Turn Fat Into Muscle?! What 2 New Studies Say About Ketones and Vitamin D
Optimal Protein Podcast with Vanessa Spina
Vanessa Spina
4.5 • 758 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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In this episode of The Optimal Protein Podcast, I take a deep dive into two exciting new studies that could reshape how we think about fat loss and body composition.
The first study investigates how a medically supervised ketogenic diet not only promotes fat loss but reverses biological aging by more than 6 years. And it’s not just the calorie restriction—the study found that elevated ketones, especially beta-hydroxybutyrate, played a key role in reducing epigenetic age and promoting longevity pathways.
The second study examines high-dose vitamin D supplementation and how it may direct surplus calories away from fat storage and toward muscle growth—via mechanisms involving myostatin and leptin signaling. While preclinical, the findings open up new conversations around vitamin D as a muscle-preserving, fat-loss–enhancing tool.
If you’re focused on losing fat, preserving muscle, and optimizing metabolic health, this episode is packed with cutting-edge insights.
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Follow @ketogenicgirl for updates on the latest studies and strategies to optimize protein intake and metabolic health.
🔍 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
• How the very-low-calorie ketogenic diet (VLCKD) reversed biological aging in adults with obesity
• The role of ketonemia (beta-hydroxybutyrate) in slowing cellular aging
• Ketones as signaling molecules: antioxidant effects, insulin sensitivity, autophagy, and more
• The potential for endogenous ketones to promote longevity
• How high-dose vitamin D may reprogram calorie allocation—favoring muscle over fat
• The roles of myostatin suppression and leptin signaling in body recomposition
• Why optimizing vitamin D status could matter for muscle preservation and fat loss
• What this research means for your own diet, supplementation, and metabolic strategy
📚 Studies Referenced:
1. Epigenetic Aging Acceleration in Obesity Is Slowed Down by Nutritional Ketosis Following Very Low-Calorie Ketogenic Diet (VLCKD): A New Perspective to Reverse Biological Age
Published in Nutrients, March 2025
2. High dose dietary vitamin D allocates surplus calories to muscle and growth instead of fat via modulation of myostatin and leptin signaling
Preprint, Research Square, May 2024
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4202165/v1
The content provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Consult with a healthcare professional before making significant changes to your diet or exercise regimen.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Optimal Protein Podcast. I'm Vanessa Spina. |
| 0:05.5 | Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Vanessa, and I am so excited because in today's episode, we are covering two brand new, fascinating studies that look into how nutrition can profoundly impact our biological aging and body |
| 0:24.3 | composition. So first study that I am bringing to you today is all about how we can actually |
| 0:30.6 | reverse biological aging with ketones and with a ketogenic diet. And this study absolutely blew my mind. |
| 0:39.4 | It was actually quantifying how many years, and I'll give away a little spoiler, |
| 0:44.0 | it actually was six years that you can reduce your biological age from doing a very low |
| 0:50.7 | calorie ketogenic diet. |
| 0:52.5 | However, it may not just be the very low calories. It may actually |
| 0:56.2 | just be the ketones themselves. So I can't wait to break down this study with you. And the second one |
| 1:01.7 | investigates how high dose vitamin D may direct excess calories towards muscle growth rather than |
| 1:09.8 | towards fat storage by modulating some key metabolic |
| 1:13.0 | signals including leptin and something called myostatin, which we're going to learn all about |
| 1:18.3 | today. So I can't wait to get into these two studies with you all today. There's some very |
| 1:22.9 | exciting insights and takeaways that we can directly apply into our lives to reduce our biological |
| 1:30.2 | age potentially and also to direct more calories that we consume into our muscles than into |
| 1:37.6 | fat storage just with vitamin D supplementation. So these are both, I think, extremely |
| 1:43.5 | amazing new studies that provide actionable |
| 1:47.3 | insights and takeaways that we can implement into our lives to improve our lives, |
| 1:53.2 | improve our rate of biological aging and slow it down to decelerate it, and to also enhance |
| 2:00.7 | our metabolically active tissue, our muscle |
| 2:03.5 | tissue. So I can't wait to get into these studies. And we will jump right in after this quick break. |
| 2:10.5 | Friends, I want to tell you about a very important nutrient that many of us are deficient in |
... |
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