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#105 Exogenous ketones, my coffee protocol, and supplements for blood sugar regulation (Premium Member Q&A July 2025)
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Hey everyone. Today's episode is something special and I'm truly excited to share it with you. Rather than a typical Found My Fitness episode, you're about to listen to an exclusive sneak peek of my most recent live Ask Me Anything session. Normally these AMAs are reserved only for Found My Fitness Premium members, but I think this one is so packed with valuable insights that I wanted to share it with everyone. So every month, Premium members join me live to ask questions and get direct personalized answers about nutrition, supplements, longevity, sleep, fitness, you name it. No topic is off limits and we dive deep. Members tell me they love these sessions and personally, they're one of my favorite things to do each month. They're genuine, interactive and filled with actionable insights grounded in rigorous science. What you're hearing today is just the first 30 minutes of a full 90 minute AMA. So in this preview alone we cover fascinating topics like why I started taking exogenous ketones, my current coffee routine, including what beans and brewing methods. I prefer optimal doses of supplements like ubiquinol, berberine, alpha lipoic acid, vitamin K2, and even whether certain popular greens powders contain concerning levels of heavy metals. But there's so much more waiting for you in the full Ask me anything. If you enjoy what you hear today and if the science and advice resonate with you, I'd like to invite you to join our Found My Fitness Premium community. Becoming a Premium member isn't just about accessing hundreds of hours of exclusive, deeply researched health content, though that's definitely a great perk. It's about being a part of something bigger. Your membership directly supports my mission to keep Found My Fitness entirely ad free, free from commercial bias, and focused on delivering trustworthy, science driven insights to as many people as possible. Every new member empowers me and my team to produce better episodes, deeper research, and even more high quality content for everyone, free and premium alike. Give it a try. If you love it, stay with us. If not, no worries. You can always cancel. But I genuinely believe you're going to find incredible value and you're going to love it and you're going to have a sense of pride being a part of our community. So thank you so much for considering supporting this important work. Now let's dive into today's special AMA preview. Hi everyone. Welcome to Q&A. Number 72. Nice to see people from all around. I see people saying hi from their location. Excited to be here. Today we're going to do things a little differently. I'm going to start with the rapid fire questions that I usually end with. And then after the rapid fire questions, I'll kind of get into some deep dive questions today. But I did mention in the chat that I was going to get my exogenous ketones and I see some questions already in the chat about exogenous ketones and the different types of ketones, when to take them and why. And some of you may be wondering why I'm taking it right now. I didn't get to do any of my high intensity interval training this morning. And that usually gives me a pump of lactate and that lactate gets into the brain and it really sort of gives me a little extra pump so that I can, you know, feel cognitively ready to, to do this Q and A. And so I took my exogenous ketones because beta hydroxybutyrate, which is the, the major circulating ketone and it's the one that's found in all these exogenous, exogenous ketone products is, acts very similar to lactate in a sense where it activates a lot of the same genetic pathways, including brain derived neurotrophic factor. It's also anxiolytic. So what I find when I take some exogenous ketones is that I feel it's not the same as like drinking a cup of coffee, but I feel focused, but a very calm focused. So it seems to calm me a little bit and allow me to focus better. And I really like that. So when it comes to the type of ketones right now I don't have any affiliation with any brands but I've been experimenting with Delta G and this is what's known as the Oxford ketone. It was developed by Dr. Richard Veach and Kieran Clark, who is at Oxford. It's the real deal. It's the ketone that was sort of developed with funding from darpa and it was really the aim was to kind of help military personnel be able to be cognitively on their game during very stressful periods where they're sleep deprived, perhaps not eating under a lot of just stressful conditions. And so that is the ketone I am doing. And the reason I'm experimenting with that one is because it's the only. Well, actually there's. The Oxford ketone is the only ketone out there that actually is the beta hydroxybutyrate ester, that one and also ketone Aid, which was, which was started by Richard Veech, that one also uses the same ketone ester. So what that is is the beta hydroxybutyrate and it's esterified 2,1 3 butanediol. What that is is it's, it's an ester that your liver does get, your liver converts into beta hydroxybutyrate eventually. So what happens is when you take a product like Delta, Delta G and I'm using their Delta H product because it's the, I don't really need the really, really high ketones. So this is about 11 grams of, of ketones in, in, in serving size of a bottle and they have higher, higher dose ones that's like 25 grams. And I don't, I don't really need that. So you feel the effects immediately because it does have beta hydroxybutyrate in there without having to be converted into beta hydroxybutyrate by your liver. So you feel the effects immediately within like minutes. And then because it's esterified to the 1, 3 butanediol over the course of an hour to 90 minutes, you're also converting, you know, that 1, 3 butanediol into more beta hydroxybutyrate. And so it's sort of, not only do you have an immediate effect, but you have this sort of long tail effect as well. Now someone asked about Ketone IQ, that product only uses the 1, 3 butane diol. So there's no actual beta hydroxybutyrate in that product. It's a much lower dose. I believe it was five grams. And it's also slow acting. So if you want, if you want that, if you're using that for something like in my case where I'm giving, you know, doing a Q and A, or let's say I was, you know, I'm doing a podcast or a talk, then I would take it at least an hour beforehand because it takes a while to convert the 1, 3 butane dial into the beta hydroxybutyrate. You can kind of think of it as like a precursor ketone precursor, whereas the one I'm taking right now I can just take, boom, right away. I'll feel it immediately and then I continue to feel it over the next, you know, couple of hours. It's also given me a little bit more motivation to revisit my experimentation with ketogenic diet. Certainly cycling. I like the way I feel, I like, I like the calming effect. And that largely has to do with, I had a podcast with Dr. Mark Matson, you know, a few years back and, and he was explaining, you know, when you're in ketosis and your body is making beta hydroxybutyrate ketones, it, the beta hydroxybutyrate appears to, it gets into the brain and it short, it sort of shifts the balance between gaba, a neurotransmitter inhibitory neurot neurotransmitter, and glutamate, which is more of an excitatory neurotransmitter. And it tips the balance more towards gaba. And that sort of has this anxiolytic effect where you feel calmer and you're less anxious. So for me, that is hugely beneficial because I do sometimes have an amount of, you know, background anxiety, particularly if I have to perform. And so I like that sort of calm focus that I feel when I have when I'm either in ketosis because I have experimented with ketogenic diets. And I do remember that being one of the most profound effects that I noticed when I was doing a ketogenic diet. And also I've been in ketosis from fasting, same thing. And then I've tried exogenous ketones. And so it all, they all sort of replicate that feeling of sort of calm focus, which I do really like. I see people in the chat asking, Faisal's asking about advice on sleep and shift work. We are gonna, we are gonna do a little bit of a deep dive on sleep today. So we'll, we'll talk more about that later. I want to go ahead and get some of the rapid fire questions. I love how a lot of people asked questions. Follow up questions on my recent coffee episode that I, that I released, I don't know, a few weeks ago. So Ruby asks, follow up on a great coffee episode. Do coffee filters have any sneaky chemicals or glue in them? Yes, some of them. Can I use the Chemex unbleached coffee filters? Those are the ones that I use. I really like them if you want to try them out. Great. A related question from Michelle was. Loved your deep dive on coffee. What brand and type of coffee maker, filter and coffee do you use? And are you saying that a paper filter does remove all the bad stuff that you mentioned? Okay, so the coffee that I have been on or been using right now, I've tried a lot of different brands. And honestly, right now I'm on a bit of a decaf coffee kick because my creatine is amazing. And now that I take 10 grams a day instead of 5 grams a day, I find that I'm not having that afternoon crash. I don't necessarily want to call it a crash because I wasn't, I wasn't really crashing, but I would often get a little sleepy, you know, two, three o' clock in the afternoon. I no longer have that with my higher dose of creatine. And so I've also gone down to decaf and the brands that I use for both decaf and also regular caffeinated coffee because I'll cycle back on. And the great thing about cycling off of coffee and then going back on is that when you go back on the coffee is so effective and so you kind of. I like to use it for those moments when I really need it. I use the purity coffee brand. I really like their organic coffee. For the decaf I use their calm decaf, which is great. They have regular coffee, which is also great. And so right now that's kind of like my, my brand that I've been using. I already mentioned the filters. I use the Chemex unbleached coffee filters. And then for a coffee maker I like doing the pour over and so I do Chemex pour over glass coffee maker. So it's like a big glass coffee maker. And then you put the filters inside and the coffee and then you pour the hot water in and there, there it goes, it drips through. When it comes to the filter, it does filter out a lot of the oily substances, the diterpenes, which I know I kind of painted a bad picture of in the episode because they raise LDL cholesterol and that could be a concern particularly for people that already are higher risk for, you know, dyslipidemia. Perhaps they have higher LDL cholesterol, they have higher. Maybe they have LP small a. There's a ton of reasons why someone may want to really just be very, you know, anal about making sure that they eliminate all the things that can raise their LDL and, and try to keep that down. But the di di terpenes also there is at least some in vitro evidence. So this means these are just cells in a petri dish. It's not the strongest type of evidence, but it is still something to talk about that there can be some anti cancer effects with the di terpenes. So they're not all. It's not like they're just like villain and, and there's nothing good about them. Um, there is potentially something beneficial, although we don't have a lot of evidence to support that. It does seem like there's a possibility that there's some benefits there as well. In other words, what I'm saying is if you like your French press coffee, by all means keep making your French press Coffee, particularly if your LDL and lipids are looking great. And we're going to talk about lipids as well today. A related question from Freda Vera. They ask, what's the best overall company to purchase organic beans for cognitive protection? Again, um, I'm turning to Pur purity coffee because one of the reasons I really like their brand is they have a lot of testing and data posted on their site. They sort of validate the organic beans. They do independent analyses on, you know, their, the polyphenol content. So this would be the chlorogenic acid. And it seems to be pretty much like, you know, really high, high amount of the chlorogenic acid. In fact, their, their light to medium roast preserves around 65% more of these polyphenols than other organic brands do. They also have third party testing showing that they're free of pesticides and heavy metals and other contaminants. So I like that brand. And again, the polyphenols are really what is beneficial for brain health. Again, caffeine itself also appears to be beneficial. So I'm on my decaf kick right now, but I will shift back to my caffeinated coffee eventually. Okay. And then another related question on coffee was from KRD who says, hi Rhonda, on the subject of coffee, what does the research say about coffee causing loss or malabsorption of minerals such as iron or zinc or copper? Also, does coffee cause dehydration? In what way can we drink coffee to prevent nutrient loss? So with respect to nutrient loss, coffee really most people are fine. I would say it's very minor and the biggest minor effect would be iron. So most, even most people that have normal amounts of iron don't have to worry about this. But it can, you know, cause a little bit of an absorption issue with iron. And so if you are eating a meal, you probably want to make sure it's like the coffee spaced out by like an hour so that you're not inhibiting the absorption of iron from your meal. When it comes to dehydration, it's totally like, it's just not, it's kind of unfounded basically, especially for people drinking normal amounts of coffee and you start to get into like the really high dose, maybe you can cause some issues. But there was a study showing that, you know, four 200 mil cups of coffee per day, you know, so this is about 4 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram body weight per day over the course of 72 hours. There was no difference in terms of water total Body water and urine osmolarity, just all that stuff. So I, there's really just not a lot of evidence that it's causing dehydration in most normal circumstances. Another rapid fire question from Farid Gargor. They ask if there's any issues of drinking coffee on an empty stomach. Not that I'm aware of. I mean obviously like maybe some people do, but I don't. There's not like an overall thing. It's not like a thing. And then another question about dairy. So the question is regarding the dampening of dampening effect of dairy. If my goal is general long term health, is there still a benefit to avoiding dairy in order to maximize immediate absorption of polyphenols, would it in fact be better to add dairy and slow the absorption rate? So what this question is hinting at is the fact that coffee, when you add dairy to your coffee, you are not. The bioavailability of the polyphenols is dramatically slowed. In fact there was a crossover study that gave people 609 milligrams of chlorogenic acids. Those are the major polyphenols found in coffee plus whole milk. And they found, you know, that basically the metabolites that are the polyphenol metabolites, they fell from 68 to 40 and it was about 40% relative drop in the first day recovery. So essentially you're not going to get all those polyphenols popping like immediately but eventually they catch up. So over long term health it's fine. But if you're wanting that immediate polyphenol boost to your brain, then you probably should not add dairy. You should do something like MCT powder or you know, some kind of plant milk like almond milk for example and that, and if you like to have your coffee with cream, don't use dairy. And then, then the. There was another related question about protein doing something similar. And yes it does do something similar and you can essentially just time your protein 30 minutes before or after your coffee. If you're concerned about the delay in bio release and bioavailability of the polyphenols. And there was another. This is the last question on coffee. This question was submitted by Sam and Sam says for those of us who have the gene for slow metabolism of caffeine, should we do anything differently? Your gene data notes notes that slow metabolizers should limit or, or avoid caffeine altogether. Is this still valid? Um, I would say that for people that are slow metabolizers, obviously you need to kind of self experiment but Typically you want to limit your caffeine to like morning use. And like you, you know, taking it in the afternoon may be the issue because if you're are, if you're a slow metabolizer, it may take, you know, 10, 10 to 12 hours before you're metabolizing all that caffeine. And so there may be this residual effect on your sleep. However, you should be able to mostly notice that. So if your coffee consumption protocol is not causing any issues with your sleep, then whatever you're doing should probably be fine. Okay, there's a few more rapid fire questions we're gonna get to before, but I wanna look at the, the chat to see some coffee related questions here. Myrna is asking about my thoughts on decreased blood flow from vasoconstriction from coffee to the brain. In fact, the polyphenols do the opposite. They actually increase blood flow to the brain. So whatever minor vasoconstrictions probably just canceled out. Bode's asking about Nespresso Virt. Virtuo. Virtuo. Sorry, I don't know how to say that. But the Nespresso capsules, and they're asking where this falls on the health spectrum. Unfortunately, those pods, those capsules, they all have lined plastic in them. And so my biggest concern with those isn't the coffee type. It's the hot liquid going through plastic, which as we have talked about several times, rapidly accelerates the breakdown of microplastics into your beverage as well as their associated chemicals like BPA into your beverage. Unfortunately, I don't think those are a good choice for that reason because you're actually going to be consuming a lot of microplastics and plastic associated chemicals. Alyssa's asking about the meter I use for my ketone to measure my ketones. I actually don't use the meter that's sold with any companies. I use a precision extra which allows me to measure my blood glucose with a finger prick or ketones or, um, I don't know if they do lactate. I use a different meter for lactate. But I, I really like the precision extra. I've been using it for like almost 10 years. It's a really great product. Mike is asking when I cycle off caffeine if I notice any lowering in my resting heart rate. Actually do not. Monica's asking about coffee pot makers that are not made of plastic. Um, that's why I mentioned the one I use, which is the glass Chemex and it's a pour over. And so it's basically you Just put the filter on the top of it and then the coffee drips through. And then of course, there's some percolators that you can buy that are not made of plastic. And there's the French press, of course, as well. If you're not concerned about drinking unfiltered coffee, Allie's asking about coffee pods that are compostable and made of paper. As long as you can confirm there's no plastic lining inside the paper, then sounds great. Okay, let's finish up some of these rapid fire questions that were submitted. Chris hall asks, you recently mentioned the potential benefits of ubiquinol, berberine and alpha lipoic acid and synergy. Can you speak about appropriate dose ranges? So for people that are really wanting to not only affect their glucose regulation, but also their lipid panel, their, I would say, you know, their lipids, they're wanting to optimize their lipids in general, then I would say that the literature really suggests berberine in a higher dose is more beneficial and it has to be split up. So the studies really do highlight that berberine should be taken at about 600 milligrams three times a day. And it's taken with meals. If, if you're wanting it to really affect the glucose response, it needs to be taken with a meal. And so that's a total of about 1.8 grams a day of berberine. Alpha, alpha lipoic acid is anywhere between 600 to 1200 milligrams a day. And, and the ubiquinol is a reduced form of CoQ10, CoQ enzyme 10. And essentially their ubiquinol is a more bioavailable form. So, and I talk about this in, in a minute in the context of fertility, which is a little bit of a higher dose, but in this regard, you know, 100 milligrams could be fine. Okay, here's the related question about ubiquit, ubiquinol and the optimal dosage for a woman in their mid-30s that's preparing for egg freezing or improving mitochondrial health. So those studies actually show 600 milligrams a day of CoQ10 in the form of ubiquinone, which is the oxidized form of CoQ10, and it's less bioavailable. So be the modifying the dose here. If you're looking at the more bioavailable form, the, the Ubiquinol, 400 milligrams a day of that is, is also something that would be more equivalent to the 600 milligrams a day of the CoQ10. Some other things to add for some for women that are looking to improve their egg quality, that they'd obviously want to add a prenatal vitamin that has all those important B vitamins in it and the methylated ones as well. You want to add vitamin D5000 I use a day. You want to add omega 3, about 2 grams a day. Also some evidence that melatonin, 3 mgs a day, has antioxidant effects as well on eggs. And then myoinositol, about 4 grams a day as well. And this leads into a related question by Ivana about myoinositol and what the dose is and the reason I'm taking it. So I was taking it again, four grams a day, and mostly it was for sleep, but also for ovarian reserve. And then Karen says in your June supplement update, you didn't mention taking benfotiamine, collagen, lutein, or zeaxanthin. Are you still taking these? If so, when do you incorporate them? I do take collagen every morning in my coffee. Lutein and zeaxanthin are in my multivitamin, so I don't feel like I need to take those really separately. And then benfotiamine, I haven't been taking lately. There's another question from Matthew Tanner asking about homocysteine. I don't see. I don't seem to talk about taking extra methylated B vitamins. So, yeah, my, my hom is great. I don't really take care. I don't really take extra methylated B vitamins because I get it in my multivitamin. But. And then I also am taking creatine. And creatine, Creatine has been shown in some, some studies to improve homocysteine because creatine is a major, major, major sink for, let's just call it methylation groups. In other words, it takes a lot of these methylation groups to make creatine. And so that sort of takes away from the other roles that it could play, like lowering homocysteine because you need methyl groups to convert homocysteine back into methionine. Right. And so if you're freeing up methyl groups because you're giving your body exogenous creatine, then what happens is those methyl groups can then be used to methylate homocysteine and, and then thus converting it into methionine. Not a lot of people talk about this, but there is some evidence on it. And again, I do take 10 grams of creatine a day. Stas asked what vitamin K2 supplement I'm taking. I'm actually taking the. I'm now taking the Pure Encapsulations. They didn't always have this pure encapsulations vitamin D plus K2. That's my new supplement. So it's all in one, which is great. And you guys know I don't have any affiliation with Pure Encapsulations. Okay, we're almost done with these rapid fire questions. Kathy asks. My question is that Rhonda told us a lot of great things about moringa powder by Kuli Cooly a while back, but she's now saying there's a lot of lead in powder green supplements. Is there lead in moringa powder? Is Rhonda still taking moringa powder? So I do not currently take moringa powder. I have switched to supplementing with Avocol. I think I. Guys, I told you guys this. I take the extra strength Abmacol. It's really fantastic. It's helped my mom with her tremors. It's kind of amazing. I've moved away from any sort of green powder supplements because I do, I do think that they're just a high risk for heavy metals. You can test this. There's a variety of blood tests that you can do. Add back in some green powders and you might see that your heavy metal burden goes up. So. So that's kind of what I'm doing right now. And then this is the last rapid fire question from Ted Ham. And Ted asks, what are the best options for choline supplementation? If one has SNPs for poor phosphatidylcholine absorption or levels, given the risk increase in TMAO levels. Now keep in mind, color choline deficiency also leads to non alcoholic fatty, fatty liver disease. And so you want to be careful with that as well. So the free choline salts are the forms that the gut, the microbes in the gut can actually ferment into tmao. Well, it actually ferments it into trimethylamine and then that gets formed, that gets converted into tmao, which is pro atherogenic. And that's what people are wanting to avoid. So essentially the goal would be to not have choline in this salt form. You'd want choline in its already sort of preformed membrane ready part, you know, so in this case you'd actually want to supplement with the phosphatidylcholine because you wouldn't. The col. The microbiome, the bacteria in the colon wouldn't really be able to use that phosphatidylcholine, that choline that's already in this membrane as a substrate to, to make the precursor for tmao. So in fact there was a study that looked at phosphatidylcholine capsules for four days, sorry, for four weeks. And essentially the TMAO was unchanged. So it wasn't increasing the tmao. Whereas the same dose of choline bitartrate, so that would be the choline salt, did increase TMAO quite sharply, actually. So I think the solution here really is you want to do phosphatidylcholine. Another potential form would be the citicoline. So this is CDP choline and, and this is basically, it's a nucleotide, a, it's a nucleotide bound choline. And I don't think it's, it's very, it's much more, less prone to converting the choline into the TMA or the tmao. So that's another form of choline. I've actually been experimenting with that recently because it's a little bit of a new nootropic, because choline is a precursor for acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter that is involved in cognition, memory. So acetylcholine would be another form. But I would say for the purposes of wanting to get, you know, not the nootropic effect, but wanting to get like adequate amounts of choline, phosphatidylcholine would be the way to go. Matthew's asking if I have any concerns with the choline bitartate and the multi. No, because it's such a small amount. We're talking about, we're talking about levels that are much, much, much higher. You know, 250 to 500 milligrams, you know, so, so it's a very, very different amount that we're talking about here. When it's a super small amount, it's just sort of, it's non significant. Faisal is asking if I have any opinion on thorn products. I use a lot of their supplements. I use their creatine, I use their glutamine, I use a lot of their, a lot of their supplements as well. I think they're a good brand. Daisy's asking, if we take CoQ10 and not looking to get pregnant, do we need 600 milligrams a day? No, you do not. The 100 to 200 is fine for mitochondrial health. The 600 milligrams is a, it's it's an excessive amount and it's solely for the purpose of increasing the egg quality, the ovarian reserve. So really it's a very specific outcome that people are looking to achieve when they're supplementing with a high dose of CoQ10 or and or ubiquinol. Let me get to the deep dives. Okay, so the first question this was top voted question by Alina and the question is what are the most common causes of fragmented sleep and nighttime awakenings that last over an hour and which strategies or nutrients do you recommend to improve sleep continuity and continuity and depth? 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