving mitochondrial function and increasing ATP production by approximately 29%, boosting both physical endurance and cognitive power. - Transitioning to a ketogenic state provides systemic health benefits, including reduced inflammation, lower blood glucose levels, and increased antioxidant activity to fight free radicals. - Regenerative agriculture used for clean keto production can sequester carbon into the soil, making the diet a tool for both personal health optimization and environmental sustainability.
Article
Is Ketosis The Ultimate Biohack?
Evolution, Metabolic Health, And The Promise Of Human Performance
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland, on Friday, 3 June 2022, Dorian Greenow took to the stage with the certainty of a convert and the urgency of a campaigner. The title of his presentation, *Is Ketosis The Ultimate Biohack?*, doubled as a provocation. His answer, delivered with evangelical force, was yes.
Greenow, founder of Keto-Mojo, did not frame ketosis as a fringe diet trend or a niche wellness practice. He presented it as a biological inheritance, a metabolic state hardwired into human development, buried by agriculture, and now rediscovered as a tool against chronic disease, cognitive decline and environmental degradation.
His case was sweeping. It moved from neonatal brain development to the fallouts of the modern carbohydrate economy, from type 2 diabetes reversal to mitochondrial efficiency, and finally to regenerative agriculture as a model for healing both the body and the soil.
A Return To First Principles
Greenow’s argument began where many biohacking claims often do not, with an appeal to first principles.
“In science, you have to reason from first principles. Go back to the physics and the chemistry to see if it makes sense,” he said.
He asked the audience to consider infancy, not adulthood, as the clearest evidence. Babies, he argued, are born in a state of nutritional ketosis, and during the second half of pregnancy ketones provide a substantial share of the energy required for development. If the newborn brain is the most precious and energetically demanding organ in the human body, Greenow asked, why would nature fuel it this way unless ketosis served a foundational role?
For him, the answer was obvious. Nutritional ketosis was not an aberration. It was the original metabolic language of the species.
The Long Arc Of Human Evolution
From there, Greenow stretched the timeline outward. For nearly 2.5 million years, he said, humans lived in conditions that made ketosis not merely possible but normal. Only with the agricultural revolution, roughly 10,000 years ago, did grains and shelf-stable carbohydrates begin to dominate the human menu.
“For nearly two and a half million years, humans were in a state of nutritional ketosis,” he told the room. “It was only during the agricultural revolution, about ten thousand years ago, that we short-circuited our brains with carbohydrates.”
The line was dramatic, but it distilled the worldview he advanced throughout the talk: that modernity had not liberated human metabolism so much as destabilised it. What was called progress in food production also created the preconditions for mass metabolic illness.
In Greenow’s telling, the rise of grain agriculture may have fed armies and built empires, but it did not necessarily nourish the individual body. The cost of convenience, abundance and storage was paid later in inflammation, obesity and diabetes.
When “Extreme” Became Normal
Greenow’s most forceful section concerned chronic disease, particularly type 2 diabetes. Here, his rhetoric sharpened.
“People say not eating carbs is extreme, but extreme is having your blood filtered in dialysis or getting a leg amputated,” he said. “We have proven that you can reverse the effects of type two diabetes with a well-regulated ketogenic diet.”
The statement captured the moral inversion at the heart of his talk. In contemporary society, carbohydrate restriction is often presented as radical, while escalating medical intervention is treated as routine. Greenow sought to reverse that logic. To him, the truly extreme condition was not refusing bread or sugar. It was normalising a disease burden so vast that, in the United States alone, hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on type 2 diabetes each year, while amputations continued at a relentless pace.
He pointed to the clinical work associated with Virta Health and its evidence that ketogenic protocols can reduce dependency on exogenous insulin and help reverse markers of type 2 diabetes in a significant proportion of patients. Ketosis, in this frame, was not just about weight loss. It was a therapeutic intervention with systemic consequences.
