Thread: Minerals

Vitamin B6 is...

The MAGICIAN.

He changes protein, the stuff in meat and beans that makes your muscles grow, into carbs, the stuff in rice and potatoes!
He changes protein into neurotransmitters, the little molecules that your brain cells use to talk to one another, and that your nerves use to sense your environment and to control your movements.

He makes protein DISAPPEAR.
He makes glucose, the main carbohydrate you use for energy, APPEAR seemingly out of nowhere!

Ok, analogies are fun, but let's get more technical.

What Vitamin B6 Does For Us

Protein is present in all foods, but especially rich in lean meats. Fatty cuts of meat, eggs, and most dairy products besides butter are also rich in protein. Among plant foods, pulses like lentils, peas, and beans have the most. Protein is made of building blocks called amino acids.

Vitamin B6 does lots of things with these amino acids.

It converts the amino acids into neurotransmitters.

When you have too much of one amino acid and not enough of another, it converts the one you have to the one you need.

It converts the amino acids into glucose whenever you don't have enough.

Most things you do with protein generate some ammonia. If you don't get rid of this, you'll smell funny and feel like crap. B6 helps you convert the ammonia into urea, which isn't toxic and has no color or odor at all. That stuff, you just pee out. Basically, it makes protein disappear!

B6 even does things that are unrelated to protein.

You store carbohydrate in your muscles for use during high-intensity exercise, and in your liver to sustain your blood sugar in between meals. B6 helps release the stored carbohydrate so you can use it.

It helps you make hemoglobin, which you use to carry oxygen in your blood. This prevents anemia and helps you feel energized.

Homocysteine is a little chemical that tries to do good, but sometimes gets into trouble, especially when you eat a lot of animal protein. High levels might contribute to heart disease. When there's too much hanging around, B6 helps get rid of it.

Histamine is famous for causing allergies. Believe it or not, lots of FOODS have histamine, and B6 helps you get rid of it.

Oxalate is a chemical that contributes to kidney stones. Some veggies are very high in oxalates, and B6 won't do anything about those. But many people nowadays are consuming lots of bone broth, or collagen supplements. Those can generate oxalate and B6 DOES help prevent that from happening.

Vitamin B6 Deficiency

So what does B6 deficiency look like?

You might become more irritable, depressed, confused, or anxious, or develop insomnia. This is from your neurotransmitters getting messed up. You can develop skin problems that look a lot like riboflavin deficiency (review that lesson if you need to!). B6 helps regulate the immune system by putting its energy into the right uses. In deficiency, you get sick more often. Yet you're more likely to have chronic inflammation, like arthritis. Basically, your immune system gets confused. Deficiency causes anemia, because you can't make hemoglobin. Your homocysteine will run high, but mainly after you eat, so a fasting blood test will probably miss it. Your blood sugar might drop, making you feel irritable, shaky, or fatigued between meals. This is unlikely, though, because your body does its best to conserve B6 for blood sugar regulation even when you're running low on it. Low B6 levels might also contribute to kidney stones, cognitive decline in old age, and the morning sickness of pregnancy.

Vitamin B6 in Foods

B6 comes in two forms in foods:

Animal foods have pyridoxal.

Plant foods have pyridoxine.

Similar to vitamin A, it's the animal form that we need. We can convert the plant form into the animal form within our liver, but it requires riboflavin and a healthy liver. Additionally, most plants have a lot of their B6 bound to sugars that make it hard to absorb. We can get, at best, only half the B6 from these sugar-bound forms. At worst, we might not get any. As a result, you should NEVER trust the values for B6 in a nutritional database when looking at plant foods.

Cooking presents another important issue. Cooking makes B6 bind to the protein in the food. This doesn't just destroy the B6. It actually turns it into a B6 antagonist! Now the magician himself is victim to the dark magic of the oven. Overall, you can expect cooked animal food to have 25-30% less B6 activity than the raw version, and 40% less for plant foods. It depends how much you cook them though.

The RDA for B6 is 1.3 mg/d for most adults. Over the age of 50, it goes up to 1.7 mg/d for men and 1.5 mg/d for women. In pregnancy, it goes up to 1.9 mg/d, and in lactation it goes up to 2 mg/d. Let's use 2 mg as our benchmark when we look at foods, and go with the 5-tier approach we've been using. Unless otherwise noted, a serving is 100 g measured before cooking. These are all natural, unfortified foods.

TIER 1 gives you 2 mg in one serving.

1.25 heaping teaspoons of unfortified nutritional yeast (used raw).

TIER 2 gives you 2 mg in three servings.

Liver (beef, turkey, veal, lamb), emu, fresh tuna, salmon, chicken and turkey breast, top round and eye of round beef steak, Canadian goose, rice bran.

Pistachio nuts MIGHT belong here but I don't know how much of their B6 is sugar-bound.

TIER 3 gives you 2 mg in five servings.

It includes chicken liver, and many cuts of fresh meat, poultry, and fish not in tier 2, though many of these go in tier 4, and there is little rhyme or reason to it.

Chestnuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and ginkgo nuts MIGHT belong here, but I don't know how much of their B6 is sugar-bound.

TIER 4 gives you 2 mg if you eat two pounds of these foods collectively.

Many fresh cuts of meat, poultry and fish, many processed meat products, some cheese (American, feta, soft goat), whelk, and octopus. Beef heart.

Hazelnuts, walnuts, corn, peanuts and peanut butter, white rice, and bananas.

These foods MIGHT belong in tier 4, but I don't know their sugar-bound content: Hemp seeds, buckwheat, brown rice, quinoa, teff, cashews, barley, mung beans, macadamia nuts, potatoes.

Most beans that have been measured have high sugar-bound content, so these probably aren't good sources, but if their sugar-bound content were low, they'd be in tier 4: lentils, lima, chickpeas, lupins, several beans (yellow, white, French, kidney, yardlong).

TIER 5 provides 2 mg if you eat four pounds collectively (the average person eats four pounds of food a day, total).

Many cuts of fresh meat, poultry, and fish go here. There is little rhyme or reason to which ones go in tiers 3, 4, or 5. Eggs go here. Crab goes here, but most shellfish not already listed don't make the cut. Many nuts not already listed go here, but almonds don't make the cut. Some cheeses (brie, gjetost, soft goat), coconut, most soy products. Mungo beans MIGHT go here, but I don't know how much B6 is sugar-bound in them.

FOODS THAT DON'T MAKE THE CUT

Here are foods that don't even make it into tier 5: fat, canned fish, almonds, collagenous tissues like feet and bones; most non-liver organ meats; most cheeses, many beans, fried foods, and heavily processed foods.

Simplifying the Food Sources

Obviously we need to simplify this.

Since many good foods don't even make the cut, and since different cuts of meat are so wildly variable, it makes sense to do the simple thing: if you don't supplement, throw 1.25 teaspoons of unfortified nutritional yeast into one of your meals. After all, every B vitamin except riboflavin has so far been a reason to get at least that much.

Other Reasons for Deficiency

There are a number of things that could make us deficient besides just poor food choices:

Riboflavin deficiency prevents us from getting B6 from plant foods.

Variations in genetics and gut flora may also make it harder to get B6 from plant foods.

Estrogen from oral contraceptives, pregnancy, or the peaks at ovulation and just before menstruation raise B6 needs.

Sulfite destroys vitamin B6. Sulfite can come from food additives (!). It also rises during pregnancy or when we consume a diet high in animal protein and low in legumes. Bad bacteria in the gut can make sulfites too.

Inflammation raises our needs for B6.

High-protein diets raise our needs for B6.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and drugs used to treat tuberculosis and Parkinson's raise needs for B6.

There are rare genetic disorders that require extremely high doses of vitamin B6 to correct.

Vitamin B6 Toxicity

Given all this, maybe it's time for a supplement!

But wait!

Unlike B1, B2, and B5, B6 pairs up with B3 in being toxic at high doses.

Signs of B6 toxicity are numbness to touch or temperature, tingling, burning or pain in the hands, feet, arms, or legs, and loss of full control over body movements. To avoid toxicity, start with low doses around 10 mg/d. Work up slowly to a maximum of 100 mg/d. Only go higher than this with the guidance of a health care practitioner.

The good news is B6 toxicity symptoms usually go away as soon as you stop supplementing.

Vitamin B6 Supplements

So let's take a look at the supplements available. There are two main forms.

PYRIDOXINE HCL

This is the form found in plants. While it is the most studied and it clearly works, I don't favor using it because its efficacy will depend on your genetics, liver health, and riboflavin status.

PYRIDOXAL 5'-PHOSPHATE (P5P)

This is the form found in animal products. I recommend always using this simply because you don't need to worry about your genetics, riboflavin status, or liver health in the way you do with pyridoxine.

I recommend trying supplements whenever you have symptoms that might be related, and when a food-first approach just doesn't seem to work. High estrogen levels or inflammation are two common reasons to need supplements. There may be other reasons that none of us yet understand. Just work up slowly from a low dose toward 100 mg/d and see if it helps.

Wrapping Up

Ok, to wrap up:

Insomnia, problems with mood or mental health, and anemia are the biggest clues of needing more B6.

High estrogen, high-protein, inflammation, certain drugs, and sulfites are the biggest reasons to need more.

A little nutritional yeast every day is the best insurance against deficiency.

Pyridoxal 5'-phosphate (P5P) is the best supplement. Use it when food doesn't seem to work, and move slowly from 10 to 100 mg/d as needed.

How Vitamin A Makes Our Eyes Moist, Our Skin Smooth, and Our Immune System Strong

All of these problems can be caused by too little vitamin A. Why? First of all, vitamin A lubricates your eyes. But vitamin A isn't "wet." It doesn't moisten everything in sight. Instead, it's what your tissues use to develop properly. It's how they "know" what they're supposed to do. It's a tool our cells use to know they are creating the right things and putting them all in the right places.

They use it like we use mirrors. The mirror doesn't make your lips red, but try putting lipstick on without one and you might look a little silly.

Your eyes use vitamin A to become moist, but your skin uses it to become soft and smooth.

Then inside your throat, on the way down to your lungs, there are little "hairs" that catch all the junk and little microbes you breath in and help you cough it all out. Vitamin A helps make those hairs! As if that weren't enough, vitamin A helps your immune system become strong, making antibodies and virus-busting proteins. These help fend off any nasty critters that made it past your moist eyes, your smooth skin, and your killer cough response.

But... oh man... let's go back to the eye for a minute.

No, I mean, this is some crazy stuff going on in the eye.

How Vitamin A Promotes Healthy Vision and Healthy Sleep

Vitamin A is what your eyes use to sense light. When the light enters your eye, it hits a molecule of vitamin A, and that triggers a reaction that sends an impulse to your brain. Your brain takes thousands of these impulses in any given instant and integrates them together to make your sense of vision.

If you are deficient in vitamin A, you don't go blind... at least not at first.

Why?

Because you have two different types of cells in your eyes: rods help you see shadows in the dark, cones help you see colors in the day. Vitamin A is equally important to both of them, but when you're running low, your body starts setting priorities. Back before artificial lighting, there wasn't much to do at night. Chat by the fire, then hit the sack. Being able to see at night wasn't that big of a deal. It was time to sleep. The day was time for hunting. Gathering. Making tools. So we sacrifice our night vision when we become deficient in vitamin A. This helps make sure we have enough vitamin A to see during the day.

And you know what ELSE light does in our eyes? Besides help us SEE???

It tells our brains that it's day time. Have you noticed the "blue-blocking" bandwagon so many people are hopping onto lately? Like "Nightshift" on iPhone, "Night Mode" on Android, Flux on the computer, or those funky amber-colored glasses the geeky guys (like me!) wear? These block the blue light from our light bulbs and digital screens. That blue light tells our brains that it's day time. Just like vitamin A transmits light signals to the brain to help us see, it's vitamin A transmitting these signals that it's daytime. So if you feel awake at night or tired during the day, one possibility is that vitamin A is missing... The light hits your eyes, but the vitamin A isn't there to transmit the signal to your brain.

Other Amazing Things Vitamin A Does

Vitamin A does some other amazing things:

It protects against kidney stones.
It protects against "autoimmune" diseases. These are diseases where the body attacks itself, like type 1 diabetes.
It protects against asthma and allergies.
And it protects against food intolerances like celiac disease (a condition where gluten, a protein in wheat and several other grains, wreaks havoc on the intestines).
It helps make hormones like testosterone and estrogen.
In fact, without vitamin A, boys won't go through puberty!
Vitamin A in Foods

So how do we get enough vitamin A?

There are two forms of vitamin A: the form in plant foods, and the one in animal foods. The plant form is actually a collection of compounds. One of them is beta-carotene. The others are similar to it and called "carotenoids."

These are named after carrots.

Oops that's a rabbit.

Let's try this again.

These are named after carrots.

The animal form of vitamin A is called retinol. This is named after the retina, the part of the eye where most of the vitamin A is found.

We don't need the plant form (carotenoids) in our bodies. We do need the animal form (retinol). But! We can convert the plant form into the animal form. In other words, we can convert carotenoids to retinol. There's actually over SIX HUNDRED (!!!) different carotenoids, and not all of them act as vitamin A. For example, lutein and zeaxanthin, found in spinach and eggs, might help protect us from going blind when we get old. This is because they protect against a disease called age-related macular degeneration. But they don't act as vitamin A. Some people think the lycopene in tomatoes protects against prostate cancer or cardiovascular disease (it's controversial!). But lycopene doesn't act as vitamin A. Only about 10% of carotenoids act as vitamin A, and these are called "provitamin A carotenoids." The PRO in "provitamin A" refers to the fact that they can be converted into the active form of vitamin A, retinol.

Carotenoids are colorful! They can be red, orange, or yellow. So, you know your plant foods have vitamin A potential if they are red, orange, or yellow. But get this... GREEN foods have potential vitamin A too! Why? Because the green is chlorophyll, which plants use to obtain energy from the sun. The carotenoids act as the chlorophyll's assistants, so you can always be sure that when you see green, those other colors are lurking beneath the surface.

For example, have you noticed the colors the leaves turn in the fall? Those shades of red, orange, and yellow are carotenoids. As the chlorophyll degrades, it reveals the other colors that had been present all along. So, to get vitamin A from plants, we eat red, orange, yellow, and green vegetables.

When we eat vitamin A, guess where we hold on to it? Our livers! And just like we store vitamin A in our livers, so do fish, cows, chickens, and all the other animals. So, the best source of animal-form vitamin A is liver. Cod liver oil can be used as a supplement because it's simply the oil squeezed out of the livers of fish. Most other animal foods are not a good source of vitamin A, with two exceptions: eggs and milk. Why? These are the two foods meant to nourish young animals, who need lots of vitamin A to grow correctly. In fact, an egg has a rather marvelous task to fulfill: it has to fit enough nourishment to last the chick 21 days until it hatches and eats its first worm. It has to pack a LOT of nutrition. And milk is meant to nourish the growing calf. Both of these have vitamin A... but nowhere near as much as liver.

Now, you might think we could get vitamin A from plant foods and animal foods equally well. But here's the thing: We need the animal form, retinol. We don't need the plant form, carotenoids. So when we get vitamin A from plant foods, everything comes down to how good we are at converting the carotenoids to retinol.

Getting Vitamin A From Plant Foods Is Hard!

And there are SO MANY things that get in the way:

fiber

parasites

toxic metals like mercury and lead

damaging molecules produced during metabolic problems like diabetes

iron deficiency

zinc deficiency

protein deficiency

hypothyroidism

The worst of these is GENETICS. About half the population has their ability to get vitamin A from plant foods cut at least in half. And half of those people -- a quarter of the total population -- has it cut by 75%. Layer on any of the 's listed above and the picture just gets more and more bleak.

So colorful vegetables MIGHT be a good source of vitamin A for you, but ARE they?

Things That Boost Our Vitamin A

Ok, enough of the stuff that makes getting vitamin A *harder.*

Here are things that help!

