Physics Of Monitoring And Managing Metabolism

Tracking Ketosis, Energy, And The Hidden Crisis Of Modern Health

At the Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 15 and 16 October 2022, Anders Murman delivered a talk that aimed to cut through the noise around metabolism with unusual clarity. His presentation, Physics of Monitoring & Managing Metabolism, argued that metabolic dysfunction had become one of the defining health crises of the age, and that understanding the body’s fuel systems was no longer a niche obsession for athletes and biohackers, but a matter of public survival.

Murman’s thesis was blunt. Metabolic disorders, he said, accounted for 35% of premature deaths, overtaking even cardiovascular disease and cancer when comorbidities were separated out. In a world still inclined to treat chronic illness with prescriptions before prevention, his message landed as both critique and provocation: lifestyle diseases, he suggested, were best confronted with lifestyle change.

The Cell As A Power Plant

Murman began at the smallest scale, with the living cell.

“The most striking thing about a living cell is that it produces its own energy,” he said. “It has mitochondria where you produce energy from fuel, creating the unit of energy that allows us to contract muscles, think, and maintain temperature.”

That framing mattered. Metabolism, in his telling, was not an abstract wellness concept or a euphemism for weight management. It was the fundamental process by which human life powered itself. In the mitochondria, fuel combined with oxygen to produce ATP, the energy currency that sustained thought, motion, and heat.

From there, Murman walked the audience through the three primary fuels the human body could use: glucose, fatty acids, and ketone bodies. This metabolic flexibility, he argued, was one of humanity’s great evolutionary advantages.

“The reason why we have populated the entire planet, from Greenland to the jungle, is because we can live on all three macronutrients,” he said. “We are designed to metabolize different fuels to survive and thrive.”

Glucose, Fat, And The Misunderstood Origins Of Body Fat

The most forceful section of the talk came when Murman turned to glucose. He described a familiar biological sequence: carbohydrates were broken down into glucose, blood sugar rose, the pancreas released insulin, and cells were signaled to absorb that fuel. But in insulin resistance, that system began to fail. Cells, he suggested memorably, treated insulin less like an important messenger and more like an ignored robocaller.

His larger point was even more arresting. Body fat, he argued, was widely misunderstood.

“All the fat that human beings are putting on their bodies is not coming from fat; it is coming from glucose,” Murman said. “High blood sugar levels hurt our bodies, so the brain tells the liver to pack that glucose away and store it as adipose fat.”

It was an intentionally provocative line, but one that served his broader argument: excess glucose placed the body under strain, and the liver responded by converting that excess into triglycerides for storage. He linked that same overload to insulin resistance and to the wider rise of fatty liver disease, especially in diets heavy in sugar and fructose.

Why Ketones Mattered

If glucose represented the unstable excesses of the modern diet, ketones, in Murman’s presentation, represented something closer to metabolic resilience.

“Ketone bodies do not require insulin,” he said. “They are the most sustainable type of energy for all our cells, including both the brain and the muscles.”

That distinction was central. While fatty acids could fuel certain tissues, they could not cross the blood-brain barrier. Ketones could. For Murman, this made them not merely an alternative energy source, but one of the body’s most efficient and versatile survival mechanisms.

He broke ketosis into three molecules: beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, and acetone. Blood tests measured beta-hydroxybutyrate, offering what he described as an average picture of ketone production and use over the previous 12 to 24 hours. Breath analysis, by contrast, measured acetone, a volatile compound that exited through the lungs and reflected much more immediate ketone production.

“If you compare the human metabolic system to a hybrid engine car, the ketone part is the electric engine,” Murman said. “Measuring ketones is like measuring how much charge you have in your battery.”

It was one of several analogies that made the lecture accessible without stripping it of technical ambition. The body, in this account, was not just running. It was switching engines.

Measuring Metabolism In Real Time

The practical heart of Murman’s talk lay in monitoring. If metabolism could shift between fuels, then individuals needed tools capable of revealing those shifts as they happened.

He discussed blood ketone meters and urine strips, but gave particular attention to breath acetone sensors, including Acetrak, a device designed to measure acetone from deep lung air. Because acetone had a short half-life in the bloodstream, roughly 30 minutes, Murman presented breath analysis as a near real-time indicator of whether the body had recently begun producing ketones.

That distinction, between historical average and immediate signal, carried implications far beyond performance tracking. Murman positioned these tools as potentially useful for people with metabolic disorders, for endurance athletes, and for those seeking more precise feedback from nutritional interventions.

In his view, such devices were not gimmicks. They were part of a broader movement toward personalized metabolic literacy.

Beyond Ketosis To Digestive Health

Murman also used the Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam stage to point toward a wider future for breath-based diagnostics. He referenced upcoming technology aimed at measuring additional compounds in breath in order to monitor digestive disorders such as SIBO, IBS, and lactose intolerance.

The implication was striking. Breath, long treated as little more than an output of respiration, was being reimagined as a data stream. In this framework, the body was constantly broadcasting information about its internal state, if only the right sensors were available to decode it.

A Challenge To Modern Medicine

What gave Murman’s talk its edge was not only the science he presented, but the cultural argument beneath it. He suggested that metabolic disease had expanded partly because nutrition remained peripheral in mainstream healthcare, and because patients were too often left without practical tools to understand what their own bodies were doing.

His answer was not magical thinking or anti-medical grandstanding. It was measurement, education, and intervention at the level of daily habit: reduced sugar intake, closer attention to fructose, greater awareness of insulin resistance, and active monitoring of whether the body was relying on glucose or moving into ketosis.

In Amsterdam, Anders Murman presented metabolism as both physics and politics, chemistry and choice. The body, he reminded the audience, was not a mystery machine. It was a responsive system with ancient capacities, many of them dulled by modern abundance. To monitor it was to understand it. To understand it, he argued, was the beginning of managing it.

Frequently asked questions

How does Anders Murman describe the cell?

As a power plant. The most striking thing about a living cell is that it produces its own energy, he said: it has mitochondria where energy is made from fuel, creating the unit that allows us to contract muscles, think and maintain temperature.

Why do ketones matter in his account?

Ketone bodies do not require insulin, Murman said, describing them as the most sustainable type of energy for all our cells, including both the brain and the muscles, in contrast to the instability he associates with a glucose-dominant modern diet.

How can you tell which fuel you are running on?

Murman discussed blood ketone meters and urine strips but gave particular attention to breath acetone sensors. Because acetone has a short half-life in the bloodstream, roughly 30 minutes, breath analysis works as a near real-time indicator of a fuel switch.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam series, recorded in Amsterdam on 15 and 16 October 2022. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.