The keto diet pills are causing quite a stir online, but not for the reasons you may imagine. You may have heard that they appeared on Shark Tank. You may have seen web advertisements promoting celebs like Chrissy Tiegen and Demi Lovato as fans. Nevertheless, those advertisements are the definition of “fake news.” In reality, they are entirely false material portrayed as fact.

Sadly, with the internet’s lightning-fast and far-reaching capabilities, it’s practically hard to eradicate these false claims now that they’re out there, so people need clarification about keto tablets.

What exactly are keto weight loss pills or ketone supplements (which, incidentally, include ketones)? Do they help you lose weight, stay alert, and boost your energy levels, as they claim? While not wholly false, most of it is, particularly in the pills’ current doses. Please continue reading to learn the truth about the too-good-to-be-true keto supplements, how they compare to the ketogenic diet, and why keto pills can slow down weight loss.

What Are Exogenous Ketones?

The term “keto tablets” refers to exogenous ketones. Exogenous ketones or ketones that originate outside the body are available in pill, powder, and liquid forms (think MCT oil).

Exogenous ketones are beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) molecules, the primary energy ketone your body generates on a keto diet. When you eat BHB, your blood ketone levels increase. (1)

Exogenous ketone supplements are classified into two types: salts and esters. Both increase ketone levels in the blood. (1) The primary distinction is that ketone salts are connected to a mineral (such as sodium) molecule, whereas ketone esters are attached to an alcohol molecule. The majority of keto supplements are ketone salts.

What Do Exogenous Ketones Do?

What is the appeal of using exogenous ketones? They’ve been investigated in some circumstances and found to:

• Reduce blood glucose levels (1)
• Decrease the development of lactate during endurance cycling (a marker of muscular endurance) (2)
• Enhance rat cognition (3)
• Decrease the frequency of epileptic episodes (4)

This sounds fantastic, but how do ketone supplements (known as keto pills) stack up against the keto diet? Are they both beneficial? What’s the distinction? Let’s go exploring.

Nutritional Ketosis Vs. Artificial Ketosis

A low-carb keto diet significantly restricts carbohydrate consumption in favor of a high-fat diet in which your body utilizes fat for fuel. This carbohydrate limitation, in turn, keeps insulin levels low. It also drives your body to hunt for energy elsewhere, stimulating your liver to burn fat to make ketones. (5) This is referred to as nutritional ketosis. You have lower blood sugar and more free fatty acids to consume for energy while in nutritional ketosis.

Exogenous ketones have been shown to reduce blood sugar, but do they also increase free fatty acids? Here is when the distinction between nutritional and artificial ketosis (using exogenous ketones becomes obvious.

In nutritional ketosis, your body breaks down body fat into fatty acids via lipolysis, and those fatty acids end up in your blood, ready to be used as energy.

Nevertheless, using ketone supplements reduces free fatty acids. As a result, less fat is accessible for burning. Put another way; your body uses less of its fat.

There’s a reason for this: quickly increasing your ketone levels using ketone supplements signals your body: Hey, we’re moving too far into ketosis; stop burning fat and making ketones! This safety mechanism is a natural defense to protect you from abnormally high amounts of ketones, which can result in ketoacidosis, a deadly (and rare and difficult to attain if you are not a person with type 1 diabetes) illness. To be precise, regular dosages of exogenous ketones are unlikely to induce ketoacidosis but will impair body fat breakdown.

The basic message is that keto tablets must be better adapted to accelerate fat loss, unlike the keto diet. Why is this still a mystery? Please allow us to explain.

Problems With Keto Pills (and Other Ketone Supplements)

There are various disadvantages to depending on pills and other ketone supplements to achieve ketosis rather than dietary ketosis:

Impaired fat-adaptation

When you go keto, it takes time for your body to become “fat acclimated.” It is accustomed to running on glucose (sugar) but must now switch to burning fatty acids for fuel.

A keto diet raises fatty acids because body fat is broken down, fatty acids are released, and ketones are created. (5)

This is an excellent strategy to eliminate fat storage, and it is one of the reasons why the keto diet is highly beneficial for weight loss (6) and other health advantages. Nevertheless, because exogenous ketones reduce lipolysis, they are unlikely to accelerate fat adaptation(1) and, as a result, reduce the amount of fat burnt to reach and sustain ketosis.

Low-dosage results in less effective ketosis levels

Exogenous ketones (usually taken in powder form) have clinically tested dosages ranging from 10 to 25 grams BHB. (1) | (7)

These doses have been demonstrated to increase ketone levels in people consistently. On the other hand, a standard keto tablet only includes 400 mg of exogenous ketones. To get to the low end of the therapeutic range, you’d have to pop…wait for it… There are 25 keto tablets. Taking that many medicines might get tiresome. And it’s pricey. This brings us to the following issue:

Cost

A bottle of keto tablets costs between $15 and $50 on Amazon.com. Assume you discover a bottle at the bottom of the pricing range: 60 tablets (400 mg BHB) for $20. You should budget around $3,000 per year to take daily therapeutic dosages. The numbers don’t lie. $8.33 for 25 tablets each day. $8.33 x 365 = $3,040.45. Whew. That is an exorbitant price.

Lack of regulation

The supplement industry is not strictly controlled. You must trust that a brand adheres to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) while manufacturing its tablets. Brands frequently do not. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently cited Let’s Talk Health, Inc. (a company that offers curcumin and vitamin C supplements) for various GMP violations. (8)

Furthermore, because the FDA does not regulate supplements, you must trust that your selected supplement has the claimed levels of its active component. ConsumerLab.com, a third-party monitor, has tested a variety of supplements to ensure they live up to their claims; for a nominal price, they disclose their findings.

Sadly, ConsumerLab.com has not yet tested keto pills, so no one knows precisely what they’re receiving with these supplements.

Takeaway

You’ve heard about keto tablets. You’ve probably heard the claims: effortless weight loss, increased fat burning, and maximum brainpower.

These statements, however, do not hold up under inspection. Yeah, exogenous ketone dietary supplements have been demonstrated to increase ketone bodies in the human body. Still, you’d have to take hundreds of tablets at a time to hit clinical dosages and acquire a substantial number that would improve your state of ketosis.

On product labels, companies selling keto tablets do not contain a caution concerning this fact. Instead, they discuss weight loss, weight control, and fat-burning qualities. But, exogenous ketones are not, by any means, a weight-loss supplement. They reduce the quantity of free fatty acids in your blood.

This supplementation is not a healthy recipe for weight loss or overall health. It is entirely up to you whether or not to use keto tablets. If you’ve read this far, you should know enough to make an informed decision. Nonetheless, it’s always a good idea to see a dietitian or your primary care physician before starting a new diet or taking supplements.

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