Different Ketones
Michel Lundell
Michel is a Swedish engineer that got epilepsy. Medication changed his personality and he found the ketogenic diet as an alternative. In the process of adopting the diet and creating a lifestyle in ketosis, he invented a breath ketone analyzer. While developing the device, the relationship between the different ketones was analyzed. Michel will talk about the difference between breath and blood ketones.
Michel Lundell explains how understanding different ketones and their functions is key to
To use the right fuel is key to get the most performance out of your life. Save your rocket fuel for when you need it.
Summary
- Fat is the body's standard fuel, while glycogen is a high-power "rocket fuel" that should be saved for peak performance to avoid making the metabolic engine less effective. - Adopting a ketogenic lifestyle ensures the body consistently burns fat for energy, which prevents fatigue and preserves glycogen for situations that require maximum power. - Breath ketones, specifically acetone, act as metabolic "exhaust fumes" that indicate when the body is actively accelerating or maintaining speed by burning fat for energy. - Blood ketone levels represent recycled energy, but combining these with glucose levels into an index provides a more accurate indicator of the state of ketosis. - Developing reliable breath ketone analyzers requires sophisticated algorithms and extensive data to accurately help users manage health conditions or optimize athletic performance.
Article
Different Ketones: Performance Tuning And Optimizing Your Body’s Fuel
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Michel Lundell Argued That Metabolic Efficiency Begins With Choosing The Right Fuel
On the stage at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** in **Helsinki, Finland**, on **Friday, 1 November 2019**, Swedish engineer **Michel Lundell** offered a deceptively simple proposition: the body, like a high-performance machine, works best when it runs on the fuel it was designed to use.
In his presentation, **“Different Ketones,”** Lundell drew on the language of motorsport, endurance, and engineering to explain a subject often clouded by wellness jargon. His central message was clear. Human performance, whether measured in brain function, athletic output, or disease management, depended on fuel strategy.
“**Every cell in your body needs fuel to make power. If you give that cell the right fuel, you can optimize your performance,**” Lundell said.
A Life Redirected By Illness
Lundell’s authority on the subject did not emerge from theory alone. According to his biography, he had been driven to the ketogenic world by necessity. After developing epilepsy and finding that medication altered his personality, he turned to the ketogenic diet as an alternative path. That search eventually led him to invent a breath ketone analyzer and to study the relationship between the body’s different ketones in unusual depth.
His talk, then, sat at the intersection of personal survival and technical inquiry. It was about metabolism, but also about control: how to read the body’s signals, how to preserve energy, and how to avoid what he portrayed as the deadening inefficiency of carbohydrate dependence.
The Formula One Body
Lundell’s preferred metaphor was Formula One. In Finland, where motorsport heroes carry near-mythic status, the analogy landed with precision. He compared the human body to a racing machine that must manage limited resources intelligently, storing and deploying energy only when needed most.
Fat, he argued, was the body’s standard fuel, the baseline source it was designed to use. Glycogen, by contrast, was more like “rocket fuel,” powerful but costly, best reserved for moments of intense anaerobic demand.
“**Fat is your standard fuel. Your body is designed to use fat,**” he said. “**Always using glucose or carbohydrates, which turn into glucose, is less efficient.**”
The danger, in Lundell’s account, was not glucose itself but over-reliance on it. A body trained to expect constant carbohydrate intake, he suggested, became metabolically brittle. When glucose ran low, fatigue followed. The switch back to fat-burning was neither immediate nor graceful.
A ketogenic lifestyle, in his framing, prevented that crash by keeping the body adapted to fat while preserving glycogen for short bursts of maximal effort.
“**Always using high power fuel will actually make your engine less effective. Save your performance fuel for when you really need that high power,**” he said.
Ketones As Brain Fuel
If fat was the standard fuel, ketones were, for Lundell, the premium fuel for the brain. He linked ketosis not only to endurance and body composition, but also to mental sharpness and sustained focus.
“**Brain fuel, the ketones are the best,**” he said. “**By optimizing your fuel, you can be more efficient and have more energy for your brain and your body.**”
This was one of the more striking undercurrents of the talk. Lundell did not present ketosis merely as a weight-loss tactic or a niche dietary experiment. He cast it as a system of energy management, one capable of supporting cognition as much as physical output. In that sense, the body became not just an engine, but an engine with a command center whose performance was critically dependent on fuel quality.
Breath Versus Blood
The most technically distinctive part of Lundell’s presentation concerned the difference between **breath ketones** and **blood ketones**, a distinction often lost in broader public discussions about ketosis.
Breath ketones, he said, primarily reflected **acetone**. In his analogy, they were the body’s exhaust fumes, evidence that fat was being burned in real time. If metabolism was accelerating, breath acetone rose as a sign of active fuel use.
Blood ketones, by contrast, told a more complicated story. Lundell described them as a form of recycled energy, less like combustion itself and more like stored or recirculated power. High blood ketones, he suggested, did not always mean a person was currently burning fat at a high rate. They could indicate a state after ketone production rather than the process in motion.
His point was not that blood measurement was useless, but that it could be misunderstood in isolation. To make blood ketone data more meaningful, he pointed to the value of pairing it with glucose, referring to the glucose-ketone relationship as a more useful indicator of metabolic state.
In his account, **glucose was often a better guide to ketosis than blood ketone numbers alone**.
The Challenge Of Measuring The Invisible
It was during the audience questions that Lundell revealed the practical complexity behind his work. Building a reliable breath ketone analyzer, he explained, was far harder than designing a conventional alcohol breathalyzer.
The challenge was not simply hardware. It was biology, variability, and interpretation. To understand what a given breath reading actually meant required expensive laboratory access, large volumes of sample data, and sophisticated algorithms trained on thousands of breaths.
It was, he made clear, a data problem as much as an engineering one.
The body did not yield its signals neatly. To read breath acetone accurately was to confront a shifting metabolic landscape, one in which physiology had to be understood before it could be measured.
From Epilepsy To Endurance
Asked who such a device was for, Lundell began with the personal. People with epilepsy, he said, mattered deeply to him because of his own history. He also mentioned those seeking to reverse type 2 diabetes and even people dealing with cancer. But he did not stop at therapeutic use.
The audience, he suggested, was broader: people wanting to lose fat, and athletes wanting to go longer and harder with greater metabolic precision.
“**If you want to lose fat or be a better ultra runner, ketones are the way because you will be using the right fuel at the right time,**” he said.
That phrase, “the right fuel at the right time,” captured the logic of the entire presentation. Lundell’s argument was less ideological than operational. The goal was not to banish one fuel forever, but to restore hierarchy. Fat first. Glucose when needed. Ketones as evidence that the system was functioning efficiently.
A Metabolic Argument For Modern Life
There was something larger in Lundell’s talk than the familiar promises of diet culture. Beneath the comparisons to race cars and batteries sat a critique of modern metabolic habits: a world in which constant carbohydrate feeding had taught people to run hot, then crash; to demand immediate power, then wonder why they felt depleted.
At **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, Michel Lundell proposed an alternative model, one shaped by engineering logic and personal necessity. The body, he argued, should not live permanently in overdrive. It should be tuned.
To do that, people needed more than dietary slogans. They needed to understand what different ketones were actually telling them, and why not all measurements meant the same thing. In the end, Lundell’s presentation was not simply about ketosis. It was about literacy: learning to read the body’s fuel system with enough nuance to make performance, health, and resilience less a matter of guesswork than design.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki