Following Your Gut Podcast #12, Fueling Your Mind and Body with Ketones

Roland Pankewich dives into the world of ketones with guest Bonnie Barnes, a passionate advocate and founder of a ketone-centric company. Explore how ketones, often misunderstood as only part of a keto diet, serve as a valuable macronutrient for brain energy and metabolic health. Barnes shares her personal and professional journey, emphasizing ketones’ role in supporting brain function, particularly for women, athletes, and those seeking metabolic balance. Discover the benefits and applications of ketones in enhancing focus, energy, and overall health.

About the Guest:

Bonnie Barnes is a passionate advocate for ketone supplementation and a seasoned expert in health and wellness. With a remarkable career that budded at the youthful age of 18, Bonnie has evolved from a personal trainer to a businesswoman. She has worn many hats in the fitness industry, including gym ownership and competitive bodybuilding. Over nearly two decades, her journey through health challenges and personal transformations has ignited a profound interest in nutrition and ketones. Bonnie now helms a company specializing in ketone products, aiming to empower individuals with the benefits of enhanced brain energy and metabolic health.

Key Takeaways:

Ketones as a Macronutrient: Ketones are introduced alongside carbohydrates, proteins, and fats as an essential macronutrient that supports brain energy and metabolic health.

Metabolic Connectivity: Achieving a balance between carbohydrate and ketone utilization can help optimize metabolic functions, particularly in acting as both anabolic and catabolic agents.

Impact on Cognitive Function: Ketones are shown to enhance focus and brain energy without the jitters of stimulants like caffeine, making them a viable option for cognitive support.

Gender-Specific Benefits: Women’s health may particularly benefit from ketone supplementation due to varied energy demands across menstrual cycles and conditions like PCOS.

Supporting Digestive Health: Ketones can synergize with probiotics and prebiotics to promote gut health by offering energy for fasting states that aid in digestive repair and optimization.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:00 25:09 Exploring Ketones’ Role in Gut Health and Therapeutic Interventions
• 0:02 Exploring Ketones and Their Impact on Health and Performance
• 2:16 The Benefits of Exogenous Ketones for Brain and Body Energy
• 10:07 Optimizing Brain Health and Metabolism with Ketones
• 18:27 Ketone Supplementation for Energy and Cognitive Benefits
• 25:09 Exploring Ketones’ Role in Gut Health and Therapeutic Interventions

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. And today, today, my friends, we have a very interesting topic we’re going to get into something that we’ve never even mentioned on the podcast before. We’re going to talk about ketones, which I’m pretty sure unless you’ve been living under a rock since 2016, you’ve come across the name or the word ketone in your health exploration journeys.

0:00:27 Roland Pankewich: But before we get into ketones, I want to introduce the person who’s going to be talking to us about ketones today. Bonnie, thank you for being with us on the podcast.

0:00:34 Bonnie Barnes: Hey, thank you for having me. I’m excited to share with you something new.

0:00:38 Roland Pankewich: Yes. Yeah, it’s going to be really exciting. Before we get into it, I want to know a little bit about who you are and what your story is because you’re really passionate about ketones, so much so that you actually have a company focused on ketones and helping people, I guess, attain them for the benefits of what ketones do as far as energy goes. But what started this journey for you?

0:00:58 Bonnie Barnes: That’s a really great question. So my background formally is I went into health and wellness about 18 years old. I became personal trainer, nutrition certified. And the idea of how I it started out, how do I aesthetically change my body? I’m working out, I’m exercising, I’m doing, you know, competitive triathlons. And then I came across bodybuilding and how aesthetically. So the curiosity of how to get your body to look a certain way is what led me into a deep dive on nutrition because aesthetics doesn’t always equal health either.

0:01:32 Bonnie Barnes: So 18 years old, I started my gym experience. I got my 999 gym pass at Golds and I started going and training and lifting weights. And so from 18 years old to I’ll be 40 this year, over the last, you know, just under 20, 20 years or so I’ve been from personal trainer to gym ownership to competitive bodybuilder, a little bit of everything that has kind of been these little aha moments to where how I felt in my metabolic states of training to burn body fat or for performance was always bringing me back to I performed well under a low carbohydrate diet.

0:02:16 Bonnie Barnes: How I felt with my brain in times of like coming out of a fight or flight state, I noticed when I was lower carbohydrate in that dieting state, I just felt differently. But I didn’t know at the time it was my body metabolically raising ketone levels. We Traditionally think of ketone levels as a keto diet or all of the things that are the negative condensations around what keto is. But what it really is is we go on these metabolic pathways to raise the levels of bhb, which is the most abundant keton beta hydroxybutyrate in your body in a fasting state.

0:02:59 Bonnie Barnes: So the aha moment for me was I had left the fitness industry for a period of time and I was working on doing some internal work, healing my body physically and then healing from some emotional trauma I was going through and leaving a consistent lifestyle, healthy. I’m, I’m in a disarray in my life. I’ve gone through a divorce, figuring out the single mom life. And I started taking exogenous ketones out of the blue. Was offered them, didn’t really understand, typically thinking, oh, it’s for keto diet, but I’m going to try it.

0:03:39 Bonnie Barnes: And I started to notice my brain just felt different with all the chaos in the background. I had this calm in my head. So I thought, well, I feel good, I’m going to keep taking these. I don’t normally take other supplementation other than to support my systems like, you know, pre fibers or probiotics to support all the other things. And as I was taking these exogenous ketones, I, I was offered a position with the company that made them.

0:04:10 Bonnie Barnes: I knew the founder, had met him through business and intuitively I thought, well, why not go learn a new skill? So as I’m taking these ketones, I’m working for the company. I thought, well, I probably should understand what I’m taking, especially if I’m going to promote it. Dove into the research and the clinical studies and everything just came to the root cause or the root start of your brain. Brain metabolism, how the brain uses energy and from there, what where the resources head to, right? So when you’re eating food, about 20% of what you eat, your brain uses because your brain takes so much energy to think, to process, just to function.

0:04:57 Bonnie Barnes: It’s nonstop. Even when you go to sleep, your brain doesn’t turn off you, you slip into a different state and then your brain goes into overdrive mode to process. I mean, that’s why sleep is so important. If you think about it, if you’re the CEO of your company and your brain’s a CEO of your body, when does most of the work for the company get done in productivity? Typically when the company is shut down during the day and there’s other things being optimized for the Most part.

0:05:26 Bonnie Barnes: So then it got me thinking, all right, so what’s happening when I’m sleeping? How does my brain being fed? I’m not eating? Well, your body has this magical system that kicks into a state called we call ketosis. And you’re converting body fat into these ketones. And these ketones are going straight to your brain and helping that performance, because you have over 60,000 thoughts that run through your brain every single day.

0:05:51 Bonnie Barnes: And if they’re positive thoughts, you’re going to process them just like you would clean energy. But if they’re negative thoughts or a negative situation that’s happened, your brain has to keep processing it until it makes sense, because it doesn’t negate things that are negative. Really easy. So along the path last four years, these little pieces would come into play. And I had this aha moment one day where I went, oh, my gosh.

0:06:18 Bonnie Barnes: We go on these metabolic pathways to raise these levels because of what our brain is craving. And now all of these studies in the last 10 years have started to emerge where it’s more specific to beta hydroxybutyrate. You will hear in the marketplace there’s going to be esters, which is a mix of a molecule called 1,3 butanediol and BHB, and together that makes an ester. And these were predominantly used in the hospitals for Alzheimer’s and dementia in high doses. I mean, they’re not very tasteful, but people know them to be in the hospital scene for that reason.

0:06:57 Bonnie Barnes: And then you have 1,3 butane dial on its own, which is a pre ketone. It goes into your system, your body converts it through your liver to make a ketone, just like an MCT is a pre ketone. And then you have straight bhb. Straight BHB or beta hydroxybutyrate hasn’t been in the marketplace until recently, and it was able to be synthesized and made into an exogenous ketone. And so with that information having taken that, I came to this conclusion that, oh, my gosh, this is a brain energy, it’s a macronutrient. It’s actually going into the mitochondria, what we call, you know, the powerhouse of the cell.

