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I was invited to a lecture which was about something related to coconut oil.
It was about ketones, which I didn't really know very much about.
Ketones are what the body produces when it's burning up fat.
Generally, they are thought to be rather a bad thing.
They are associated with a risk of
problems with kidneys, and so on.
If you talk with regular dieticians, they
will warn you about producing ketones and ketosis.
The lecture that was particularly interesting was given by an Oxford Professor of metabolism,
called Professor Kieran Clarke.
She was talking about the fact that we are
actually functioning rather like a hybrid car.
We have two sources of energy: we can either use glucose or we can use fat,
which is coming in the form of ketones. Ketones are packets of energy which, per unit,
are actually slightly more energy dense than glucose.
The reason that this all fits in with coconuts and with Alzheimer's is because ketones can
provide an energy source for the brain if the glucose energy source the brain normally
runs on is, for some reason, not working as well as it should be.
We can go on a bit later on about how and why that is.
I went to this very fascinating talk by Professor Kieran Clarke in which she explained how she
had managed to synthesise ketones in a laboratory.
This is a very interesting development.
If we were living in an environment where useful scientific breakthroughs of medical importance
were picked up and developed regardless of whether or not they have huge commercial potential,
such as the commercial potential if you have a drug for Alzheimer's, these synthesised
ketones that Professor Clarke had developed would now be in mega-scale production.
There would be trials being run on it, and so on.
So what had happened with Professor Clarke was that she had been approached by the American military some years ago.
They wanted an additional energy source for their troops.
The problem was actually that, rather than carrying actual food,