Bio-Individuality: The Importance of Managing What You Measure
Dorian Greenow — Founder @ Keto-Mojo, Co-Founder & President @ The Ketogenic Foundation
The ketogenic lifestyle redirected Dorian’s life, enabling him to lose 47lbs, regaining health & wellbeing. However, testing strips were then produced by a few big biotech players, thus expensive/inaccessible to most. Utilizing their life savings, Dorian and his wife launched Keto-Mojo in 2017 with affordable ketone & glucose testing products, making the ketogenic lifestyle accessible to anyone wanting to optimize their health. Dorian has traveled the world to learn the science behind the lifestyle and is passionate about sharing the experience/knowledge gained on his journey – and the importance of bio-individuality to measure progress on the path to health optimization!
Dorian, the founder of Keto-Mojo, will present bio-individuality as the cornerstone to metabolic health, with measuring, then managing results as the key to personal success. He will discuss the different tools, platforms, and metrics available for monitoring/optimizing the progress of the ketogenic lifestyle. This will include information on measuring ketones and glucose – as well as calculating the glucose ketone index (GKI) as a tool to monitor/optimize the therapeutic efficacy of the ketogenic lifestyle. He will incorporate scientific, as well as anecdotal data/examples to enhance his presentation. The goal is to empower by freely sharing keto news, tools, and resources, so that people can make changes to their lives that will allow them to live longer, healthier lives, reducing the strain on our healthcare and ecosystems.
Measurement is the first step that leads to control. Once you can control something, you can improve upon it.
Summary
- Bio-individuality means everyone responds differently to food; personal carb thresholds for ketosis vary significantly, requiring individualized measurement for metabolic success. - Beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) is the gold standard for ketone measurement, offering the most stable and accurate data for clinical research compared to urine or breath testing. - The Glucose-Ketone Index (GKI) tracks the ratio between glucose and ketones, serving as a vital biomarker for managing metabolic health and various chronic medical conditions. - Monitoring biomarkers before and after meals allows for a "test, assess, address" approach to tailor diets and lifestyle choices to a person's unique metabolic profile. - Frequent measurement serves as "training wheels" to help individuals learn their body’s responses, eventually enabling an optimized lifestyle that requires less constant monitoring.
Article
Bio-Individuality And The Metrics Of Survival
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Dorian Greenow Made The Case That Health Could No Longer Be Managed By Guesswork
On a grey November afternoon in Helsinki, amid the gadgetry, promises and self-optimization fervour of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Dorian Greenow offered a message that cut through the noise with unusual clarity: measure first, then act.
Greenow, the founder of Keto-Mojo, took the stage on Friday, 1 November 2019, to deliver his presentation, *Bio-Individuality: The Importance of Managing What You Measure*. It was, on one level, a talk about ketones, glucose and ketogenic living. On another, it was a challenge to one of modern wellness culture’s most persistent illusions: that there is a universal body waiting for a universal answer.
There is not, Greenow argued. There is only the individual, metabolically distinct, shaped by food, stress, sleep, hormones and the thousand invisible pressures of daily life.
“One person's response to a banana is going to be different than another's,” he told the audience. “This is where bio-individuality comes into place and why it is so important to measure your own unique metabolic response.”
A Personal Reinvention Became A Commercial Mission
Greenow’s authority on the stage was inseparable from his own story. He described how the ketogenic lifestyle had transformed his health, helping him lose 47lbs and regain a sense of wellbeing. But the transformation also exposed a barrier. The tools needed to test ketones and glucose, he said, were expensive and largely controlled by major biotech firms.
That frustration became a business. In 2017, Greenow and his wife used their life savings to launch Keto-Mojo, with the aim of making metabolic testing affordable and accessible. The company’s mission, he suggested, was not merely to sell devices but to democratize a method, to put clinical-grade insight into the hands of ordinary people.
His core premise was both simple and radical: if measurement leads to control, and control leads to improvement, then inaccessible measurement keeps health optimization reserved for the few.
The Body As A Landscape
The most striking metaphor of the talk came not from medicine, but from wine. Greenow borrowed the idea of terroir, the total environment that shapes a vine, to explain the forces that shape a human metabolism.
“Think about the terroir of your actual self and all the externalities that come into play,” he said. “That is what gives you your bio-individuality, allowing you to adjust your life to tailor-make it for yourself.”
In Greenow’s framing, diet was only one part of the equation. Sleep quality, heart rate variability, stress, cortisol spikes, microbiome health and meal timing all formed part of an individual’s metabolic terroir. To eat by a formula alone was to ignore the complexity of the body that received it.
It was a rebuke to nutritional dogma, including the rigid carbohydrate thresholds often promoted in ketogenic circles. Why, he asked, should everyone live by the same ceiling? Some might maintain ketosis at 30 grams of carbohydrates a day, others at 40, 50 or even 60. The point was not to obey a rule. The point was to discover one’s own threshold.
Ketones, Glucose And The Search For A Reliable Signal
Greenow’s lecture then moved from philosophy to instrumentation. Not all ketone measurements, he stressed, were equal.
He outlined the three ketone bodies: acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone. In his account, acetoacetate represented 28% of available ketone energy but was unstable; acetone, at 2%, was little more than metabolic exhaust; beta-hydroxybutyrate, or BHB, accounted for 70% and was the most stable, making it the preferred marker for blood testing.