0:07:36 Bonnie Barnes: And if you have a fire in that cell in the mitochondria burning, and you’ve got the wood, and the wood is considered glucose being thrown on that fire, and it’s fast burning, then your ketones are considered coal, and you’re putting coal on the fire. And depending on how you want to burn that energy or how it’s used or absorbed in your brain, you have this really cool thing that switches back and forth.

0:08:00 Bonnie Barnes: But unless somebody’s really consistent on their diet to be able to use those fuel switches, then you’re not going to have that consistent use of both fuels. And so that’s where ketones have really been able to come a long way, where people are starting to now use both of them, understand them and to kind of have that experiential feel. But yeah, that’s where all these aha moments came is along the way. Working for the company and the studies, I’m dove into research and then taking them myself, I went, there’s something bigger here.

0:08:34 Bonnie Barnes: And we went on. I went on a trip to Europe a year ago. I didn’t take any of the ketones with me and I started my menstrual cycle and it was incredibly painful. And I hadn’t had a painful menstrual cycle in quite a long time. And I thought, what am I doing differently? I wasn’t taking my ketones pre menstrual cycle or on my daily dose that I normally would. And so my body had to work harder energetically because it didn’t have the extra energy that can come from these exogenous ketones. And so that’s when it clicked for me how crucial these could be for extra supplementation, especially around women and taking them on their menstrual cycle, because our brains literally will change depending on the day of our cycle. There was a study that came out that talked about that.

0:09:25 Bonnie Barnes: And so when that piece clicked for me, I went, all right, I’m a woman on the go. How do I make this energy source not only more convenient, but at a dose that makes sense for women to take that’s convenient and will help them? And that is where I came up with my brand and my product using.

0:09:46 Roland Pankewich: So a few things that I want to just pull out of that. So, number one, very trusting person you are. Someone said, here, take this and you just took it. That’s always the sign of either a trusting personality or that person was a good friend because that’s usually how some of these dives into the world of supplementation start. You know, when you’re not looking for the thing it’s offered to you and then all of a sudden, boom, it just rocks your world.

0:10:07 Roland Pankewich: The second thing, and I want to dig into this a little bit more. So you talked about glucose, you talked about ketones. Fundamentally, for no one who’s really delved into this before, a ketone is essentially an Additional macronutrient to a carbohydrate, a protein and a fat. Is that a correct way of framing it?

0:10:25 Bonnie Barnes: Yes, I, I would definitely frame it that way. If you look at the traditional ways you have what, how much protein do you eat to sustain your muscle mass? How many grams of fat do you eat for the other benefits for your brain, your joint lubrication internally, and then how many grams of carbohydrates do you eat to sustain energy and the support your brain takes from that? And where ketones come in, take. It’s like taking a dose of ketone food, you could say, and making it a complete plate.

0:10:58 Bonnie Barnes: Because if you’re supporting your muscles and everything else, why are we not supporting our brain on what it seeks for the most?

0:11:04 Roland Pankewich: And you mentioned something in the previous question where you said if you’re good with your diet, it should be something happening naturally. So in your assessment, if someone is eating an appropriate style, quantity, maybe they’re fasting a certain amount during the day. At some point, everyone should be making some natural ketones in their body, all things being optimal, correct?

0:11:29 Bonnie Barnes: Correct. Here’s what we do know. When you eat highly processed foods, crackers, breads, things that impact your insulin level at a higher rate than normal, you’re not going to make as many ketones because ketones are made in a lower insulin state. So if you do high intensity cardio, if you are, you know, eating a balanced diet with more fresh food that is digested and absorbed because of the fibers differently in your body, and they don’t impact your insulin as much your body. Imagine like a water bottle and you know, when you drink the water bottle and the water goes down, imagine that being your food storage or your carbohydrate storage. And the lower that gets to kind of balancing in the middle, you know, you have room to kind of switch between those energies. But if those carbohydrate levels and the sugar levels are filled up to the top and overflowing, where do you find room to be able to optimize Ketones in that balance is kind of how I visualize it.

0:12:23 Bonnie Barnes: And so yes, the inconsistencies are not at a higher percent rate with everybody, but when you can kick into that and be consistent with your food and having whole foods, you’re naturally going to make more ketones than not. Like you said, between fasting, you know, most people stop eating between what, 6 and 7pm at night, and then they don’t start eating till about 7 or 8am the next morning. So think about how long you’re in that fasted state and your body’s able to make those.

0:12:55 Bonnie Barnes: And so then when you wake up, most people have a sugary breakfast. So that’s an instant insulin. So those levels are going to be taken down versus having eggs or things that your body’s utilizing a little differently, which creates that energy pathway for you to keep those levels a little higher. You have about 150 grams naturally in your. When you wake up.

0:13:19 Roland Pankewich: Got it. And, and it’s interesting you say that because I, I always look at things through kind of what I would call a, an evolutionary lens or, or a nature intended lens to where, you know, carbohydrates are are. Carbohydrates have been vilified in the health industry for the last few years, and in some cases correctly so and in some cases unjustly so. What I mean by that is if someone is eating a high quantity of empty carbohydrates, they’re not doing their body any favors.

0:13:48 Roland Pankewich: Carbohydrates are very anabolic food, right? Insulin’s the major anabolic hormone. And when they eat those carbs, what you’re explaining is they’re always going to be pushing those carbs up as a way of sustaining themselves by eating too many of them too frequently, and they’re not getting the ne natural regulatory compensation that a ketone would generate for you in a fasted state. I’ve used these things clinically over the years for people who have metabolic issues because as a ketone is catabolic and helps regenerate in the body, carbohydrate is anabolic and helps build up.

0:14:23 Roland Pankewich: So I’ve always thought of ketones as a great supplement to use for people who have metabolic dysfunction. Where do you personally see them fitting into the health industry? To those who might be most opportune to use them. Like, who’s that target audience that you think, yes, these people should be looking at ketones first and foremost.

0:14:45 Bonnie Barnes: That’s a really great question. I think anybody who has a brain should be using ketones. Now, the amount will vary in how you use that energy. Just like carbohydrates, right. Having a balanced diet comes with how you’re using that energy. If you are a triathlete or somebody that likes has a heart rate in these targeted zones that is giving you feedback and saying, hey, you’re using energy this way, optimize it this way. It’s the same with ketones.

0:15:12 Bonnie Barnes: More sedentary people who, you know, have more conveniences will have more metabolic disorders. So I would see those people needing more ketones just to kind of help bring a better balance as a tool. I think of it like this. When you wake up in the morning, if your body’s been making these, would you start your day off with a half charged cell phone?

0:15:34 Roland Pankewich: I mean, some people do because I forget to plug the phone in.

0:15:36 Bonnie Barnes: But optimally you don’t. Often you don’t and you wouldn’t want to. And then if you did, let’s say you have an Apple phone, would you put your Apple phone on an Android charger if they did fit?

0:15:48 Roland Pankewich: I think you can get arrested for that in some countries.

0:15:52 Bonnie Barnes: So it wouldn’t be optimal though, right?

0:15:53 Roland Pankewich: It would not be up, it would.

0:15:55 Bonnie Barnes: Burn out over time. And so I’m not a villain to carbohydrates. It’s having the right kind of carbohydrates, right potatoes, you know, fruits and vegetables. These things are going to absorb into your body differently and help you keep those balances. But where the mindset is, and I think where people are coming from is how do we use ketones as a tool to give them come back to a healthy metabolic state.

0:16:20 Bonnie Barnes: And that comes to helping our gut. And then if we’re able to help our gut, then it comes back to our brain. I believe a lot of problems do start in the brain with the neurological pathways and in the meta and in the pathways that it supports. So for example, you have cell signaling molecules in your body and you have supplements that will support those molecules. BHB is known to go in and almost like a battery charger, charge up those cells, charge up that mitochondria.

