What the book covers

The book discusses five layers of the metabolic switch, each with runnable programs:

1. Fuel stoichiometry and switching kinetics. How much ATP glucose, fatty acids and ketones yield and how much oxygen they use; the time course of liver glycogen depletion and rising blood ketones.
2. Thermodynamics. Veech’s hypothesis that ketones improve mitochondrial energy transduction, computed with the Nernst equation, with the limits of the evidence in humans.
3. Signalling. Research on β-hydroxybutyrate as a histone deacetylase inhibitor, receptor ligand and inflammasome inhibitor, and how those findings were later revised.
4. The switch. The mutual inhibition of AMPK and mTORC1, and autophagy: why times from animal experiments cannot be converted directly into human hours.
5. Human evidence and physiological costs. The real effect sizes of randomised trials and metabolic-ward studies; the sodium, potassium and water changes of the first low-carbohydrate days.

Chapter 7 reads this modern research beside writings on diet and restraint in the Mawangdui silk manuscript Quegu shiqi, Ge Hong’s Baopuzi, the Huangdi Neijing and the Analects, distinguishing a tradition of moderate dietary restraint from life-threatening extreme fasting. Chapter 8 offers a four-step checklist for a personal metabolic log and a pre-registered randomised crossover trial.

This book complements 5D Library volume 5 (5DL-B-005), on fasting, ketones and attention: that book discusses fuel switching and attention, this one more of signalling, autophagy and physiological costs. Both follow the same medical rules.

Claims corrected on checking

Several claims behind this book needed correction once they were checked: ketone bodies yield less ATP per molecule of oxygen than glucose, so “ketones are more efficient” holds only in a specific sense; the finding that β-hydroxybutyrate inhibits histone deacetylases came mainly from enzyme assays, and later work found its action in cells far weaker than that of butyrate; results on autophagy after a 24-hour fast in mice cannot be converted into any number of human hours, and there is as yet no simple non-invasive marker that times autophagy in the human body; and when calories and protein are strictly matched, a ketogenic diet did not produce the extra fat loss the insulin model predicts. Each chapter says so where it arises, and the Editor’s Notes published with the book files collect these points.

How to read the boxes

As in other 5D Library books, different kinds of statement are marked separately.

About this edition

This is version 1.0.0, the first complete edition: a preface and eight chapters, in Chinese and English. Corrections and missing references are welcome through the 5D Library website.