Vitamin A mixes with fats and oils better than it mixes in water. That means eating it with fat helps us absorb it.
The best fats to use are animal fats and traditional oils like palm oil and olive oil. If you want to look up a specific oil, look up the type of fat it has and use oils that are low in polyunsaturated fat.
Cooking or pureeing vegetables helps us get more vitamin A from them.
Vitamin E helps us get more vitamin A from plant foods.
Here's what I recommend as the best way to get vitamin A:

Eat 4 ounces of liver once a week, or eat a half ounce every day.
If you tolerate eggs, eat up to three whole eggs a day.
If you tolerate milk, consume up to three servings of full-fat dairy per day.
Eat 3 or 4 cups of red, orange, yellow, and green vegetables a day.
Don't go out of your way to eat a high-fat diet, but don't avoid fat either.
To super-charge your vitamin A, use grass-fed butter and red palm oil for your added fats.
Red palm oil is a great plant source of vitamin A. It happens to be super-rich in carotenoids *and* vitamin E *and* all the right fats. And it's even better than pureed vegetables. Because it is an oil, the carotenoids are already perfectly dissolved and you don't need to do much digesting to extract them.

Vegans, Low-Fat Dieters, and Children

Now, some people will need to change things up!

First, LOW-FAT. If you avoid adding fats and oils to your food, emphasize lean cuts of protein, and avoid egg yolks or full-fat milk products, you qualify as "low-fat."

Triple your animal-form vitamin A by eating 12 ounces of liver a week.

Second, VEGAN. If you don't eat *any* animal products, you're a vegan.

Use red palm oil liberally as often as you can stand it.

Supplement if you have symptoms of deficiency.

And then there's CHILDREN. The best thing to do for children is cut these down based on the amount of food they eat. For example, if they eat half as much as you, feed them half as many of these foods. If they eat twice as much as you, feed them twice as many of these foods. If you want to put numbers on it, cut these serving sizes in half, then multiply that by every 1000 Calories in your child's diet. Do the same thing for the supplement doses I'll discuss below.

Vitamin A Supplements

If you can't meet the food recommendations (or just refuse to eat liver and palm oil!), you should consider supplementing. When supplementing, we need to start counting. Vitamin A is measured in "international units" or IU.

Cod liver oil providing 3000 IU per day from a brand that doesn't use synthetic vitamins is the most natural source.

You can also just take a vitamin A supplement. Take 3,000 IU a day, or 10,000 IU twice a week. If you take more, you should work with a knowledgeable health care practitioner and make sure all your other nutrients are adequate to avoid imbalances.

Vitamin A Toxicity

Vitamin A has a dark side. Yes, it can be toxic!

It can hurt your bones, especially when you don't have enough vitamin D.

In the first 8 weeks of pregnancy, too much might cause birth defects.

Taking way too much for way too long a time can cause these problems:

Fatigue

Hair loss

Upset stomach, nausea, and vomiting

Dry skin and torn lips

Headache

The best way to avoid these problems is to avoid taking too much, and to keep the rest of your diet balanced. Here are some rules to follow to make sure you don't experience any problems from too much vitamin A:

Keep it to no more than 3,000 IU per day or 10,000 IU twice a week unless you have deficiency symptoms that only go away at higher doses.

If you supplement with more, include supplements of vitamins D, E, and K. I'll give you dosing recommendations when we get to those lessons!

Work with a knowledgeable health care practitioner if using high doses, especially if you have any symptoms of toxicity.

The MYSTERY Vitamin.

Now, don't get me wrong. We know a LOT about what pantothenic acid does in the body. We know how it works. What we don't know that much about is how much we need, or what might have to go wrong to make us deficient.

Everything we know about pantothenic acid deficiency came from highly controlled experiments. To make people severely deficient they had to do both of these two things to them at the same time:

Feed them an artificial diet that had ZERO pantothenic acid.

Give them a toxin that interfered with the normal function of pantothenic acid.

Still, there's a LOT we can learn from this experiment. You ready?

Pantothenic Acid Deficiency

Eating a diet with zero B5 made people complain about fatigue, and made them seem like they had no energy or enthusiasm. No toxin was needed to make this happen.

But the anti-B5 toxin did a lot more:

The people started acting childish and arguing with each other all the time.
Sometimes they'd spend all day in bed.
Their hands and feet would go numb. They'd stamp their feet and shake their hands all the time, trying to make them feel normal.
They couldn't stand on their tippy toes, and some of them started walking funny.
They got insomnia.
Their pulse would start beating real fast from doing the tiniest bit of work.
They got cramps, felt nauseated, farted more... and sometimes they threw up.
What B5 Does For Us

Notice how B5 deficiency has its own set of problems, yet it overlaps with the other Bs in so many ways.

For example, the funny feelings in the hands and feet happen in thiamin and riboflavin deficiency, and the mood and gut is impacted in niacin deficiency.

The similarities reflect how closely related the B vitamins are.

When we break down food for energy, we break the food molecules into pieces and extract the energy that had been used to hold the molecules together.

Pantothenic acid is what helps break apart the pieces.

Thiamin, niacin, and riboflavin extract the energy.

They're all components of the same system.

Other Cool Things B5 Does

But pantothenic acid does more. He takes those little pieces of food molecules and starts building things with them.

And he starts sticking them onto things, rearranging things in the cell, putting this thing here, that thing there... until everything is just right.

He does the heavy lifting... but he's the part-time interior designer and decorator too.

While pantothenic acid is adding his magic touch

... a bunch of cool stuff happens:

Serotonin, the stress-coping hormone, gets converted to melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleep at night.

Hemoglobin gets made. This is what carries oxygen to your muscles and helps you feel energized.

Ammonia gets cleaned up. When you eat protein, the stuff in meat and beans that builds your muscles, you generate a little ammonia. If you don't get rid of it, you smell funny and feel really tired.

B5 makes LOTS of other things. For example, it helps make the mucus that moistens your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, genitals, and internal organs.

And there's a few things we think it MIGHT do: help prevent acne, reduce pain in rheumatoid arthritis, lower cholesterol, help wounds heal faster, and maybe, maybe just maybe, keep our hair from going gray.

The Great Pantothenate Mystery

So what's the mystery then?

Here's how the standard story goes.

Pantothenic acid is so easy to get from food that you can't become deficient if you eat natural foods. You can't even become deficient by eating junk food. The only way to get deficient is to be in a laboratory experiment designed to give you a deficiency. In fact, pantothenic acid takes its name from the Greek word "pantos," which means "everywhere" or "everything." Pantothenic acid is EVERYWHERE. It's in EVERYTHING. Therefore, you will never become deficient.

As a result of this idea, we have way less research into how much we need to be healthy. The Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine is the committee that makes the RDAs. The RDA is how much people should eat of a particular nutrient, on average, to make sure that most people aren't at risk of getting too little. Sometimes there's not enough evidence to make an RDA. Instead, the committee makes an "adequate intake" or "AI." An AI basically means "people are already eating this much and nothing seems to be wrong with them, so it's probably OK." And that's exactly what we have for pantothenic acid.

Is it really true that none of us will ever run deficient? There are some good arguments against that idea:

The study that produced fatigue and loss of enthusiasm on a zero-B5 diet only lasted 9 weeks. Things could have gotten a lot worse if it went on longer.
Alcohol actually acts like an anti-B5 toxin, and lots of us drink alcohol.
Because there's so little research, we hardly know anything about what increases our needs for B5.
Fatigue, grumpy mood, gut problems, cramps, and insomnia are pretty common. In fact, tingling in the hands and feet isn't even that rare.
All of these things could have plenty of other causes, but how will we ever know if B5 is part of the picture if we just assume that it isn't?

The official recommendation is 5 milligrams per day (mg/d) for most adults, 6 mg/d for pregnant women, and 7 mg/d for lactating women. I recommend shooting for 10-12 mg/d. I also recommend increasing your B5-rich foods or trying B5 supplements if you have anything that seems like it could be a B5 deficiency problem.

We're about to start looking at foods. One thing to keep in mind as we do: A lot of B5 gets destroyed by heat, processing, and storage. So it's VERY important never to use values for raw foods in a nutritional database unless the food is fresh (not canned or frozen) and you're eating it raw. Everything I'm about to show you uses data for cooked foods, except a few cases where the food is usually eaten raw. I point it out whenever that's the case.

All right, ready to look at foods?

We can separate the foods into five tiers. Unless otherwise stated, a serving is 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces.

TIER 1 gives you 10 mg in one serving.

There's one natural food in this tier...

... and it's not liver.

That one food is 2 heaping teaspoons of unfortified nutritional yeast (used raw).

TIER 2 gives you 10 mg in two servings.

It includes the livers of chicken, beef, lamb and veal.

And, roasted sunflower seeds.

TIER 3 gives you 10 mg in three servings.

beef pancreas or kidney
gjetost cheese
black and red caviar
kidney from lamb imported from New Zealand
pork liver (and most products made from it)
shiitake mushrooms or canned grape leaves
Many cuts of muscle meat belong in tier 3, but many belong in tier 4.

TIER 4 gives the AI (5 mg) in five servings.

Eggs
Duck, goose, or emu
Fresh salmon or trout
Raw avocado or canned chilli
Peanuts, peanut butter, and cashews
White or portabella mushrooms
Pate
Giblets or heart from chicken or turkey
Beef thymus or heart
Pork kidney or brain
Lamb brain
TIER 5 are foods where you would meet the AI of 5 mg if you ate four pounds of them collectively.

Tier 5 includes cuts of fresh meat that aren't in higher tiers, whole grains, most natural dairy products besides butter, most seafood that isn’t canned, most beans that aren’t canned, raw coconut, most nuts and seeds, most processed meats, and most spices.

Watch Out for These If You Don't Want to Be Deficient!

Refining flour removes half the B5, and B5 is *not* added to enriched flours.

Sugar, fat, refined flour, and many canned, heavily cooked, or heavily processed foods have little to no pantothenic acid. The more of these foods you include, the more important it is to eat from the top tiers.

There's a few things we should suspect raise the need for pantothenic acid:

Burning fat requires about 20% more pantothenic acid than burning carbs. This is a small effect compared to riboflavin, but a high-fat diet may modestly increase our needs.

Alcohol inhibits the activation of B5 and prevents us from using it properly.

In the third trimester of pregnancy, the mother starts sending large amounts of pantothenic acid to the fetus at her own expense.

A lactating mother puts almost 2 mg/d into her milk.

Gut bacteria might play a role in making pantothenic acid for us, stealing it from us, or making antagonists.

There is a collection of very rare genetic defects in the ability to activate B5.

Pantothenic acid is harder to extract from food than other B vitamins. A healthy person may only extract half the B5 from food, and someone with poor digestion might get even less.

However, the major forms in food cannot be obtained from any supplements on the market! They are a lot easier to convert into the active forms that we need in our bodies. We *know* the forms in food are superior for these folks. And they MIGHT be for the rest of us!

B5 Supplements

Pantothenic acid supplements come in a few different forms.

PANTOTHENATE

This comes as sodium pantothenate or calcium pantothenate. It's one of the forms you get from natural foods. It works perfectly fine as a means of fulfilling your basic needs. It's probably what's in your multivitamin or B complex.

Nutritional doses of pantothenate are in the range of 5-15 mg. Our needs are very poorly studied, though, and 100 mg/d seems to be used well by the body rather than going to waste.

1 gram per day has been used to reduce pain in rheumatoid arthritis, and doses between 2 and 10 grams per day have been used for acne.

PANTETHINE

This exact molecule isn't found naturally in food to any meaningful extent, but it breaks down into natural forms within your intestines, and it *might* be made by some of the bacteria in our gut.

It does supply you with pantothenic acid to help meet your requirement, and it may actually be better at doing that than pantothenate.

It is mainly used, though, for lowering cholesterol.

At 300 mg taken three times a day, it has special drug-like effects not shared by ordinary pantothenic acid that lower cholesterol levels. It's definitely effective at doing that, but hasn't been studied for its ability to reduce heart disease.

DEXPANTHENOL

This is a topical form designed to be stable in creams and lozenges. It's used to speed up wound healing. The creams go on injured skin and the lozenges are for injured tissue within the mouth or throat. Once they dissolve, the dexpanthenol converts to pantothenic acid. Several studies suggest it works.

While there are more questions than answers with pantothenic acid, the good news is there is no known toxicity.

At 900 mg/d of pantethine, barely more than 1% of people get heartburn, itchiness, or diarrhea.

Occasionally someone develops irritation or eczema from using the topical creams.

In theory, high doses of pantothenate might hurt the absorption of biotin, or vitamin B7, a nutrient we'll cover two lessons from now.

I don't recommend taking doses higher than 100 mg unless you have a good reason to do so. And when doing so, it's wise to make sure you're getting plenty of all the other B vitamins.

Wrapping Up

To wrap up:

Pantothenic acid deficiency is most likely to cause fatigue and tiredness.

It may also cause poor mood, insomnia, gut problems, cramps, and numbness or tingling in the hands and feet.

Acne, high cholesterol, and poor wound healing might be helped by B5.

Shoot for 10 mg/d. A little nutritional yeast and liver give you way more than that.

If you have any signs of deficiency, it's harmless to try extra B5 to see if it helps.

High doses and topical creams are safe, but use them only with a good reason to do so and make sure you've got plenty of other Bs.

Why Niacin Is Important
Niacin is the most foundational and universal B vitamin in all of energy metabolism. There's no tricks to pull to reduce your need for it:

Breaking something down? You need niacin.
Building something up? You need niacin.
Detoxing? It requires energy. You need niacin.
Recycling other nutrients, like vitamin K and folate? It requires energy. You need niacin.
Defending against oxidative stress? It requires energy. You need niacin.
But what's cray cray about niacin is that it does some super important stuff that has nothing to do with it's role in energy metabolism:

✅ It helps you use your neurotransmitters, those little chemicals that allow your brain cells to communicate with one another, and allow your nerves to control your muscles and to sense your environment.

✅ It repairs your DNA whenever it gets damaged.

✅ It lengthens your telomeres. These are little caps on the ends of your chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that house all of your genes. This helps them keep your cells dividing and staying strong as you age, allowing you to live longer.

What's nuts about niacin is that these last three roles actually *consume* niacin. In energy metabolism, niacin is just shuttling energy around. But in these roles, niacin gets used up. That's why, molecule for molecule, we require 38 TIMES as much niacin per day as riboflavin!

Although niacin is important everywhere for everything, it's especially important to the brain, gut, and skin.

Why?

In the brain, it's consumed during every single release of neurotransmitters.
In the gut, your intestines get wildly assaulted by all the nasty stuff in the food you eat that winds up in your... 💩 The cells get replaced every two or three days. That requires LOTS of energy and repair.
Every ray of 🌞 that strikes your skin damages your DNA. Your skin is in DNA repair mode nonstop. Gotta git dat niacin, gotta git dat ni-ni all the time-time.
Rea-D-D-D-y to learn about niacin deficiency?

(You'll get that spelling joke in a just a sec. Trust.)

Niacin Deficiency

Let's consider severe niacin deficiency first. It will help us think clearly about what moderate deficits might look like.

Severe niacin deficiency is called pellagra. Optimists say it's the three D's: dementia, dermatitis, and diarrhea. Pessimists add the fourth D: death.

The "dementia" actually starts out as depression. When it gets bad, it turns into suicidal or aggressive behavior, and eventually to hallucinations and schizophrenia-like psychosis. Some cases of depression might be pellagra. There's no way to know except to look for a niacin deficiency, try to fix it if you find it, and see if the depression goes away. Same with schizophrenia. The tell-tale sign it's a true niacin deficiency is that high-quality food or niacin supplements make it go away in minutes. We've tried treating regular schizophrenia with niacin, and it doesn't work. Strangely, though, there's a connection. Most people get a "flushing" reaction to high-dose niacin that we'll talk about in just a bit. Schizophrenics and their close relatives tend not to flush. Perhaps run-of-the-mill schizophrenia involves some kind of disturbance in niacin metabolism?

The next D, dermatitis, starts with red skin. As it gets bad, the skin starts scaling and gets much darker. The tell-tale sign it's niacin deficiency is it only occurs when you go out in the sun. This is because the sun causes DNA damage and there's not enough niacin to repair it.

The diarrhea is just that -- diarrhea. You can't replace the cells that absorb your nutrients, so you stop absorbing nutrients. You develop other deficiencies, and all the stuff you don't absorb gets flushed out the other end.

So what might we expect from more modest deficiencies?

One possibility is just very weak versions of pellagra -- depression that responds to niacin, gut problems that respond to niacin, or skin problems that get worse in the sun.
Accelerated aging in any form. Especially of the skin. And especially as a result of sun exposure.
Fatigue or exercise intolerance, because of its role in energy metabolism.
People with poor niacin status are more likely to have an inflamed esophagus.
They're also more likely to develop cancer of the esophagus, skin cancer, and leukemia. Failure to repair DNA correctly may be the culprit.
How to Get Niacin From Food

Look, we're not done talking about how nuts niacin is.

There are three ways to get niacin:

✅ We can actually MAKE niacin from protein! (nuts, right?)

✅ The niacin in grains, seeds, and coffee is bound up, and these foods need to be processed in special ways to release it.

✅ Niacin is freely available in animal foods, yeast, and pulses (lentils, peas, and beans).

Protein

Making niacin from protein ain't easy.

Making it from protein requires iron, riboflavin, and vitamin B6. Deficient in these? You're out of luck. In men, the ability to convert protein to niacin might just be a way of getting rid of excess protein. The body doesn't have a way of engaging the pathway more when you need more niacin. In women, estrogen increases the conversion of protein to niacin.
Is this a way to support the huge energy needs of making a baby? Or to supply the baby with niacin? I don't know, but it means that you make more niacin when you're ovulating, about to start menstruating, taking birth control, pregnant, and young. You make less after menopause.

The RDA, the official recommendations for how much niacin we need, says that women need less than men. But they ASSUMED this because women weigh less and eat less than men. Even the studies they had in 1998, when they made the RDA, showed that women needed more. And the role of estrogen suggests women have specific needs for niacin during times when estrogen runs high. Women may be better than men at making niacin from protein. So women on high-protein diets who have plenty of iron, riboflavin, and vitamin B6 in their diet might need less preformed niacin than men. But women on low-protein diets or who have deficiencies in those nutrients (SO MANY WOMEN!) likely need more food niacin than men.

And neither men nor women make more niacin from protein specifically because they eat less niacin from food. So there's never a guarantee you'll get enough from protein.

Coffee, Grains, and Seeds

Please don't tell me you like weak, light roast, decaf coffee. 😔

Coffee is a great source of niacin, but:

💪 Roasting frees the niacin. Compared to light roast, dark roast doubles it and Italian heavy roast triples it.

💪 The stronger your coffee, the more niacin in a cup. The weaker your coffee, the less.

😳 Decaf cuts the niacin in half.

85-90% of niacin in whole grains is bound up, and 40% of the niacin in seeds is bound.

✅ Traditional rising of a yeast bread frees 25% of the niacin.

✅ Sprouting for 3 days frees 20% of the niacin.

✅ 8-hour sourdough fermentation frees 80% of the niacin.

✅ Baking with 3.5 grams of baking soda per 100 grams of flour frees all of the niacin.

So:

Don't trust nutritional databases for coffee, grains, or seeds.
Make strong, dark or heavy roast, fully caffeinated coffee.
Use a combination of 3-day sprouting and 8-hour sourdough fermentation for grains, or bake them with a hefty dose of baking soda.
I recommend eating enough protein AND covering your needs for preformed niacin from food, leaving enough wiggle room to cover increased needs during pregnancy and lactation.

For protein, eat between 0.5 and 1.0 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. Double this if you weigh yourself in kilograms. Consider more if you're an athlete.

The Five Tiers

For food niacin, we can break it down into five tiers. In all cases, a "serving" is 3-4 ounces unless otherwise stated.

Tier 1 gives you enough niacin for a day in one serving. This includes fresh yellowfin or shipjack tuna, anchovies, liver (beef, lamb, pork), and unfortified nutritional yeast in the amount of 3 heaping tablespoons.

Tier 2 gives you enough niacin for a day in two servings. This includes peanuts and peanut butter; liver (veal, chicken, turkey); most fresh meat products from typical farm animals and game if they are lean cuts; certain fish (canned or fresh bluefin tuna, salmon, mackerel, yellowfin, halibut, American shad, sturgeon, cod, mahimahi, and bluefish); certain seeds (hemp, chia, sunflower).

Tier 3 gives you enough niacin for a day in 3-5 servings. This includes most but not all other finfish (but not shellfish); sesame seeds and tahini, pumpkin and squash seeds, pine nuts, almonds, chestnuts, flax seeds, peas, cuts of meat that are not muscle or liver (e.g. tongue) or are fatty cuts of muscle, many mushrooms (white, portabella, shiitake, oyster, crimini). Tier 3 also includes coffee *if* it's Italian "heavy" roast (that's darker than dark roast!) brewed with 10 grams of coffee per cup.

Tier 4 are foods that you can feel free to bulk up on without *hurting* your niacin status, but they aren't doing you any big niacin favors. This includes most beans, most crustaceans, processed meats, white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, kale, cabbage, and whole grains processed to fully free their niacin. If you brew it at 10 grams per cup and keep it fully caffeinated, dark roast coffee occupies the top of tier 4, while light roast occupies the bottom of tier 4.

Decaf? Weak coffee? Fuggedaboutit.

Tier 5 is foods that you can *only* bulk up on if you meet your requirements from the first three tiers first. This includes virtually all other foods not mentioned above except sugar, fat, and enriched flour.

Enriched flour has niacin added and tends to occupy tiers 2 or 3.

Sugar and fat don't have niacin. The more sugar and fat you eat, the more you detract from your niacin status and the more you need to focus on niacin superfoods.

For children, adjust the doses based on food intake. If they eat half as much as you, feed them half as many niacin-rich foods. If they eat twice as much, feed them twice as many. To put numbers on it, divide all the doses in the lesson by 2, then multiply them by every 1000 Calories your child eats.

Making It Simple

Are you feeling the need to simplify? 😬 I am! 😁

Across all of our lessons so far, we see that:

✅ Liver is a great source of vitamin A, riboflavin, and niacin, but not thiamin.

✅ Unfortified nutritional yeast is a great source of thiamin and niacin, but not riboflavin or vitamin A.

So...

✅ A half ounce to an ounce of liver per day and 3 heaping tablespoons of unfortified nutritional yeast would take care of ALL your needs for these four nutrients without worrying about anything else, and without relying on any unnatural, synthetic vitamins.

Comforting, right?

Other Causes of Deficiency

Deficiency isn't just about diet. Here are a few other things that cause deficiency:

❌ Hartnup's disease, a rare genetic disorder.

❌ Serotonin-producing tumors.

❌ Digestive disorders such as Crohn's and megaduodenum.

❌ Certain drugs used to treat cancer, autoimmune disorders, tuberculosis, and Parkinson's.

❌ Alcohol abuse.

❌ HIV/AIDs

A few other things are likely to increase niacin needs:

❌ Bodybuilding directs protein into muscle-building instead of niacin synthesis.

❌ Stress does something similar by directing protein into synthesis of serotonin, your stress-coping chemical.

❌ Anything that lowers energy production, like thyroid and adrenal problems, are likely to hurt niacin status.

❌ Anything that causes cellular damage, ranging from simple sunlight exposure to injury, disease, and aging, depletes niacin in repair processes.

Remember how sunlight and tanning destroyed riboflavin? It also makes *you* destroy your niacin to repair your DNA.

And aging? We all age! Since we all age, and aging depletes niacin, many people in the anti-aging community are enamored with niacin supplements.

Niacin Supplements

Niacin supplements have a lot of promise... But they also have a dark side.

This dark side goes well beyond the famous flushing reaction (redness, heat, itching) to high-dose niacin used to manage cholesterol. Unlike thiamin and riboflavin, niacin can be toxic. In fact, enough niacin can cause liver failure in humans and can kill lab mice.

What causes liver failure? We detoxify niacin using methylation. We mentioned methylation when we talked about riboflavin, and we will explain it in more detail when we get to folate (vitamin B9). High doses of any form of niacin will put a tax on the methylation system. Moderately high doses could make you feel weak or throw you off mentally and emotionally, while high enough doses can damage your liver.

With that said, there are ways to manage these problems. So let's talk about each form of niacin supplement and how to use it safely.

NICOTINIC ACID

This is often just called "niacin." It's used at high doses to lower cholesterol levels. It seems to reduce the risk of heart disease, but for every 7 people it saves from heart disease it gives 3 people diabetes.

Using this form in this way has NOTHING to do with using niacin as a nutrient. It works as a drug that alters how you handle fats and carbohydrates. The best way to avoid diabetes (apart from not taking it) is *probably* to avoid snacking on carbs in the 3-6 hours after each dose of niacin you take. This is also the form that causes flushing (redness, heat, and itching). Taking 325 mg aspirin 20-30 minutes prior can fix the flushing. Taking glycine at half the dose of the niacin *might* help.

SLOW-RELEASE AND INOSITOL HEXANICOTINATE

These are forms of nicotinic acid that reduce the flushing, but increase the risk of liver toxicity at high doses. Although small doses of inositol hexanicotinate in multivitamins and B complexes are probably perfectly safe, I'd rather avoid them.

EXTENDED-RELEASE OR WAX-MATRIX

Niaspan (prescription) or Enduracin (over-the-counter) are examples. These are forms of nicotinic acid that reduce the flushing but aren't as toxic to the liver at high doses when compared to the slow-release. If you insist on using niacin to manage cholesterol, you'll stop flushing so much if you just stick to your guns and keep taking it. But if you can't stand the heat, the best path out of the kitchen is to take the extended-release form. Still, I'm not a fan of using niacin to manage cholesterol.

NIACINAMIDE/NICOTINAMIDE

As a standalone supplement, this form is sort of pointless. It doesn't cause flushing in most people and it has a lower toxicity profile than the forms we discussed above. But it also doesn't do anything to manage cholesterol levels.

NICOTINAMIDE RIBOSIDE (NR)

This is the best form to use for anti-aging, but it's expensive. It's superior to all other forms at nourishing your niacin status, and it doesn't cause flushing or mess with your cholesterol. Reasonable doses to experiment with range from 75 to 2000 mg/d.

Warning:

The anti-aging benefits make sense and there are great studies in mice.
There are lot of positive stories from people taking this stuff.
But no one has shown this supplement to do anything great in humans with a properly designed study... yet.
NICOTINAMIDE MONONUCLEOTIDE (NMN)

This is probably digested into nicotinamide riboside before you absorb it. So it probably works just like NR.

Making Niacin Safe

Here are some safety suggestions for using ANY form of niacin:

✅ Don't use high-dose niacin supplements for any purpose if you have a history of liver disease, or if you have diabetes, active peptic ulcers, gout, cardiac arrhythmia, irritable bowel disease, migraines, or alcoholism. If you *insist,* discuss it with your doctor.

✅ Always take it with food, and spread the dose evenly across each meal.

✅ Let your doctor know if you are taking more than 750 mg/d nicotinic acid ("niacin") or 3000 mg/d of niacinamide, NR, or NMN. Don't take these doses without a good reason to do so.

✅ Pair nicotinic acid ("niacin") or niacinamide with an equal amount of trimethylglycine (TMG). Pair NR or NMN with half the dose of TMG. This protects against liver toxicity.

✅ Pair nicotinic acid ("niacin") with half the dose of glycine. For example, for 1000 mg nicotinic acid, include 500 mg of glycine. You could also use gelatin or collagen if you multiply the dose of glycine by 3. For example, for 1000 mg nicotinic acid, include 1.5 grams of gelatin or collagen. Don't worry about glycine for the other forms of niacin.

When looking for multivitamins and B complexes, my preference would be to avoid nicotinic acid and inositol hexanicotinate. I would prefer nicotinamide riboside, but it's patented and isn't included in multivitamins or B complexes right now. Short of NR, niacinamide (nicotinamide) would be my preference.

Wrapping Up

Allright! Let's wrap up:

✅ Niacin is especially important to your mind, gut, and skin.

✅ Stress and injury as innocent as simple sunlight or as serious as dangerous diseases all increase niacin needs.

✅ 3 tbsp of unfortified nutritional yeast and 0.5-1 ounce of liver gives you all your vitamin A, thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin.

✅ If you don't use the superfoods, select your foods carefully based on the 5-tier distribution.

✅ If you use niacin to lower cholesterol, avoid snacking on carbs 3-6 hours post-dose and pair it with glycine and TMG.

✅ If you use niacin for anti-aging, use NR and pair it with TMG.

✅ If you use multivitamins or B complexes, look for niacinamide/nicotinamide.

Big important thread. Bump

Riboflavin is also known as vitamin B2.
I call it the FAT-BURNER.

Why?

Because burning fat requires almost twice as much riboflavin as burning carbs. You use riboflavin to burn anything for energy, and you need all the other energy Bs to burn fat. But none of the other Bs stand out as so clearly related to fat-burning as riboflavin. This doesn't mean that extra riboflavin will help you lose weight. But it *does* mean that when you lose weight you need more riboflavin.

In fact:

Losing weight increases your need for riboflavin by 60% during the active weight loss.
Doing 20-50 minutes of cardio six days a week increases your need for riboflavin by 60%.
Doing BOTH of these together more than DOUBLES your riboflavin requirement!
And what's nuts is that when you're losing weight you're eating less food. So your riboflavin intake goes down, but your riboflavin requirement goes up!

As we will see, though, you don't need to be losing weight to run low in riboflavin. In fact, recent estimates suggest that almost half of adults and over 75% of children run short on it.

Amazing Things Riboflavin Does

Why is this a problem?

Because riboflavin does lots of other amazing things besides burn fat:

It helps you absorb and utilize iron, which prevents anemia.
It prevents oxidative stress. Remember this from the last lesson? It's the wear and tear on our tissues that occurs with age. It contributes to a lot of diseases, and a lot of diseases make it happen more. So does exposure to toxins like cigarette smoke and alcohol.
It keeps the eyes healthy by preventing cataracts.
It prevents preeclampsia. This is a dangerous condition in pregnancy involving high blood pressure and swelling. About 5% of women with preeclampsia wind up with eclampsia, which causes seizures, hemorrhage, and in the worst cases death.
It lowers homocysteine, which many believe contributes to heart disease.
It supports a process called methylation, which contributes to mental and physical health in many ways that we'll talk about more when we get to folate (vitamin B9).
It helps keep blood pressure under control.
It helps you feel energetic and feel good when you exercise.
In people who suffer from migraines, high doses of riboflavin make the migraines shorter and make them happen less often.
Riboflavin Deficiency

When riboflavin deficiency gets REALLY bad, things really start going haywire, especially in your skin:

The outer edges of your lips get red and crusty.
The corners of your mouth crack or fissure.
Your tongue and all throughout the inside of your mouth gets red, bloody, and swollen.
The skin gets red, scaly, itchy, greasy, and painful. It's often infected with candida, a nasty fungus. It's worst at the outer edges of the nostrils, the smile lines, ears, eyelids, and genitals.
Your hands and feet can get unusually sensitive to touch, heat, or pain.
How Much Riboflavin Do We Need?

One way to look at how much riboflavin we need is to look at the RDA. The RDA is the recommended dietary allowance, the official recommendations for how much we need in a day. The RDA is 1.3 milligrams per day (mg/d) for men and 1.1 for women. Women require some extra during pregnancy and lactation, and children are adjusted down for bodyweight.

However, our true needs are probably closer to 2-5 mg/d. For children, I would divide the dose in two and multiply it by every 1000 Calories they eat. As we already covered, dieting and cardio will double the requirement by 60% each. High-fat diets increase the requirement by 20-40% depending on how much fat you eat. Exposure to sunlight and tanning beds increases your needs, but no one knows exactly by how much.

There is a famous gene known as MTHFR. We'll talk about it more when we get to folate, or vitamin B9. I won't tell you what people think that stands for, but I'll drop you a hint.

That's my bad MTHFR.

People who have a variant of this gene known as C677T have double the need for riboflavin.

So we might think of 2 mg/d as the bottom of a good intake, but as we pile on things like weight loss, cardio, high-fat diets, MTHFR, sunlight exposure, and tanning beds, we move toward needing 5 mg/d.

Getting Riboflavin From Food

Food sources come in five tiers.

Tier 1 gives you 2-5 mg for every 3-4 ounces (oz). These are foods where one serving a day keeps the deficiency away. Tier 1 contains liver. Chicken liver is at the bottom of the tier and pasture-raised lamb liver imported from New Zealand is at the top. But it's just liver in this tier. It's lonely at the top. But someone's gotta be there.
Tier 2 provides 1-2 mg for every 3-4 oz. These are foods where two servings a day keep the deficiency away. Kidney, heart, and almonds are in this tier.
Tier 3 provides 0.4-0.5 mg for every 3-4 oz. These are foods where four to five servings a day keep the deficiency away. Red meat, cheese, eggs, salmon, mushrooms, seaweed, sesame, wheat germ and bran are all in this tier.
Tier 4 provides 0.2-0.4 mg for every 3-4 oz. These are foods where five to ten servings a day are needed. This tier includes most other meats not mentioned in tier 3, and it includes milk.
Tier 5 is all the foods that are safe to bulk up on *if* they don't come at the expense of top-tier foods. These have little bits of riboflavin (0.1-0.3 mg) that are meaningful in high volumes, but eating them doesn't really help you out unless it's displacing sugar and fat. This tier includes whole grains, nuts, seeds, and vegetables (including beans and other starches).
Enriched flours tend to fall into tier 3 or 4.

A lot of people think nutritional yeast is a good source of riboflavin. It isn't naturally, but many products are enriched with riboflavin, just like refined flours are.

The foods that contain ZERO riboflavin are sugar and fat. These hurt your riboflavin status by displacing foods that have riboflavin.

Let's talk about three dietary patterns!

VEGANS

Vegans have fewer superfoods available. They have almonds in tier 2; mushrooms, seaweed, sesame, and wheat germ/bran in tier 3, but nothing in tier 1. They need to emphasize the vegan tier 2/3 foods, to avoid sugar and fat more strictly, and to bulk up on tier 5 foods.

HIGH-FAT

Burning fat requires more riboflavin, yet fat doesn't have any riboflavin! Since fat takes up room in the diet and displaces foods that contain riboflavin, it's a double-whammy against riboflavin status. The solution? Double-down on the riboflavin superfoods in tiers 1 and 2. Bulk up on the tier 3 foods.

For vegans, the problem is they don't have access to the top foods. But if they avoid sugar and fat, they can bulk up on the tier 4 foods. For high-fat, the problem is they don't have room to bulk up on the tier 4 foods. But they *do* have access to all the superfoods. So, leverage your strengths to make up for your weaknesses.

MINDLESSLY ALL-NATURAL

Doing things the natural way is great, but when you take control of your own nutrition, you take responsibility to learn proper planning. Refined flour is fortified with B2 by edict of the public health authorities. Cut it out and start eating more fat, and your riboflavin status will tank unless you start emphasizing the superfoods.

Other Causes of Deficiency

Riboflavin deficiency isn't all about diet. Here are some other causes of deficiency:

Low stomach acid hurts protein digestion, which is needed to release riboflavin from the proteins in food.

Exposure of YOU to sunlight or tanning beds destroys riboflavin inside of you.

Exposure of your FOOD to light kills riboflavin. For example, putting milk in sunlight for two hours destroys half the riboflavin.

Alcohol hurts your ability to absorb and use riboflavin. Alcoholics often have low intake too.

Low thyroid or adrenal hormones hurt your ability to activate riboflavin and cause you to lose more in your pee.

Poor magnesium status acts just like low thyroid and adrenal hormones.

Intestinal inflammation hurts your ability to absorb riboflavin.

Bad gut bugs may make riboflavin antagonists.

Diabetes, stress, trauma, and kidney dialysis (a treatment for people with poor kidney function) cause you to lose riboflavin in your pee.

As noted earlier, weight loss, cardio, MTFHR genes, and high-fat diets increase your needs.

Diabetes, heart disease, and cancer often provoke or exacerbate a riboflavin deficiency.

Anorexics are at high risk because of low intake.

Riboflavin Supplements

Good news! Like thiamin, riboflavin has no known toxicity!

There are two supplements on the market. Free riboflavin, plain old' normal cheapo riboflavin, is the first form. Riboflavin 5'-phosphate is the other form. It's often called FMN or "activated" or "coenzymated" riboflavin. There is NO EVIDENCE that the second form is EVER better than the first! Why? Because you cannot absorb it until you convert it into the cheap stuff. And if you have intestinal damage, you might not be able to convert it to the cheap stuff, and it might actually be *less effective.*

Although riboflavin is not a "fat-soluble vitamin," it mixes quite a bit with both water and fat. So it's *a little* like vitamin A. It's better absorbed with a meal, and the meal should have some fat. The natural fats in your foods are fine -- no need for gobs and gobs of added fat. Although you can absorb a lot of riboflavin at once, you will always hold on to the riboflavin and put it to use better if you spread the doses evenly across your meals. So if you take a supplement, the ideal thing is to take it at each meal.

Most people would benefit from a low-dose supplement of 2-5 mg/d on days where they can't meet the requirement from food. You can find liquid supplements that offer these doses, or you can find them in some B complexes and multivitamins.

I don't recommend using high doses unless you have a good reason to. However, there is no evidence that doing so is unsafe. 100 mg per meal would be an example. These are the doses effective against migraines! A number of rare genetic disorders are treatable with high-dose riboflavin. 10 mg per kilogram bodyweight for children, and up to 1500 mg/d in one case. Right now these are all genetic defects in riboflavin absorption or use. But there is a fascinating possibility that high-dose riboflavin can correct other genetic disorders that have nothing to do with riboflavin. Again, I don't recommend using high-dose riboflavin with no specific purpose, but trying it for strange, unexplained health problems just to see if they do anything is a reasonable idea.

Riboflavin supplements will turn your pee neon yellow. This isn't bad. It's riboflavin leaving your body when you couldn't activate it and start using it right away. It doesn't mean your dose was too high. It doesn't mean you're wasting riboflavin. You might need the high dose to ram it into your metabolism by force.

So let's wrap up!

Ideally, eat a half ounce to an ounce of liver every day, or 3-8 oz per week; eat a few foods from tier 2 or 3 every day, and minimize sugar.

Vegans avoid sugar *and* fat, and emphasize the tier 2 and 3 foods available to them.

High-fat diets, cardio, weight loss, tanning, and low-MTHFR genes require doubling or tripling down on the superfoods.

Various disease states, alcoholism, anorexia, and thyroid and adrenal problems are all red flags.

When foods won't cut it, supplement. Free riboflavin is best, taken with meals and spread out evenly across those meals.

Low doses of 2-5 mg/d are best for most people, but some people require high doses, especially for migraines (common) and genetic disorders (rare).

Thiamin and Glucose Intolerance
Eating carbs won't deplete your thiamin. But not getting enough thiamin *will* prevent you from burning carbs. What would happen if you eat carbs that you can't burn? The carbs will build up in our blood. Specifically, glucose, a type of sugar, is the main carbohydrate in our blood. If there is too much in our blood after we eat, we call it "glucose intolerance." Let glucose intolerance go on long enough, and we wind up with diabetes.

Thiamin deficiency isn't the only factor in diabetes, but it's probably one of them. There aren't many studies testing whether thiamin helps prevent our blood glucose from rising too much after we eat, but there are some, and they are promising.

A lot of people feel better on low-carbohydrate diets. Are they deficient in thiamin?

Let's come back to that when we talk about how we become deficient.

If modest deficiencies of thiamin make us bad carb-burners, what do really bad deficiencies do?

Severe Thiamin Deficiency

Ok, severe deficiencies of thiamin:

They make your hands and feet tingle, or become weak, numb, or painful.
They cause the muscles around your eyes to become weak, paralyzed, or disordered. This can cause twitching or drooping.
They can cause your heart rate to go up, or cause other heart trouble.
They can make it harder to control your own body movements.
They can make you feel weak.
They can make you feel confused.
They can make you feel apathetic.
They can give you amnesia, and cause you to make up, distort, or misinterpret your own memories.
When severe thiamin deficiency only affects your hands, feet, and heart, it's called "beriberi." When it affects eye muscles or your control over the bigger movements you make in your day-to-day life, it's called "Wernicke's encephalopathy." When it affects your mind, it's called "Korsakoff's psychosis."

