About KetoSuite
What is the need
Medicalized Ketogenic Treatment is traditionally associated with Epilepsy. An increasing body of research projects is indicating use in other specialities such as neuro-oncology, degenerative brain disorders, mental health and diabetes.
Children with Refractory Epilepsy don’t respond to Anti Epilepsy drugs and may have hundreds of seizures per day.
For some, significant improvement of seizure count (50% patients achieve 50% reduction) and cognitive ability, or even seizure freedom (10%), can be achieved through Nutritional Ketosis induced through Medicalized Ketogenic Dietary Therapy in a clinical setting.
This is not to be confused with the fad weight-loss diets found online. This is an evidence-based high fat diet of up to 90% fat, careful management and measurement sometimes to 0.1 gram for ingredients. Patient Ketone production and responses to Ketone levels are individual, likewise required Calorie intake is individual. Changing personalised food prescriptions (requiring rebalanced recipes), are prepared for patients as they start, maintain, grow and wean off Ketogenic Dietary Therapy.
The problem is this is time-consuming for Registered Dietitians, and difficult and time-consuming for patient families. Accessibility and compliance are traditional issues for Ketogenic Therapy.
Auto Balancer Technology
It can take up to 40 minutes to manually balance an existing complex recipe to a new food prescription. Our aim was to have this happen instantly, and then be able to adjust in real-time.
A personalised food prescription for a snack, meal or day, is made up of three core numbers for Fat, Protein, Carbohydrate (sometimes with an optional MCT value). This is described as a percentage of fat, or a ratio of Fat to Protein + Carbohydrate.
Individual foods and food products also have a specific profile of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrate. The complexity arises from having a fixed number of ingredients in a recipe, and completing the calculations to re-balance these to a target prescription of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrate, while maintaining the ratio and still creating a recipe that bakes/cooks and is palatable.
Our apps do this instantly and in real-time as sliders for each ingredient are adjusted by the user. A workable recipe or meal is maintained through an iterative process where values converge on a solution.
Achieving the calculations is not the whole technology picture. We have implemented UX technology that significantly aids the vehicle of creating and delivering the result.
Foods in the UK, NZ, Canadian, and our Custom Food products databases are filtered using MetaData. This auto grouping helps significantly with scalability. This impacts the creation of recipes, setting default foods and users being able to swap out ingredient foods based on what they have in their cupboards.
Our practitioners can create custom recipe sheets for an individual patient. These sheets include links and QR codes for loading the recipes directly into the balancer.
Who are the team
We have a small flexible team with specialized medical and application development skills.
We have Canadian Ketogenic Registered Dietitian Jennifer Fabe internationally known for the development of the Low and Slow delivery method. New Zealand Ketogenic Registered Dietitian Charlene Tan-Smith is the clinical lead of the South Island Paediatric Ketogenic Dietary Therapy Service.
Our developers are based in Christchurch, New Zealand. We have oversight from a NZ CEO with extensive international health application development experience.
Andrew Smith manages the KetoSuite project and enquiries can be made directly to him by email at