Beyond Weight Loss, Toward Cellular Power
What made Greenow’s case compelling to a biohacking audience was that he did not stop at disease management. He linked ketosis to performance, endurance and mental clarity, framing the metabolic shift as an upgrade at the level of the cell.
“At a fundamental stage, ketosis changes your mitochondria and your ATP production goes up by almost twenty-nine percent,” he said. “That gives you the endurance and mental capability to be a force multiplier in everything you do.”
The phrase “force multiplier” was telling. Borrowed from military language, it suggested that ketosis was not simply health preservation but human amplification. Better mitochondrial function meant more efficient energy production. More ATP meant not only surviving but operating with greater steadiness, stamina and cognitive edge.
Greenow also cited broader benefits associated with ketogenic metabolism, including reduced inflammation, lower blood glucose, increased antioxidant activity and the scavenging of free radicals. In his account, ketosis offered an internal environment less hospitable to chronic disease and more conducive to resilience.
The Biohack Of Endurance And Attention
For a summit built around optimisation, Greenow’s most seductive claim may have been that ketosis sharpened both body and mind.
He described a metabolic state that could help people endure physical exertion while sustaining concentration during periods of fasting or demanding mental work. Students, entrepreneurs and athletes all appeared in his field of reference. So did clinicians and people living with diabetes who had used ketogenic strategies to transform their biomarkers and capabilities.
The promise was not merely slimmer bodies, but clearer thinking. Ketosis, as Greenow presented it, was a fuel source for sustained attention in an age of distraction and a remedy for the highs and crashes of sugar-dependent living.
A Personal Testimony Behind The Platform
Part of Greenow’s authority on stage came from autobiography. His own story sat quietly beneath the lecture’s larger claims.
In 2015, he weighed 210 pounds and showed markers of metabolic syndrome. After adopting a ketogenic lifestyle with his wife, Gemma, and using glucose and ketone monitoring to refine their nutrition, he lost 47 pounds in six months and came off all medications. The experience led him to launch Keto-Mojo in 2017, with the aim of making ketone testing more affordable and accessible.
That history mattered because it lent his presentation the shape of lived conviction rather than abstract advocacy. Greenow was not simply arguing for ketosis as an idea. He was presenting it as a life-altering intervention that had remade his own body and then his professional mission.
The Planetary Claim
The final movement of the talk widened the frame again, this time from metabolism to ecology. If ketosis was a way to biohack the self, Greenow argued, it could also be part of a broader effort to “biohack the planet”.
“It is not the cow, it is the how,” he said. “By being permaculturally inspired, we can sequester carbon into the soil and create an environment that is rich, making a better planet for ourselves and for others.”
This was a familiar but increasingly potent argument within parts of the keto and carnivore-adjacent world: that the environmental critique of animal agriculture often misses the distinction between industrial extraction and regenerative systems. Greenow contrasted lifeless monocultures with biodiverse ranchland, arguing that clean keto rooted in regenerative and holistic agriculture could support both personal health and environmental repair.
It was an attempt to rescue ketogenic eating from the charge of ecological indulgence and reposition it instead as a partner to sustainability, if practised in the right agricultural context.
Ketosis As A Revolt Against Modern Damage
What lingered after Greenow’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki was not just a set of nutritional claims but a larger philosophy of modern illness. His thesis was that the body had not failed. It had been mismatched with its environment. Ketosis, then, was not a gimmick but a return, a way of restoring an ancient metabolic flexibility lost in the grain-heavy architecture of modern life.
Whether every claim can bear the full weight he placed upon it is a matter for ongoing scientific debate. But as a piece of persuasion, his talk was deftly calibrated for the anxieties of the present moment: rising metabolic disease, declining vitality, environmental fear and the desire for agency in the face of all three.
Greenow offered a single answer expansive enough to touch them all. Ketosis, he suggested, was not only a diet. It was an argument about what humans once were, what they have become and what they still might recover.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki