thiamine - Page 8

Mitochondria Need Nutrients

Published on
24.8K views
happy mitochondria

One of the more common questions I get asked is which nutrients do the mitochondria need to function well? This is really two questions. The first involves which nutrients are involved in the enzymatic processes that allow the mitochondria to convert food to ATP and to manage all of the other tasks that they are responsible for like inflammation, immune function, and steroidogenesis. The second question applies specifically to the individual. It is a question of what he/she needs to be healthy. The answers to both are entirely different. While it is true that there are a set of nutrient co-factors involved in the mitochondrial machinery and these are necessary for mitochondrial function for everyone, which ones and how much of each an individual may need to support his or her health varies significantly. Moreover, although there are baseline minimum nutrient requirements that tell us where insufficiency diseases are likely to develop, what determines an individual’s health or disease is entirely dependent upon genetics, exposures, diet and lifestyle, and even day to day stress. Here, there is no one-size-fits all prescription for nutrient replacement and supplementation or even diet and exercise. This frustrates folks to no end and I think it is one of the reasons both patients and physicians are so reticent to look toward nutrient supplementation seriously as a therapeutic option.

Both the current model of medicine, and to a large degree, the way we approach nutritional therapies, relies very heavily on the silver bullet approach to health. If we’re honest with ourselves, so too do we. It is so much simpler to believe that if we just take X drug or vitamin in Y dose, all of our health issues will disappear and they will disappear at set rate that is linear and predictable. Unfortunately, this is not how the body works. While there is an internal chemistry that requires certain nutrients to function appropriately, that chemistry varies ever so slightly by genetics and is endlessly modified by life itself. There is no one-size-fit-all. There are no magic supplements. There is just your chemistry and your needs.

Since I have written repeatedly on the mitochondria and the reasons why nutrients are required for health, this post will not tackle those topics. Articles on those topics can be found on Hormones Matter with any number of search terms. This information can also be found in the book, Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition, that I co-authored with Dr. Lonsdale. Here, since many have requested it, I just would like to present a graphic illustrating mitochondrial nutrient requirements. This is from Chapter 3 of our book. Use this as template to understanding your health.

Figure 1. Nutrient requirements for healthy mitochondria.

mitochondrial nutrientsA few things should be pointed out. First, while these nutrients are required by everyone for proper mitochondrial functioning, not everyone needs to supplement with each one, or even sometimes any of them, although that is becoming increasingly rare with modern dietary patterns. Secondly, notice how many times and where vitamin B1 (thiamine) appears in this chart. It is at the entry points of the entire system and at various junctures throughout. This suggests that among all of the nutrients required for healthy mitochondria, thiamine is particularly important. Unfortunately, it is the one nutrient that is so often ignored or missed in testing. Indeed, that is why we wrote the book. Thirdly, notice how many vitamins are required to process the food we eat into ATP. Contrary to popular opinion, we need more than simply empty calories. For the foods we eat to be converted into ATP, there are multitude of vitamins and minerals required that may or may not be included in sufficient density with the macronutrients we consume daily. Finally, not discussed in this chart, but discussed in great detail in the book, synthetic chemicals, whether in form of pharmaceuticals, industrial, environmental, or food production, damage the mitochondria. Some deplete nutrients directly, while others damage aspects of mitochondrial functioning that necessitate increased nutrient density for the enzyme machinery to work. Of course, underlying all of this, are the genetic variables that each of us brings to the table. These influence how well or poorly we metabolize any of these nutrients from the get-go. All of this combines to make nutrient therapies complicated.

What is not complicated, however, is that we need nutrients to function and so, no matter what else we do to improve health, if we do not address nutrient concentrations, we can never be well. Mitochondrial functioning demands nutrients, and thus, health demands the same. Nutrient deficiencies are not something we can override with a pharmaceutical. That being said, addressing nutrient deficiencies holds great promise for those seeking health. If you or someone you love experiences chronic and complicated illnesses that have been treatment refractory, consider healing the mitochondria by tackling nutrient deficiencies. You might be surprised at well this works.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

This article was originally published on November 11, 2019.

Related posts:

mitochondrial exerciseHow To Exercise Your Mitochondria When You Can’t Get Out of Bed Health requires energyHealth Requires Energy. Energy Requires Nutrients. exercise mitochondriaExercise Heals Mitochondria fluoroquinolone time bombThe Fluoroquinolone Time Bomb – Answers in the Mitochondria

You might be interested in

Health Requires Energy. Energy Requires Nutrients.

Published on
17.8K views
Health requires energy

A Fundamental Issue

I was horrified to watch the “60 Minutes” program Sunday, April 12th, 2020 on television that dealt with the colossal number of Americans suffering from obesity, chronic fatigue and diabetes, both types I and II. About half of the program dealt with the essential consumption of natural food, reminding us that Hippocrates, 400 BCE said “let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food”. This must have been said thousands of times but everything in our modern civilization is totally destructive to the whole idea. I have seen so many hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose illness was caused by themselves. It was treatable by making sure that each individual understood the fundamental issue. So before I illustrate a typical illness situation within my experience, I will try to state what I mean by describing what I consider to be the “fundamental issue”.

We behave according to what we eat.

I have stated this so many times but unfortunately the American medical profession is the major inhibitor to its clinical success. When a suffering patient with many symptoms arising from what I call “dietary mayhem”, goes to his or her physician, they simply do not recognize the clinical expression of the popular high calorie malnutrition. The many symptoms are usually referred to as psychosomatic and the unfortunate patient is told that “it is all in your head”. I have witnessed this so many times; I cannot understand why the physicians don’t pay a little more attention to what the patient is trying to tell them. Often the patient has discovered the real cause of the problem but find that her words are considered to be the voice of ignorance and delusion.

Food and Energy

Our food consists of fuel that must be burned (oxidized) to liberate energy. In any text this element of the food is described as “calories”. The energy quality of our food intake is measured in kilocalories and a single one is defined as “the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water through 1°C”. Notice the use of the word energy, the result of oxidation. Now, as everyone knows, vitamins and minerals, known as non-caloric nutrients, are vital to the release of energy from the caloric elements. To understand how this combination of chemicals works, there must be a ratio of calories to the noncaloric elements. That is why high calorie foods without vitamins or minerals are known as empty calories. It is the consumption of empty calories across America that has given rise to the idea of high calorie malnutrition. I have actually seen a written statement that this is an oxymoron. “How can excess of calories be considered a form of malnutrition?” It seems that few people understand this vital ratio and they seem to think that as long as you are consuming calories, you will flourish. Also, the food industry fills the grocery store with cartons of temptation and seems to have no regard for the well-being of its consumers. They keep using the term “all natural” so much, it becomes meaningless.

A Typical Case of Energy Deficiency

I was a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic and one of my interests was sudden infant death (SIDS). So one day I was having lunch with one of the surgeons who practiced ear nose and throat surgery. He told me that he had been called to the medical ICU because a woman had stopped breathing and he had performed a tracheostomy. He was intrigued by the reason for this disaster and, knowing my interest, he suggested that I should take a look. Pediatricians are assumed to be familiar with diseases of children but ignorant of adult disease and I knew that I was  not welcome. I found a 50-year-old woman who was grossly edematous and unconscious. Without considering the technical details, I proved that she had the vitamin B1 deficiency disease beriberi. With injections of thiamine she became conscious and the edema disappeared. During her recovery she developed a progressive anemia, thought to be evidence of internal bleeding, but all the tests were negative. I took some urine from her and subjected it to a special type of test. It showed that she was deficient in folate, another B vitamin. It is important to note that she did not develop folate deficiency until she began her recovery from thiamine, it was masked by cellular energy deficiency. When she began to receive folate there was an immediate recovery from the anemia but she had been given at least one injection of thiamine by then.

She was discharged from hospital, wheelchair bound, taking both thiamine and folate. When she returned as an outpatient, I found that she had a skin rash and that her legs were, if anything, weaker. It had long been known that anemia would develop from either folate or B12 deficiency, but the folate deficient variety required B12 supplementation as well as folate. If B12 was not provided, the patient would develop paralysis of the legs and I had forgotten this. Also, it is not well-known that vitamin B12 deficiency can cause a skin rash. I gave her an injection of B12 and the rash disappeared. However, for a few days she had muscle aches and fever that I did not understand at that time. Looking back I would now assume that this was what we call “paradox” on Hormones Matter. To those that may not have read about this it is the temporary worsening effect by introducing an essential nutrient to someone who has long been deficient in that nutrient. One of the things that had probably been a serious indictment on self cause was that she was a chronic cigarette smoker, a well-known habit that damages oxidation.

Energy Metabolism

Can we extrapolate from this case any general ideas about how medical treatment should advance? Perhaps the general opinion would be that this is a rare and unusual case, an outlier from the “usual and customary diagnosis”. But if we consider the facts; long-term cigarette smoking, dietary indiscretion and genetic risks appear to be quite common. I treated a 12-year old girl  with a conventional diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, using a  nutritional supplement. Without discussing the technicalities of laboratory evidence, it was clear that defective energy metabolism was the underlying cause. The combination of genetic risk, failure to adapt to any form of stress (infection, trauma, chronic useless brain activity etc.) and inadequate energy metabolism are the three factors that either collectively or singly lead to breakdown of health. As Selye predicted, energy for adaptation is the essential ingredient.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

Image by Inns-Web from Pixabay.

This article was published originally on April 22, 2020.

Rest in peace Dr. Lonsdale, May 2024.

Related posts:

sleep requires energySleep Requires Energy mitochondria energyMitochondrial Energy, Not Genetics, Underlies Health and Disease mitochondrial stress and energyUnderstanding Mitochondrial Energy, Health and Nutrition thiamine plus magnesiumWhy Thiamine Supplementation Requires Magnesium

You might be interested in

Medication and Vaccine Adverse Reactions and the Orexin – Hypocretin Neurons

Published on
17K views
orexin hypocretin neurons brain energy

A paper published in Science Translational Medicine, provides preliminary evidence that the H1N1 Flu Vaccine Pandemrix can evoke immune system mediated damage to the orexin – hypocretin neurons and induce narcolepsy in individuals with a particular genetic variant. The orexin – hypocretin neurons were only recently discovered in the mid 1990s, by two separate research groups, hence, the two names for the same molecule. For this paper, we’ll be utilizing the orexin nomenclature.

Initially, the orexin neurons were thought to be involved only in feeding behavior, as damage elicited hypophagia in animals. Soon it was learned that more severe damage to the orexin neurons induced narcolepsy and the orexin system became a key focus in narcolepsy related research. With time, however, it became quite clear that these neurons were involved in regulating a myriad of hormone and neurotransmitter systems and their consequent behaviors. Narcolepsy or rather the ability to sustain wakefulness, is but one of the many functions regulated by the orexin system.

In a previous paper, I touched briefly on the possibility that the orexin neurons might be damaged and have diminished functionality in individuals suffering from post Gardasil side effects. In particular, I suspected these neurons were indicated in post-Gardasil hypersomnia, a derivative of narcolepsy. That may be only the tip of the iceberg. As I soon learned, the hypocretin/orexin neurons are brain energy sensors and may be involved in array of post medication or vaccine adverse reactions. Indeed, they may be central to the ensuing state of sickness behaviors that emanate once an organism becomes overwhelmed.

The Orexin – Hypocretin Basics

Orexin nuclei are located in the lateral hypothalamus, the section of the hypothalamus that is most known for regulating feeding, arousal and motivation. The hypothalamus is the master regulator for all hormone systems and hormone related activity including feeding, sleeping, reproduction, fight, flight, energy usage – basically every aspect of human and animal survival. It sits at the interface between the central nervous system functioning and the endocrine system functioning.

From the lateral hypothalamus, orexin neurons project across the entire brain with its two receptors (OXA and OXB) differentially distributed throughout the central nervous system and even in the body, including in the kidney, adrenals, thyroid, testis, ovaries and small intestine. The orexin neurons also modulate local networks of adjacent neurons within the hypothalamus that in turn influence a myriad of behaviors.

The most densely innervated brain regions include the thalamus, the locus coeruleus, dorsal raphe nucleus, accounting for the hormone’s role in arousal, feeding and energy management. At the most basic level, release of the orexin induces wakefulness. When orexin neurons are turned on and firing appropriately, arousal is maintained. When orexin neurons are turned off, diminished or dysfunctional, melatonin, the sleep promoting hormone, is turned on. The two work in concert to manage wakefulness and sleep.

Orexin receptors are also located in the amygdala, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and throughout the limbic system, accounting for its role in emotion and the reward system. Orexin directly activates dopamine in the VTA. The VTA is the reward, addiction, and in many ways, the pleasure center of the brain. All drugs of addiction, all pleasurable activities, activate dopamine in the VTA. Through the release of dopamine, here and elsewhere, orexin modulates the motivation to sustain pleasurable activities. When orexin is diminished, not only does dopamine diminish, but the motivation to sustain behaviors decreases and dysphoria increases.

That’s not all. Orexin influences the release of many other neurotransmitters and hormones, several of which are co-located on the orexin neurons themselves. For example, the neuropeptide dynorphin is co-located on orexin neurons. Dynorphin is an endogenous opioid involved in the perception of pain and analgesia. It has dual actions that can both elicit analgesia or pain depending upon dose and length of exposure. Stress activates dynorphin. Dynorphin then inhibits orexin firing by as much as 50%. Illness is a stressor, a vaccine is a stressor, either could activate dynorphin and inhibit orexin. After the initial activation of dynorphin, and the ensuing decrease in orexin, the presence of chronic stressors and chronic pain could begin a continuous feedback loop of diminished arousal, and increasing pain.

Other Neurochemical Connections

  • Consistent with orexin’s role in arousal, orexin neurons contain glutamate vesicles. Glutamate is the brain’s primary excitatory neurotransmitter. Drugs that increase glutamate, also increase orexin. Drugs that block glutamate, via its NMDA receptor, decrease orexin. Common migraine medications block glutamate and thereby may also diminish orexin.
  • Serotonin and norepinephrine decrease hypocretin/orexin firing (suggesting if one is concerned with hypersomnia, anti-depressants might not be a good option).
  • As one might expect, orexin neurons are inhibited by GABAα agonists – sedatives. From a women’s health perspective, consider that cycling hormones would also affect orexin neurons through the GABAα pathway. Progesterone is a GABAα agonist – a sedative, while DHEA and its sulfated partner DHEAS are GABAα antagonists, anxiolytics that block GABAα, reduce sedation, and thereby increase anxiety and wakefulness. There may be a cyclical nature to orexin firing that has yet to be investigated.
  • The hypocretin/orexin neurons also influence galanin, a GI and CNS hormone that seems to inhibit the activity of a variety of other neurons in those regions.

These are but a few of the brain systems that the orexin neurons touch in some way or another. Damage to this system would have serious health consequences by initiating a cascade of biochemical changes within the brain and body. Many of which, we have yet to fully understand.

How Might the Orexin Neurons Become Inhibited?

Quite easily, apparently. In addition to the orexin’s vast interconnected pathways with a myriad of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, the orexin neurons act as energy and activity sensors with some unique intracellular mechanics that make them especially sensitive to the changing dynamics of the extracellular milieu. Disruptions in ATP, glucose and temperature, elicit reactions in orexin functioning.

Orexin neurons require as much as 5-6X the amount of intracellular ATP to maintain firing, and to maintain a state of wakefulness or arousal. This extreme sensitivity to reduced ATP makes the orexin neurons uniquely positioned to sense and monitor brain energy resources, early, before ATP levels become critical in other areas of the brain. The orexin neurons cease firing when ATP stores become low, thereby allowing the reallocation energy, perhaps to those cells required for survival, breathing and heart rate. As Hans Selye observed many decades ago, one of the first, and indeed, most consistent of the sickness behaviors, no matter the disease, is lethargy, fatigue and sleepiness. Orexin is at the center of this behavior.

Orexin neurons react to extracellular glucose levels, though perhaps not as one might expect. When extracellular glucose levels are high, orexin neurons stop firing via what is called an inward rectifying potassium (K+) channel that is ATP dependent. That means that when extracellular glucose is high, intracellular ATP is allocated to open K+ channels and flood the cell with the inhibitory K+ ions. K+ hyperpolarizes the cell, prohibiting it from firing. This mechanism reminds me of Dr. Peter Attia’s talk about the nature of Type 2 Diabetes and our approach to treatment. He proposes that the body’s metabolic response – the conservation of energy – to Type 2 Diabetes is not something aberrant but is exactly as it should be with a disease state. We’re just not treating the correct disease state.

Another way we can shut down the orexin neurons is via increased temperature. The orexin neurons are very sensitive thermosensors. Increased temperatures shut down orexin firing via the inward K+ flow. Again, this is consistent with sickness behaviors and the reallocation of resources.

Orexin – Hypocretin Neurons in Migraine and Seizures

Diminished orexin has been linked to migraine and seizure activity. With migraines specifically, orexin may contribute to the early warning, hours to days, of impending cortical disruption via changes in feeding and sleep patterns that often precede migraine onset. Orexin may also be linked to the pre-migraine aura mediated by changes in brain electrical activity that prelude the migraine pain itself by minutes, called cortical spreading depression or more appropriately, cortical spreading depolarization – the massive spreading change in ion balance of the neurons. Initially the wave is excitatory, neurons are firing, but that is soon followed by a period of neural silence. Finally, orexin is also connected to the vasodilation of the trigeminal nerve, the nerve responsible for migraine pain. These findings have led some to call orexin a migraine generator.

Diminished cerebral spinal concentrations of oxerin have been found in patients generalized tonic-clonic seizures. Conversely, in rodent studies, injections of orexin elicit seizure activity. Despite the somewhat contradictory findings in seizure activity versus migraine activity, it is likely that the orexin system is involved both disease processes.

Pulling it all Together: Orexins Monitor and Mark Disruptions in Brain Homeostasis

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Although some have argued orexin, particularly diminished orexin functioning, is the cause and culprit of disruptions in brain homeostasis, leading to narcolepsy, excessive sleepiness, migraine, seizures and other diseases, I think this system represents merely a marker of a disease process. I think the orexin system is the stopgap, the final barrier of disrupted cellular energetics, of mitochondrial function. Mitochondrial ATP is the key.

When we consider orexin’s role in migraine, in particular, we see clearly how environmental changes (diet, stress, illness, medication/toxin exposure) can lead to changes in the extracellular milieu where orexins reside. The orexin sensors adjust to these changes, mostly by reducing neural firing in attempt to counteract damages. The reduction in orexin then elicits the premonitory phases of the impending brain disruptions, sleep and hypophagia – the sickness behaviors. If it progresses, the massive waves of electrical disruption ensue, and migraine, perhaps even seizures are evoked. When the extracellular environment become chronically disrupted, so too does the diminishment of orexin activity, thereby initiating a perpetuating loop of dysregulated brain activity. We can hypothesize that similar progressions exist with disease processes marked by aberrant electrical activity, such as epilepsy.

We know that mitochondrial dysfunction is often generated by genetic polymorphisms and can predispose individuals to an array of seemingly unrelated conditions like migraine and fibromyalgia, dysautonomias and cognitive deficits. At the root of the dysfunction is a error of some sort in mitochondrial energy processing – ATP.

What has become increasingly clear, is that the production of cellular energy, can be disrupted environmentally, by diet, illness and exposures, if co-factors necessary for the production ATP like thiamine are diminished. It is via diminished ATP production, that I think some medications and vaccines evoke adverse reactions in some individuals. The orexin system, because it is so exquisitely sensitive to changes in cellular energy, is our warning system; first by subtle changes in neurochemistry, then by changes in arousal and feeding behavior, and finally, by an all-out reallocation of resources – excessive sleeping. If ATP remains deficient chronically, and an individual is so disposed, then the cortical misfiring we see in migraine and seizure ensues, along with autonomic dysregulation and the syndromes associated therewith. It is not the orexin – hypocretin system that is at root of many of these diseases, but rather, the causes are deeper yet and reside with mitochondrial health.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

Image created using Canva AI.

This article was published originally on January 29, 2014.

Related posts:

Lupron mitochondriaLupron, Estradiol, and the Mitochondria: A Pathway to Adverse Reactions protein orexin hypocretin brainThe Brain Needs Protein, Say What? epidemic of silenceThe Epidemic of Silence With Adverse Drug Reactions adverse drug reactions are like earthquakesAdverse Drug Reactions Are Like Earthquakes

You might be interested in

Thiamine and the Energy To Heal

Published on
9.6K views
thiamine and the energy to heal

Over the last 8 years or so and since the publication of our book: Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition, I have written dozens of articles and given countless interviews and talks on the importance of thiamine. Just last month, I was privileged to give a talk on thiamine at The Forum for Integrative Medicine. While the talk was recorded, it was available only to conference attendees, physicians, and other practitioners. So that others may have this information, I am including the PowerPoint below.

The talk was entitled: Thiamine and the energy to heal. In it, I outline why we ought to be looking at thiamine, why we are not, and why so many people are walking around with insufficient thiamine relative to the demands not only of modern living, but also, for their own genetic predisposition and unique constellation of environmental exposures. All of the benefits of modernity that we enjoy so readily, the fast and convenient foods with chemical preservatives that extend shelf life, the agricultural chemicals that promise to maximize production, the industrial chemicals that make transportation, heating and cooling, computer and cell phone technologies possible, and modern medications that override natural systems, all deplete thiamine and other nutrients. In other words, modern living demands more nutrition that we provide and that, I believe, is the root of all illness.

Sadly, conventional wisdom disagrees. We are taught that food availability, no matter its composition, equates with nutrient sufficiency. With a good portion of the population overweight or obese, the idea that we may be fundamentally malnourished seems comical. When speaking of nutrition, even prominent researchers and physicians use the term ‘over-nutrition’ to describe the health risks associated with being over-weight. Read just about any article on obesity and the term will likely be used. I won’t belabor the point, but I have to note, that how we define nutrient sufficiency determines whether or not we understand deficiency.

The title of the talk – thiamine and the energy to heal – points directly to the key concepts both Dr. Lonsdale and I have been pushing for years: that healing takes energy and energy takes thiamine. We know this intuitively. What do we do when ill? We rest to conserve energy. Over the last several decades, however, we have forgotten that in order to conserve energy, we have to be able to make energy. No amount of energy conservation will help if one cannot make energy efficiently in the first place.

So how do we make energy? Biological energy or ATP is synthesized by deriving from the foods we eat essential macro (amino acids from protein, fatty acid from fats, and glucose from carbohydrates) and micro nutrients (vitamins, minerals, and metals) and funneling those substrates through a series reactions to make ATP. Those reactions take place in the cell, but mostly in the mitochondria, and all of them require ample nutrients to run. The manufactured ATP then drives everything else. It gives us the energy to live, to breathe, for the muscles to contract, the brain to function, the heart to beat, the immune system to fight illness, even the ability to die a peaceful death requires sufficient ATP. When we cannot make sufficient ATP to fuel the basic functions of living, to put it bluntly, sh%t goes wrong, and it goes wrong in some wildly bizarre and unique ways. Importantly, when we cannot make adequate ATP, no amount of rest will help. Indeed, some research suggests, extended periods of immobility may even degrade ATP synthesis. See here, here.

Why Thiamine?

Thiamine is key to making ATP. It serves as a rate-limiting nutrient to the entire process. If there is not enough thiamine relative to demand, ATP production suffers. Thiamine is the gatekeeper to mitochondrial production of ATP. It quite literally determines whether substrates of glucose can enter the mitochondria and produce up to 30 units of ATP per glucose molecule or if glucose has to be metabolized in the cell where we get only about 2 units of ATP per molecule. Thirty versus two is a huge difference in energy production. Imagine trying to function on such diminished energetic capacity. It just does not work.

That’s not all – thiamine is involved in fatty metabolism and fats can provide up to 100 units of ATP per molecule and it is involved in protein/amino acid metabolism where it determines the pattern of amino acids available for DNA/RNA and other functions. So thiamine is absolutely critical to health and we simply do not get enough from the modern diet both directly and relative to demand. Remember, modern living demands more thiamine than modern diets provide.

Returning back to having the energy to heal, if thiamine is instrumental in making energy, thiamine then is instrumental to healing. To the extent one is unable to heal or suffers with a chronic illness that will not resolve, it is very likely that thiamine intake is insufficient to the demands of the illness. Sure, there are other nutrients that are absolutely critical for health and healing and may also be deficient, but they are downstream of thiamine and require ATP to be managed effectively. That means when thiamine low, we are unable to utilize a whole bunch of other nutrients. It also means that many nutrient deficiencies may be relative to reduced ATP production from inadequate thiamine and not a reduction of the nutrient itself.

The bottom line is that thiamine is critical for health and healing and we ignore it at our own peril.

Thiamine and the energy to heal.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash.

Related posts:

pregnancy, thiamine, preeclampsiaThiamine, Pregnancy, and the Energy Connection Thiamine -key to energy metabolismWhat Is Thiamine to Energy Metabolism? Health requires energyHealth Requires Energy. Energy Requires Nutrients. mitochondria energyMitochondrial Energy, Not Genetics, Underlies Health and Disease

You might be interested in

Understanding Mitochondrial Energy, Health and Nutrition

Published on
15.1K views
mitochondrial stress and energy

I live in a retirement community. In my everyday discussions with fellow residents, I find that the idea of energy metabolism as the “bottom line” of health is almost completely incomprehensible. Since my friends are all well-educated professional people, I came to the conclusion that few people really have an idea about energy. For example, we talk about people who indulge in physical sports being energetic, while people sitting behind a desk are classed as sedentary. What we fail to realize is that mental processes require even more energy than physical processes. Both physically and mentally active people consume energy, so it is obvious that some kind of attempt must be made to talk about energy as it applies to the human body.

Hans Selye and the Stress Response

I will begin by giving an outline of the work that was performed many years ago by a Canadian scientist by the name of Hans Selye. Originally he was a Hungarian medical student. Some of the teaching was done by presenting individual patients to the class of students. The professor would describe the details of the disease for each person. What interested Selye was that the facial expression of each patient appeared to him to be identical. He came to the conclusion that this was the facial expression of suffering, irrespective of the nature of the disease. He referred to this as the patient’s response to what he called “stress”. He decided to study the whole concept of stress. He immigrated to Canada and in Montréal he set up a research unit that came to be called “The Research Institute of Stress”.

Of course, Selye could not study human beings and his experiments were performed on literally thousands of rats. He subjected them to many forms of physical stress and detailed the laboratory and histological results. He found that each animal would begin by mustering the well-researched fight-or-flight reflex. If the stress was continued indefinitely, the metabolic resistance of the animal gradually decayed. He called this ability of the animal to resist stress the “General Adaptation Syndrome” and came to the conclusion that it was driven by some form of energy. If and when the supply of energy was exhausted, he found laboratory changes in blood and tissues that were listed carefully. Although extrapolating this information from animal studies, he ended up by saying that humans were suffering from “diseases of adaptation” and that they were the result of a failure to adapt to the effects of life stresses.

My addition to this is that it would have been better to describe them as “the diseases of maladaptation”, meaning that humans have to have some form of energy to meet life. If there is energy failure, disease will follow. The remarkable thing is that energy production in the human body was virtually unknown in Selye’s time, so his conclusion was a touch of genius. The mechanism by which energy is produced in the cells of the body is now well-known. We know that energy consumption is greatest in the lower part of the brain and the heart, organs that work 24 hours a day throughout life. The lower part of the brain that organizes and controls our adaptive capabilities is particularly energy consuming. So before we begin to think about energy as a driving force, let us consider what we mean by stress and how we adapt to it.

Human Stress: Surviving a Hostile Environment

We all live in an environment that is essentially hostile. We have to adapt to natural changes such as cold, hot, wet and dry. We are surrounded by enemies in the form of microorganisms and when they attack us, we have to set up a complex mechanism of defense. Add to this the possibility of trauma and the complexity of modern civilization, involving business and life decisions. We possess the machinery that enables us to meet these individual stresses, meaning that we are adapting. Health means that we adapt successfully and that is why “diseases of maladaptation” makes a lot of sense. Obviously, the key is that the machinery requires energy.

Energy Metabolism, Physics, and Chemistry

First of all, let us begin by trying to define energy. The dictionary describes it as “a force” and the only way in which we can appreciate its nature is by its effects. It is not a substance that we can see but the effects of light energy enable us to have vision. The old riddle might be mentioned; “Is there a sound in the forest when a tree falls?” The answer is of course that the only way that the resultant energy can be perceived is when it is felt by the human ear. Even that is not the end of the story, because the ear mechanism has to send a message to the brain where the sound is perceived. Thus, there is no sound in the forest when a tree falls. It is the perception of a form of energy, a force that impacts on the ear of any animal endowed with the ability to hear. Energy can be stored electrically in a battery or as heat energy in a hot water bottle, but the inevitable process is that the energy drains away. A hot cup of coffee cools. A battery gives up its stored energy and becomes just “another lump of matter”.

For example, if a stone is rolled up a hill, its natural tendency would be to roll down the hill again. Whatever force is being used to roll the stone up the hill is known as “potential energy”. In other words, there has to be a constant supply of energy as long as the stone is moving up a gradient against gravity. When it reaches the top, we say that the potential energy is being stored in the stone. It is the equivalent of electricity being stored in a battery. The “potential energy”, however, requires an electrical force to “electrify” the battery. The potential energy in the stone can be released by allowing it to roll down the hill and Newton called this kind of energy “kinetic” (the use of a force to produce movement). The force that is being used is of course the effect of gravity and the stone becomes stationary when it gets to the bottom of the hill. The use of gravity as the source of energy is simply wasted, but note that gravity has not changed. It is still available for use. Let us take a simple example of this energy being used for a purpose. Suppose that there is a wall at the bottom of the hill and a farmer wishes to create a gate. In a fanciful way he could use the stone to create a gap in the wall. The gap in the wall is the observable mark of the effect produced by consumption of kinetic energy.

The body consists of between 70 and 100 trillion cells, each of which has a special function. Each is a one-celled organism in its own right and in order to perform their function they need a constant supply of energy. This is developed by complex body chemistry. The “engines” in each cell are called mitochondria and one of their many different functions is to synthesize energy. The energy that is developed is stored in a chemical substance known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and in order to understand this a little more, perhaps we should think of the Newtonian analogy for comparison. The Newtonian hill is replaced by an electronic gradient and the stone by the chemical ATP

Of Mitochondria and ATP

Cellular energy is produced in the mitochondria by oxidative metabolism. This simply means that a fuel (glucose) combines with oxygen but, like any fuel, it has to be ignited. The best way to analogize that is to say that thiamine can be compared with a spark plug that ignites gasoline in a car. It “ignites” glucose. The resultant energy is used to add a phosphate molecule to adenosine three times to make ATP (the electronic gradient). We have “rolled an electronic stone up an electronic hill”. As the adenosine donates phosphate molecules, it becomes adenosine monophosphate (AMP) that must be “rolled uphill again”. As it is “rolling down the electronic hill”, it is transferring energy. Therefore, ATP can be thought of as an energy currency. Note that there must be a continuous supply of fuel (food) that must contain the equivalent of a spark plug (thiamine) in order to maintain an energy supply with maximum efficiency.

The loss of any one of a huge number of components in food that work in a team relationship with thiamine, lowers the energy maximum. That is why thiamine deficiency has been earmarked as the major cause of a disease called beriberi that has haunted mankind for thousands of years. Its deficiency particularly affects the lower part of the brain and the heart because of their huge energy demand. Since the lower brain contains the control mechanisms that enable us to adapt to the environment, as depicted above, it is easy to see that we would be maladapted if there is energy deficiency, just as Selye predicted. In fact, one of his students was able to produce a failure of the General Adaptation Syndrome by making his experimental animals thiamine deficient. It also suggests that a lot of heart and brain disease is really nothing more than energy deficiency that could be easily treated in its early stages. If the energy deficiency is allowed to continue indefinitely because of our failure to recognize the implications, it would not be surprising that changes in structure would develop and produce organic disease.

Health and Disease in the Context of Energy

With this concept in view, the present disease model looks antiquated. There are only three factors to be considered. The first one is obviously our genetic inheritance. If it is perfect, all it requires is energy to drive it. However, DNA is probably never perfect in its formation. It may not be imperfect enough to cause disease in its own right, but a slight imperfection would constitute what I call “genetic risk”, causing disease in association with a stressor such as an otherwise mild infection or trauma.

Suppose that a given patient died from an infection (think of the 2018 flu).The present medical model would place the blame on the pathogenic virulence of the virus without considering whether malnutrition played a part by failing to produce sufficient energy for the complex immune response. Therefore, the second factor to be considered is the perfection of the fuel supply and that obviously comes from the quality of nutrition. Stress (the viral attack or non-lethal trauma) becomes the third consideration, since we have shown that an adequate energy supply is required for adapting on a day-to-day basis. There is even a new science called epigenetics in which it has been shown that nutrient components can be used to upgrade genetic mistakes in DNA. A fanciful interpretation of these three factors, genetics, nutrition and stress can be portrayed by the use of Boolean algebra. This is a mathematical representation as interlocking circles. The area of each circle can be easily assessed, marking their relative importance. The interlocking area between any two of the three circles and that of the three circles together completes the picture. It becomes easy to perceive how a prolonged period of stress can impact health. The present flu epidemic may be an example of the Three Circles of Health in operation, explaining why some people have only a mild illness while others die. Could the appalling nutrition in America play a part?

Why Thiamine

The pain produced by a heart attack has always been a mystery in explaining why and how it occurs. The answer of course is that pain is always felt by sensory apparatus in the brain. The brain is able to identify the source of the signal as coming from the heart but cannot interpret the reason. I am suggesting that in some cases, the heart is having difficulties from energy deficiency and notifying the brain. A coronary thrombosis would introduce local energy deficiency, but other methods of producing energy deficiency would apply. It is logical to assume also that brain disease is a manifestation of cellular energy deficiency. That is why I had found that so many children referred to me for various mental conditions responded to megadoses of thiamine. It is also why I had found that so much emotional disease was related to diet and not to poor parenthood.

I recently came across a patient that I had seen many years ago when he was a child. He had a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, made elsewhere. I treated him with megadoses of thiamine and his symptoms resolved completely. Medical skepticism would answer this by calling it a placebo effect, but since this effect is well-known, it must have a mechanism. For many years I have believed that therapeutic nutrition “turns on” this effect by enhancing cellular energy. A small group of physicians known as “Alternative Medicine Practitioners” use water-soluble vitamins, given intravenously, irrespective of the acceptable clinical diagnosis. For example, I remember a young woman who came to see me with a diagnosis of “Thrombocytopenic Purpura”. This disease is a loss of cellular elements known as platelets and it had resisted orthodox treatment for years. I gave her a series of intravenous injections of water soluble vitamins with complete resolution of the problem. I must end by stating that healing is a function of the body. The only way that a healer can be justifiably recognized is by supplying the body with the ingredients that it requires to carry out the healing process. Perhaps spontaneous healing, as for example initiated by religious belief, is an ability to muster those ingredients that are present, but hitherto unused.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

Image by 422737 from Pixabay.

This article was published originally on February 14, 2018.

Related posts:

mitochondria energyMitochondrial Energy, Not Genetics, Underlies Health and Disease Stress and DietPoor Nutrition Stress: The Enemy of Health Health requires energyHealth Requires Energy. Energy Requires Nutrients. health, healing and illnessThe Exquisite Simplicity of Health and Illness: Mitochondria and Energy

You might be interested in

Healing From Lupron and Endometriosis With Thiamine

Published on
9.4K views
Lupron, endometriosis, thiamine

I was diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis in 1996. In 2017, I was ready for a hysterectomy. I had two children and was finished with childbirth. I was having a lot of pain on my left side where my ovary was located. My Veterans Administration GYN refused to do a hysterectomy without first giving me Lupron shots assuming that my pain was due to the endometriosis. I was trying to hold down a very demanding government job and missing a lot of work from the pain. I had two laparoscopic surgeries in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Both were to excise the endometriosis. At the time, I was required to take Lupron in order to have a hysterectomy, I was 46 years old. I was denied a hysterectomy after my son was born in 2000 because I was considered too young at 30 years old to have a hysterectomy.

Endometriosis in the Colon and Lupron

After the injections of Lupron, a colonoscopy confirmed a diverticula pocket in that spot that was painful and others on my large intestine. The laparoscopy and excision in 1996 confirmed that my endometriosis extended to my large intestine. The colonoscopy found that I have so many pockets of diverticulosis, a resection surgery was not possible. Basically, if I were to become septic due to an endometriosis/diverticulosis flare, they would need to remove all of my large intestine. My options were very limited. My GYN wouldn’t perform a hysterectomy and laparoscopy under the assumption that the pain I was having was due to endometriosis. He convinced me to start the shots to see if they would help the pain because he assumed the pain was due to endo. I didn’t research the Lupron injections much prior to receiving them. I fully trusted my GYN. He mentioned hot flashes and suppression of symptoms with estradiol.

Immediately I noticed a difference. I don’t take prescription drugs of any kind unless I am really sick. I had nothing for any preexisting conditions. I could not tolerate the injections and function at work. I had severe hot flashes every few seconds 24/7 for three months even with add back estradiol. Worse, the estradiol made my migraines flare and so I was a hot mess. After stopping estradiol, my migraines continued to flare and still do without supplementation. I was also having diverticulosis flares every month sometimes twice a month. I had terrible gas and severe IBS symptoms. My work leave, FMLA and advanced sick leave were dwindling from all the visits to the various doctors. Within three months of my last Lupron injection, I was forced to retire or be fired for not being able to work. I never fully recovered from the Lupron.

Finally, a Hysterectomy

My GYN finally agreed to the hysterectomy in 2018 where they found my left ovary and left fallopian tube in one mass of adhesion scarring with my large intestine. The GYN removed the left polycystic ovary, left and right fallopian tubes along with my uterus, which had fibroids, and cervix leaving me with just my right ovary. Prior to the hysterectomy, I began noticing some numbness and cramping or burning in my feet at work that was much worse at night. I had the same kind of cramping and burning in my lower back too. I would later learn that these are symptoms of thiamine deficiency. Trying to keep it together at work with all of this was a nightmare.

Around this time, I also began having severe nausea and pain in my stomach. The GI doctors did an upper GI scope to confirm duodenal ulcers. The digestive issues, especially the diverticulosis should disqualify anyone from having Lupron as Lupron causes major digestive upset according to the FDA fact sheet. My digestive tract was inflamed from mouth to anus post Lupron. I had an inflamed esophagus and ulcers, diverticulosis flares, IBS with constipation and diarrhea and hemorrhoids that I couldn’t heal with meds. The low FODMAP diet helped though.

No More Pharmaceuticals

In 2019, I finally stopped taking all pharmaceuticals. No pharmaceutical made me feel better. Every medication I took for GI issues and neuropathy made me worse. I only took one for one or two weeks at a time to log all my side effects from each so I could have them added to my growing list of allergic reactions. I did have some sensitivity issues with prescription drugs prior to Lupron, just not as bad. I have the MC1R redhead gene. Redheads are more sensitive to pharmaceuticals and have more adverse reactions. I struggle with topical solutions as well. I couldn’t use estradiol patches because I’m allergic to the adhesive. Thankfully, my primary care physician also has endometriosis and suggested herbal supplements and remedies. All of this ,surprisingly, is from the veteran’s hospital. I was ordered by her to stop working. This was a final attempt to heal my ulcers, as they would eventually kill me if I could not find relief.

How I Healed Myself With Thiamine and Diet

I decided to try high dose thiamine after researching it via Drs. Lonsdale and Marrs and Elliot Overton. I started with 100mg daily for 6 months. Then 500mg for 3 months and currently 1000mg (500mg 2x daily). The thiamine works as well as the acupuncture with EMS. I also take Alpha Lipoic Acid and Dandelion root daily. The increases in thiamine are proving to be a significant factor in recovery. If I miss one day of supplements I’m sick for several days so I’m convinced that it is working.