In the absolute worst cases, severe, untreated thiamin deficiency leads to seizures, paralysis, and death. This is sad, because severe thiamin deficiency is often diagnosed *after* someone dies and they perform an autopsy. This is because many older medical textbooks insist on using the combination of eye problems, loss of control over body movements, and confusion for diagnosis. But a thiamin-deficient patient often just shows up feeling apathetic and moving more slowly, before things get rapidly worse... and become fatal.

Thiamin Deficiency Starves the Nervous System of Glucose

Notice how much these all center around your brain and nerves.

This is because your nervous system, far more than any other system in your body, requires glucose -- the major carbohydrate -- to function. Every day, your brain consumes 120 grams of glucose, the amount found in 3-4 large potatoes. This glucose doesn't just provide energy. It's also needed to make many of your neurotransmitters, the chemicals that your brain cells use to communicate with each other. These neurotransmitters are also what your nerves use to control your muscles.

You may have heard of the ketogenic diet. It's a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. When you spend a while on this diet, your nervous system readjusts how it uses its energy, and it starts consuming 75% less glucose than it usually does. And what are ketogenic diets most effective for? Epilepsy! That's what they were first invented for. So they help the brain. Many people report feeling calmer or sleeping better on them. More effects on the brain. Some people report brain fog that improves on a ketogenic diet. More effects on the brain.

Thiamin deficiency is overwhelmingly a problem of being a bad carb-burner, and having the nervous system starve as a result.

Are ketogenic diets just treating thiamin deficiency? Probably not "just." But thiamin may often be an important part of the picture.

Other Cool Things Thiamin Does

By the way, thiamin does some other cool things besides help us burn carbs:

It helps protect us from oxidative stress. This is the wear and tear on our tissues that happens as we age. It gets worse with metabolic diseases like diabetes, or exposure to toxins like alcohol and cigarette smoke.
It helps us recycle other vitamins, like vitamin K and folate (we'll get to those lessons soon enough!)
We need it for detoxification.
We use it to synthesize a lot of different things. For example, fats, cholesterol, and the building blocks of our DNA.
Getting Thiamin From Food

So how do we get thiamin from food?

The most certain way to do it is to eat three servings of anything from this list per day:

2 heaping teaspoons of nutritional yeast
3-4 ounces of legumes (lentils, peas, beans) measured before cooking
3-4 ounces of whole grains, measured before cooking
Enriched flour also has thiamin added to it, as a public health measure to prevent deficiency.

The thiamin content of meat is a confusing topic. Older databases say that red meat animals (beef, lamb, bison) have the most thiamin. They say pork is a mediocre source, and that poultry have very little. The newest databases say that pork is an awesome source, while red meat animals and poultry have very little.



I think I have an idea why there might be conflicting information about the thiamin content of animal products, and I'll explain it in just a bit. But for now, let's say meat is a "maybe."

You know what's a definite no?

FAT! That's right, fat has no thiamin to speak of. And this is the great irony. Although ketogenic diets spare thiamin better than any other diet, if they aren't designed carefully they can give you a thiamin deficiency. Even though you need twice as much thiamin to burn carbs as you need to burn fat, you still need thiamin to burn fat.

If your keto diet has several servings of meat per day, it has enough "maybe" food that it *might* keep you out of deficiency. But a heaping tablespoon of nutritional yeast, a thiamin supplement, or a multivitamin could go a long way if you aren't going to eat legumes or whole grains.

If you eat paleo, if you can tally these foods up to a total of 2 pounds measured before cooking, you can get plenty of thiamin:

Okra, Jerusalem artichoke; garlic; dandelion greens; acorn squash, and butternut squash; asparagus, kale, or Brussels sprouts; bamboo shoots; maitake, shiitake, oyster, or white mushrooms; taro root or leaves; white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams; beet greens; nori or spirulina; wasabi; mustard; thyme; caraway seeds; savory; nutmeg; anise; mace; marjoram; tarragon; curry.

And carnivore? Just go with pork and hope for the best? Or nutritional yeast.

In other words, yeast, legumes, and whole grains are our sure-fire tickets to Thiamin Land. If we don't eat them we rely on huge volumes of other foods, or supplements.

So how much sense does it make that low-carb or keto helps some people by sparing the need for thiamin, if these diets themselves are often low enough in thiamin to cause deficiency?

Well, to get a handle on this, we need to turn our attention to thiamin antagonists.

Thiamin Antagonists From Foods and Microbes

Here are a list of foods and microbes that contain things that actually hurt thiamin status:

Raw fish and shellfish

Ferns

The larvae of the African silkworm anaphe venata, a traditional food in many African countries

Various bacteria found in human feces (there are no tests for them! )

Several known fungi

At least one amoeba that sometimes pollutes drinking water

Sulfite

The antagonists in fish and shellfish and destroyed by heat. Their content in these foods varies widely for reasons that are largely unknown.

Sulfite is used as a food additive (!), is produced by gut bacteria that make your farts smell like rotten eggs, and is produced in our own body when we eat a diet high in animal protein and low in legumes.

The human gut is a black box. We know from research done decades ago that humans carry bacteria that destroy thiamin. We just have no way to test for them right now.

But this story gets even crazier.

Thiamin Antagonists In the Environment

Thiamin deficiency is being caused by something in the ENVIRONMENT. Thiamin deficiency bad enough to cause seizures and paralysis has been found in wild fish, birds, and reptiles from the US, Canada, Iceland, Sweden, and the UK. Outbreaks come in waves and affect the wildlife in large numbers. We DON'T KNOW what's causing it.

So could you wind up sparing thiamin by going low-carb, even if you cut out some of your best sources of thiamin in doing so?

Yes!

Or, at least, maybe!

As confusing as it is, this could make sense if we are suffering from exposure to unknown amounts of environmental thiamin antagonists.

Could this explain why older databases show different distributions of thiamin among meat products than newer databases do? Red meat animals like cows, buffalo, and sheep have a giant bacterial mega-factory called the rumen. A healthy rumen may provide these animals with lots of thiamin. An unhealthy rumen (from grain-feeding?) may provide them with lots of thiamin antagonists. We don't currently know if the mysterious cause of thiamin deficiency in wildlife also affects farm animals, but it might.

Other Causes of Thiamin Deficiency

There are a few causes of thiamin deficiency that we do understand well:

Gastrointestinal diseases hurt thiamin absorption.

Persistent vomiting causes us to lose thiamin in the vomit.

Liver diseases hurt thiamin storage.

Alcohol abuse hurts its absorption, its storage in the liver, and its activation for use with our enzymes

HIV/AIDS patients, anorexics, and hunger strikers are at high risk

Are Thiamin Supplements Safe?

Now, for some good news! Finally! Thiamin has no known toxicity! Zero! Zilch! This means that it's very safe to play around with thiamin supplements even if we don't know for a fact we have a deficiency and don't know for sure if they'd help.

There are a few different types. Thiamin hydrochloride or thiamin HCl is the cheapest and most common. Benfotiamine is more expensive. It's thought to be better at getting into the nervous system, but it's superiority over the cheap stuff hasn't been clearly demonstrated. Thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) is the activated form. In theory, it could be more effective for people who have energy problems (thyroid, low adrenals, diabetes). We know alcohol hurts our ability to activate thiamin, so maybe environmental antagonists do too. But none of this has been clearly studied.

So let's wrap this up with some take-home points.

Get thiamin from nutritional yeast, legumes, or whole grains if you tolerate these well.
Get it from huge volumes of the vegetables and spices I listed, if not.
Fixing your gut might help, but we don't know exactly how.
When all else fails, a carefully designed low-carbohydrate diet or thiamin supplements may help.
When supplementing, using 100 milligrams multiple times a day is safe!
We only get 1-2 milligrams from food, so expensive forms that provide, say, 10 milligrams may be perfectly effective.
Try the cheap stuff first if you're concerned with money. Try the others to see if you get better results.
You don't need to eat fat, or even food at all to absorb it.
Still, you will retain and activate more if you take it with food and spread the dose across your meals.
If you have signs of deficiency, or respond well to supplements, see if there are sources of antagonists you could clean up, like raw fish and shellfish, ferns, sulfites, or gut problems.

Put this thread together a while ago when I used to post more. It’s about all the mineral. It’s a good reference

Thanks thebear