• What is MCT?

Fat is a chemical compound with fatty acids and glycerin.
The name ‘triglycerides’ comes from its molecular structure. e.g.> Tri(= 3) + glycerides (= glycerin + fatty acids).

There are many fatty acids and each fatty acid have a unique carbon tail.
Types of fatty acids can be identified with its chain length (short, medium, long and very long) or bonding structures (saturated or unsaturated).
Medium chain triglycerides are fat (triglycerides) with fatty acids which have a tail of medium length (six to twelve carbon atoms).

MCTs are more efficiently absorbed and require minimal processing in the body to metabolize.
It is absorbed and used easily and used to treat patients with malnutrition or metabolism disorders.

• MCT and Ketogenic diet

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet.
It originally developed to treat severe epilepsy in children.
The diet forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.

Human body is using carbohydrates as main energy source.
However, if the carbohydrates intake is extremely limited, the liver converts fatty acids into ketone bodies to use as energy source.
An elevated blood level of ketone bodies is called as ketosis, leads to a reduction in the frequency of epileptic seizures.

However the extreme carbohydrates restriction was difficult for many parents of patients, and they often asked for more palatable meals.
Most of dietary fats are long-chain triglycerides which have a tail with 13-21 carbon atoms,
but in 60s, medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs) has been found and used in ketogenic diet.

MCTs produce more ketone bodies than normal dietary fats. With more calories from MCTs,
the patients can have more protein or carbohydrates in their ketogenic diet while maintaining ketosis status.
From then, The MCT diet replaced the classic ketogenic diet in many hospitals.