Biohacking: Max Out Ketone Production with Cronometer

The ketogenic diet has been rapidly growing in popularity for a wide variety of users. Keto has attracted programmers looking to maintain a focused productivity window and endurance athletes wanting to consume less calories to keep their stomachs stable. The challenge for each person adjusting to ketosis is to figure out “how much” of “which foods” to eat for maximum ketone production. How many carbs can I eat and stay in ketosis? What is the right ratio of fats to protein to carbs to meet my fitness goals?

Cronometer is the first nutrition tracker that I have come across that has the ability to passively collect biometric data from many sources and overlay it with nutritional data. It is actively being developed by an anti-aging biohacker Aaron Davidson.  This means simple things like “net carbs” (where the fiber is subtracted out) and ketogenic macro profiles are built right in. The app / website are well designed for fast input of regular foods and provides an easy to understand dashboard summary.

The real power of cronometer comes in with overlaying biometrics {blood glucose, blood ketones, weight, sleep, exercise, etc.} on top of nutritional data.  Many of these can be recorded through IoT devices where almost no user input is required. Apple Health is well integrated, but due to use many fitness trackers I prefer the cronometer Nokia and Garmin device linking.

My current setup for feeding biometric data into cronometer is:

After entering data into Cronometer for two weeks I have observed several things:

  • Peak ketone production occurred after minimal carb intake ( <33g net carbs )
  • Optimal macros for high ketone production (so far…) [77% fat, 10% carb, 13% protein]
  • Daily Selenium has been low.  [ A single brazil nut resolved this ]
  • Low fiber numbers. [ 4 Tbl of chia daily resolved this ]
  • Low B-Vitamins. [ Daily B-Complex supplement ]
  • High sodium. [ reduced salt in take from daily electrolyte mix ]
  • Caffeine intake. [ 200 – 300mg – comfortably amped ]
  • Weight Loss. [ Down 4 lbs from my normal weight ]

Nobody gets excited about logging everything they eat, but I think we can all agree that historical nutritional data is powerful to have. Cronometer makes it easy to input the nutrition and biometrics. It even provides a sweet reporting tool and trend graphs for further data correlation. Below you can see average nutritional data based on two weeks of data collection.


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