0:16:51 Bonnie Barnes: We have some people that will take BHB and if it’s charging those neurons, then they will say things like, oh, my eyesight feels sharper because your eye is a nerve ending. So charging and creating these cell signals like a wifi code in your body, being able to communicate with things tells me your body is going to communicate all the way through by having this molecule. So if things are internally are communicating better, then that tells me my gut’s going to talk to my brain access. Even better if I’m not craving carbohydrates because my brain senses I have ketones in there because it’s the most optimal fuel to get past the blood brain barrier quicker, then wouldn’t it make sense that I would want to optimize it as a tool in between my meals so my brain can use those, my carbohydrates can be kind of allocated more to my muscles and my body and less to my brain, like a, like a switch, you know, if my brain senses it has what it needs, why would it steal resources from the body, thus naturally allowing people to eat less?

0:18:03 Bonnie Barnes: Which if you’re eating less, you are naturally going to have an easier time getting into a better metabolic state with less disease.

0:18:11 Roland Pankewich: That’s a really nice way of framing it because the next question I wanted to dive into was how do people use ketones most optimally? Is there a therapeutic way to do it? Is there a defined protocol or is it very much individual to the person?

0:18:27 Bonnie Barnes: That’s a really great question too. I’m going to use myself for an example because that’s what I know right now. So for me, best way to do it. All right, so for me as a woman, depending on the day of my cycle, I will do up to therapeutic levels, which are about between 15 and 20 grams is what we know them of. 15, excuse me, 20 to 30 grams would be considered therapeutic levels. At that level, you definitely would want to. If you’re not familiar with how your body works and how that feels, you’d want to start out at a 5 gram dose just once a day to kind of see how that feels in general.

0:19:03 Bonnie Barnes: If you can feel it and you notice an increase in like performance with your brain and focus, when that starts to kind of die off and there’s a difference, you know, when you’ve taken caffeine or stimulant, it’s like really intense. A ketone is just a sense of focus, but there’s no intensity there. You’re just very present.

0:19:25 Roland Pankewich: And so it’s real energy versus stimulation, right?

0:19:28 Bonnie Barnes: Yeah, real energy versus stimulation. So when you kind of feel that die off and you kind of time it, okay, when was the last time I ate? Am I needing brain energy or am I needing body energy and am I hydrated? So you ask yourself those things. But optimally, somebody starting out would do about 5 grams a day, and then from there you would move to 5 grams twice a day. The clinical studies right now that are out is 5 grams twice a day helps to sustain metabolic transformation, which allows you to continue to burn body fat and use your own resources.

0:20:03 Bonnie Barnes: Another study at that same amount shows that cognitive, in your cognitive speed was increased by 9.9%. So that’s a good range between 5 and 10 grams. Five or, you know, five. One or twice a day. If you wanted to go to the gym and use it, you would do 15 minutes before your gym workout and do it with your meal. Most people eat before they work out or they do a pre workout? Well, what if you were going to go to bed and you did your Pre workout at 5 o’ clock at night and it had 300 milligrams of caffeine? That person’s not sleeping good at night.

0:20:38 Bonnie Barnes: So another study that just recently came out of Japan talked about at 3 grams over a 14 week period of time, these people were seeing better deep sleep by taking beta hydroxybutyrate. So really you could take this any time of the day. It just depends on how do you want to feel at what time of the day. Do you want to have a little bit more focus in the morning and eat it with your meal? Do you want to use it in between and have that energy in intermittent fasting?

0:21:08 Bonnie Barnes: It really becomes a tool to where you have to understand enough about what you’re doing. But a general rule of thumb, 5 grams once a day, move up to twice a day is where you’re going to be able to optimize that. And if you are a, an athletic person, you could even take it up to 15 grams and time some of that between before your workout.

0:21:26 Roland Pankewich: And you mentioned for women, is there a difference between how women and men should or have to take ketones?

0:21:35 Bonnie Barnes: If, if how they take the ketones.

0:21:37 Roland Pankewich: Like you said, so around my, my menstrual cycle, for example, or not, you said there are some conditions to which you consider when it comes to supplementation. Are there differences in what men and women need or don’t need when it comes to ketone supplementation?

0:21:51 Bonnie Barnes: That’s a great question too. So as far as a man goes, I think it depends on their metabolic state. Right. How much, how much lean muscle tissue do you, does a person have in general? Because there are studies that show that ketones are, will help support, like we mentioned earlier, the muscle mass that’s on their body, but it’s not going to grow your muscle. It’ll help you keep from going into, you know, catabolic state because it’s using the energy.

0:22:15 Bonnie Barnes: But for a woman, and I don’t know the exact number there, this is a lot of the research that is starting to rise with less research in the past having been done on women and they’re starting to understand it more is how much energy does it take my body to transition from each state of my menstrual cycle to each phase that comes with it. All right, so about a week out before I actually know that that comes, I’m really tired, my brain is foggy. I’m just Feeling drained.

0:22:45 Bonnie Barnes: That instantly tells me that’s when most people will crave. Or, you know, most women want chocolate because of the polyphenols, which are active ingredients that support the brain. All right. It just tells me I need more brain energy. And so instead of taking it at 5 or 10 grams, I’m going to need even more. So I gauge how I feel when I feel tired. In most women, it’s between that five and three day period right before the start. And then think about your body’s shedding this uterus lining.

0:23:16 Bonnie Barnes: It takes a lot of work. And so the male doesn’t have that, that transition. I mean, I think you guys go through hormonal trans transitions, but it’s not going to be on a monthly basis where your body’s doing this physical transition, which takes a little bit more. And then if you’re having a baby, you’re pregnant for nine months. Just the energy it takes to grow this baby. And then something I’ll throw in, what, when this baby’s born, how long is it before they even have their first set of carbohydrates? They’re pretty much in a ketosis state on their mother’s milk or, you know, this high fatty diet until they are first introduced to fruits and vegetables.

0:23:57 Roland Pankewich: So that brain, you got to grow.

0:23:59 Bonnie Barnes: That brain, and that’s exactly what ketones do. They support that, that brain process. I mean, you’ve got so much fat tissue on you when you’re a baby. I mean, that should tell you right there what these, what this molecule is doing. So I think it depends on the stage of your period that you’re in and how tired you feel. I’ve gotten up to 30 grams in one day, which most women also experience migraines when they’re menstruating.

0:24:25 Bonnie Barnes: So migraines have been said to be a metabolic energy deficiency because your brain is searching for something as it’s trying to process this. And so there’s actually a brand out there that specializes just in migraines. And the main ingredient is ketones.

0:24:44 Roland Pankewich: Interesting. I had no idea. That’s a really cool therapeutic target. It gives me a thought too. And if you don’t have the absolute answer to this, maybe you can just theorize or hypothesize. Do you know of any successful conditions or, or areas of diseases that people find a lot of relief in when it comes to using ketones in conjunction with a therapeutic intervention?

0:25:09 Bonnie Barnes: Let me make sure I understand your question. Right. Are you asking anybody successful cases and where they’ve used ketones? In the, in their, in their outcome.

0:25:15 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, like so someone’s been diagnosed with something, be it degenerative, be it metabolic, dysregulatory. Do you know of some of the specific conditions where people when adding ketones into maybe another therapeutic supplement cocktail has helped them get greater success?

0:25:33 Bonnie Barnes: I know of a woman that had PCOS and she did therapeutic levels of ketones. She works in one of our clinical divisions and through that clinical division had seen a study where another woman had also went on a ketogenic diet and supported those that diet with the tool of exogenous ketones. One of the women actually ended up getting pregnant where before she wasn’t able to. So her successful outcome was she was able to get pregnant because within her body it got it working correctly.

0:26:00 Bonnie Barnes: This other woman, it was just able to help her clear up the pcos. Pcos, pcos. And maybe that could have been through the state of fasting that that tool gave her to where her gut was able to reset. She started taking pre and probiotics in during that fasted time to be able to support the healing of the gut. So when it comes to that, I think ketones give you fasting ability to allow you to take other supplementation to work while your brain is having that energy so you don’t have to eat food.

0:26:33 Roland Pankewich: Oh, you said the magic word because you know, we are a digestive wellness company and I’m so curious about this specific thing. Do you know the impact that ketones do have on either the gut, how it functions like the microbiome, the immune system? Is there any study that you’ve come across or any anecdotes that you’ve heard of that directly help people heal their guts in conjunction with other things of course, but with the use of even low to high dose keto therapy?

0:27:04 Bonnie Barnes: Well, I’m not going to speak to what I don’t know because I’m not an expert on like the gut. But where ketones definitely can help is like I said. Well, what we know is prebiotics are, you know, that they’re food and when you combine the BHB and the probiotics and the prebiotics, it’s like creating this ultimate gut trifecta. BHB can work synergistically by creating that fasting state. So and helping while your gut lining is healing, you have to do the probiotics to support the gut as food and then the prebiotics is food for, you know, those little.

0:27:38 Bonnie Barnes: I hope I don’t slaughter the word villi that that are in there keeping things flowing, but preparing and cleaning and keeping the environment calm. BHP has anti inflammatory properties in the mitochondria, so you don’t have that inflammation feeling and that these probiotics can go in and do their job effectively.

0:27:58 Roland Pankewich: You said you’re not a gut expert, but you did a pretty good job of explaining that. It’s. Yeah, it, it, it’s an interesting premise because sometimes people don’t realize that eating can be the most toxic thing you can do to your gut regardless of what you’re eating. Because it’s not necessarily about food, it’s about digestion. And if someone has digestive issues, you know, we talk about mitochondrial health and people think mitochondria think muscle, like they think it’s only an athletic thing or a performance thing.

0:28:27 Roland Pankewich: Every single cell in the body has a multitude of mitochondria in them of different densities. So if you’re trying to heal your gut, when you put food into your gut, you make the gut work. So it doesn’t necessarily have not only the time, but it’s expending energy to break food down, to pull energy in. So I could see how if you gave someone a gap ridge, like the use of a ketone to help them into a longer, more extended fast, where they can give their digestive system true time away from food, but without the negative impacts of low energy, hypoglycemia moments, brain fog, having to sleep all day when they might need to be at work, it could be a very good indirect way of helping someone on a gut healing journey.

0:29:07 Roland Pankewich: So I wanted to ask that because I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the digestive system at some point in one of our podcasts. So, Bonnie, I want to thank you so much for all that information. I mean, I think we just scratched the surf. We might have to do a little bit more on diving into ketones because there are some, you know, deeper aspects of the metabolic side of things and the biochemistry of them that I find really interesting. But as you were talking, I got this visual picture of a teeter totter with a ketone on one side and a glucose on the other. And the teeter totter is only fun when both sides get to go up and down. You don’t want it to have any one side compromise for too long. And in the western world, I don’t think excessive ketones are most people’s problems. I think the excessive consumption of simple sugars and carbs and things that cause dysregulation to the mitochondria and the entire metabolic system of the body is really what people have to understand.

0:30:00 Roland Pankewich: So if these can be amazing tools that allow people to start the process of regeneration within their own health and their bodies. I’m so glad that you shared this with us. Where can people find you if they want to know more about your ketones?

0:30:15 Bonnie Barnes: Great question. So I have a website called let’s Go BHB Co. You can find the product on there. It’s a liposomal gel. BHB product. Helps come down to the gut and set the stage for those probiotics.

0:30:28 Roland Pankewich: There we go.

0:30:28 Bonnie Barnes: And then you can find me on all the social platforms. Instagram, fit CEO on the go. And I call it fit CEO because the brain is the CEO of my body. And LinkedIn, you can find me on all the. On YouTube. I’ve got a YouTube channel and of course, the podcast.

0:30:47 Roland Pankewich: Cool. Yeah. From what I understand, I think Master Supplements might be starting to have some of these things available too. So I’m sure that there’ll be a multitude of different ways that people can find these should their curiosity have been piqued.

0:31:01 Bonnie Barnes: Yes, you can. You can find them on Master Supplements. Yes.

0:31:04 Roland Pankewich: Very cool. Well, thank you so much again. Hope you have a great long weekend and we appreciate all your expertise and appreciate your time.

0:31:12 Bonnie Barnes: Thank you so much for having me.

0:31:14 Roland Pankewich: See you next time on the podcast, everyone. Thank you.