This was why, Greenow said, BHB had become the gold standard in clinical research. Urine strips, often used by beginners, measured acetoacetate and quickly lost usefulness once the body adapted. Breath testing, though non-invasive, was vulnerable to confounders ranging from alcohol to sugar alcohols and often struggled to capture the subtlety of nutritional ketosis with sufficient consistency.
For Greenow, blood-based BHB testing was not a lifestyle gimmick but a serious tool. Yet even that, he argued, was insufficient on its own.
“If you're measuring beta hydroxybutyrate, you're only getting one part of the picture because you've got to be measuring your glucose as well, because they are two sides to the same coin.”
The Glucose-Ketone Index As A New Compass
That two-sided picture led Greenow to the Glucose-Ketone Index, or GKI, a ratio derived by dividing glucose by ketones, both measured in millimoles. He presented it as more than a convenience metric. It was, in his telling, an emerging map for therapeutic intervention.
The GKI, he said, was already being used in work related to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, polycystic ovary syndrome, multiple sclerosis and psychiatric conditions including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD and PTSD.
Such claims sat at the frontier where biohacking, metabolic medicine and experimental therapeutics overlap, often uneasily. But Greenow’s point was less that the science was settled than that precise measurement could open doors that broad nutritional advice never could. Weight loss, in this vision, was only the shallowest application of ketosis.
Test, Assess, Address
The operational heart of the talk was Greenow’s three-step method: test, assess, address.
Test before a meal. Test after a meal, about an hour later. Watch what happens. Did glucose climb sharply? Did ketones fall while glucose remained stable, suggesting an insulin response? Was the stress of the day distorting the numbers? Did poor sleep reshape the morning baseline?
Greenow suggested that post-meal glucose should ideally rise by no more than 1.3 millimoles and remain below 6 millimoles if one aimed to stay in a low-carbohydrate zone. These were not commandments, but guides for reading the body’s reactions.
The broader lesson was that food is never just food. The same meal can produce different biochemical consequences in different people, and even in the same person under different conditions. The body after a sleepless night is not the body after rest. The body under pressure at work is not the body at ease.
The Balance Sheet Of Health
Greenow, a businessman as much as a health advocate, reached for the language of finance to make his point land.
“As a businessman, I look at my balance sheet, I look at my P and L almost daily. When do you go and look at your balance sheet? When do you look at your P and L to see how well you are doing as an individual?”
It was one of the talk’s sharpest reframings. Modern life trains people to track money obsessively and health sporadically, often only after decline becomes impossible to ignore. Greenow’s appeal was to reverse that hierarchy. Wealth, after all, does not accompany anyone beyond the grave. Vitality, while it lasts, shapes every waking hour.
“You aren't taking any money with you, so wouldn't you want to have a vibrant life and dial in your optimized self?”
Stress, Sleep And The Limits Of Dietary Purity
The speech was not a plea for nutritional purity alone. Greenow repeatedly returned to external pressures that could disrupt even the most carefully designed metabolic plan.
Stress, he noted, could spike glucose through cortisol alone. Sleep deprivation could distort baseline readings. Heart rate variability could reveal physiological strain before the mind had fully named it. Even the microbiome, tracked in part through simple practical tools such as the Bristol stool scale, deserved a place in the self-monitoring architecture.
This wider framing mattered. Too often, metabolic conversations collapse into carbohydrate counting, reducing the body to a crude ledger of inputs. Greenow argued for a more textured understanding: one in which metrics become clues to an ecosystem rather than a moral scorecard.
Training Wheels, Not A Life Sentence
For all his enthusiasm for data, Greenow was careful to insist that measuring was not the end state. Testing, he said, should function as “training wheels”.
“Testing your glucose and ketones are just training wheels. Once you know how to live an optimal life, isn't it better just to go out and live it? Our goal is to make everyone healthy and living in a vibrant way.”
In that line lay an important distinction between empowerment and dependency. The aim was not perpetual surveillance of the self, nor a permanent consumer relationship with diagnostic hardware. The aim was education. Learn the body well enough, through disciplined observation, and eventually the devices could recede.
It was perhaps the most humane note in a summit culture often tempted by endless optimization. Greenow’s best argument was not that more data would save us, but that the right data, used wisely, might eventually free us from needing so much of it.
A Biohacking Ethos With Medical Ambition
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, where technological enthusiasm often runs ahead of evidence, Greenow’s presentation stood out because it tied the rhetoric of hacking to the discipline of measurement. He was selling a tool, certainly. But he was also advancing a worldview in which personal health ceased to be abstract and became legible.
His language was evangelical at times. “Being fueled by ketones is when you get your superpowers,” he said. Yet beneath the flourish was a more grounded proposition: that precision matters, that bodies differ, and that effective intervention begins by abandoning the fantasy of one-size-fits-all nutrition.
The promise of bio-individuality is not that it makes health simple. It does the opposite. It insists on complexity, variability and patience. But it also offers something seductive in return: the possibility that our bodies are not failing to obey the rules, only revealing that the rules were never universally true to begin with.
In Helsinki, Dorian Greenow argued that managing what we measure is not merely a technical exercise. It is a way of reclaiming authorship over health itself.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki