The Science
Mitochondria run your biology. When they work, you're fuel-flexible. When they don't, the body defaults to glucose — and inflammation, insulin resistance, and chronic disease follow. Therapeutic ketosis is the lever. The GKI is the readout. Here's the biology, the measurement, and the published evidence behind our coaching protocol.
Mitochondria
Healthy mitochondria are fuel-flexible — they can run on glucose or on fat-derived ketones. Decades of glucose-default eating breaks that flexibility. The cell loses quality control, inflammation rises, and the downstream consequences show up as metabolic syndrome, accelerated aging, and elevated cancer risk.
The metabolic-therapy thesis: restore fuel flexibility and you change the inputs to all of it.
In ketosis
Each one has decades of literature behind it. None of it is a hack — it's how your biology was built to operate when carbs are low.
Low insulin and elevated ketones trigger autophagy — the body's built-in process for clearing damaged cellular components. It's the lever every "longevity" intervention tries to pull. Ketosis pulls it the way nature designed.
Mizushima & Komatsu, Cell 2011 — PMID 22078875 →Stable blood sugar means stable insulin. Stable insulin means less chronic inflammatory signaling and less oxidative stress on the cells you want to keep healthy.
Youm et al., Nature Medicine 2015 — PMID 25686106 →Glucose spikes and crashes. Ketones don't. When the body learns to run on fat between meals, the 2pm crash and the 4pm cravings stop being a daily event.
Cahill, Annual Review of Nutrition 2006 — PMID 16848698 →Clinical evidence
Therapeutic ketosis in cancer is an active research field, not settled science. These are the early-phase studies we read closest. We don't claim MyMetabolism reproduces these results.
Median overall survival vs. control
Randomized Phase 2 trial in metastatic pancreatic cancer. 94% of patients reached ketosis. No added toxicity. Early signals favored the ketogenic arm in progression-free survival (8.5 vs. 6.2 mo) and overall survival (13.7 vs. 10.2 mo). Larger trials needed.
Randomized Phase 2 trial, Cancer 2025. PMID 41817106 →Alongside standard-of-care
2025 Phase 1 trial established that a medically-supervised ketogenic diet is feasible and tolerated alongside standard-of-care for newly-diagnosed glioblastoma patients. Early signal supporting further investigation.
Amaral, Gresham, Hu et al. — Phase 1 trial, 2025. PMID 40595067 →Insulin resistance, one year · 30 lb avg. weight loss
Adults on a coached nutritional-ketosis program for one year cut insulin resistance in half and lost 30 lbs on average — without medication. The closest published analogue to what we coach.
Hallberg, McKenzie et al. — Diabetes Therapy 2018. PMID 29417495 →This research is preliminary. MyMetabolism is not a clinical trial and does not provide medical treatment. We coach people who have chosen to pursue metabolic therapy in coordination with their medical team.
Two months. A coach. A protocol built from your data. Pick what's in your program and start.