To help myself heal, I no longer work a 9 to 5 job. I follow a low FODMAP diet with modification for diverticulosis and supplement with elderberry or dandelion for inflammation and immunity, turmeric, prebiotic + probiotics, magnesium for bone loss, palpations, anxiety, alpha lipoic acid for neuropathy, high dose thiamine for neuropathy, fatigue anxiety and brain fog, b vitamins and D3+K2 for b1 uptake regulation and delta 8 CBD for fibromyalgia pain and fatigue. I have regular chiropractor adjustments of my neck and lower back. Acupuncture and light therapy on my feet helped with the burning and cramping.

Where I Am Now

Currently, I have no endometriosis pain, only some lingering PMDD. I have no ovarian cysts and the migraines are not as frequent. Now only a couple a month versus weekly. I still have some burning and cramping in my legs and feet, but it is tolerable. Before thiamine, I was bedridden. The back and neck pain I had previously has improved with thiamine along with physical therapy/yoga and regular chiropractic care. I no longer experience diverticulosis flares with the new diet and supplements for inflammation like dandelion root, turmeric, and elderberry. I switch out the dandelion and elderberry because they work about the same. Depends on what is on sale.

I am able to stand for longer periods of time. My anxiety is significantly reduced, my palpations are gone, I can remember things, and my ADHD flare ups are minimal. In 2022, I only had two mild diverticulosis flares. Prior to the diet changes and supplements, I was having them once a month. I went from being bedridden completely to cooking (I still need to sit some), cleaning with short breaks, gardening with a sit on garden cart, and walking about a half mile every few days. I still have numbness in both feet. I am hopeful that lowering my A1C will resolve this. It may be permanent. Only time will tell. I’m going to the VA this week for a checkup and requesting more PT to see if it will help. They did an EMP on both legs with normal results. That was pretty painful but I felt nothing in my 3 little toes on both feet. Overall, I am doing much better with the higher dose thiamine and have much more energy.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash.

Related posts:

lupron osteoporosisLupron Induced Osteoporosis? Healing our daughter with thiamine and vitamin K2Healing Our Daughter, Healing Ourselves child abuse, endometriosis, thiamine deficiencyEarly Abuse, Poor Nutrition, Endometriosis, and Thiamine Deficiency lupron injuryLupron: The Cycle of Negligence

You might be interested in

Charcot Marie Tooth Disease and Thiamine: A New Genetic Connection

Published on
13.5K views
Charcot marie tooth disease thiamine

It is very probable that a non-medical reader, coming across this title, would not be further interested. Charcot was a famous neurologist in France, Marie one of his students, and Tooth was an English neurologist. They were the first physicians to observe a disease pattern that reappeared from time to time in their experience. Because the cause was unknown, their names were used to document the disease in medical texts. This post is being written to describe its complex genetic mechanisms that are coupled with thiamine metabolism and the fact that it is the most common inherited neuromuscular disorder.

Symptoms of Charcot Marie Tooth Disease

Symptoms commonly begin in childhood or early adulthood, although they may appear much later. Muscle degeneration in hands and legs appears together with a burning sensation in feet and hands. There is decreased sensation in the feet and hands and an awkward gait that is observed in the patient. Abnormal curvature of the spine, known as scoliosis appears and there is increased clumsiness and tripping.

Prevalence data from the general population is lacking. At present 47 hereditary neuropathy genes are known to be involved and it has been estimated that 30-50 genes are yet to be identified. However, in 2018, it was shown that deficiency of a single gene (DHTKD1) in mice caused them to develop the symptoms of the disease.

DHTKD1 and Thiamine

Maintaining the functional integrity of mitochondria, the energy producing organelles in cells, is crucial for cell function. Mitochondrial dysfunctions may alter energy metabolism and in many cases are associated with neurological disease. Although the function of DHTKD1 in the mitochondria remains unknown, it has been reported that there is a strong correlation with ATP production, the currency of energy metabolism. Genetically determined suppression of DHTKD1 leads to Impaired mitochondrial biogenesis and increased reactive oxygen species. In simple language, energy production is impaired.

What interested me was that the structure of the DHTKD1 gene is reported to be associated with thiamine. Mutations have been associated with certain metabolites in urine (2-amino adipic and 2- oxoadipic acids), Charcot Marie Tooth disease, and eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE). The pathophysiology of these two clinically distinct disorders remains elusive. It suggests that named diseases, each with its alleged distinctive laboratory studies, could all be the variable result of cellular energy deficit. It calls to mind the energy dependent General Adaptation Syndrome that gave rise to the conclusions of Hans Selye who described human diseases as “The Diseases of Adaptation”.

An experiment in rats investigated the long-term changes in brain metabolism after a single injection of 400mg/Kg thiamine. Protocols were established for discrimination of the activities of the two dehydrogenase complexes that constitute the enzymes derived from the DHTKD1 gene. The thiamine induced changes depended on brain-region-specific expression of the thiamine dependent dehydrogenases. In the cerebral cortex, the “thinking” part of the brain, both were relatively high and did not increase with thiamine administration. In the cerebellum, part of the automatic brain function, the original levels of both were relatively low and the activities of both were upregulated by the injection.

Energy Deficiency

The well-known effect of thiamine deficiency (TD) is the disease called beriberi. Because the brainstem, limbic system and cerebellum are peculiarly sensitive to thiamine deficiency, the autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated, giving rise to symptoms of dysautonomia. Many case reports are to be found in the medical literature where a given disease has been found to be associated with dysautonomia, where the association observed is considered to be a mystery.

A case report of a single patient with eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) was reported to have TD as the underlying cause of the associated dysautonomia. Since it is well known that sugar easily induces TD, the publication asks whether EoE is a sugar sensitive disease. Thiamine is a necessity for the metabolism of the vagus nerve, part of the autonomic nervous that is now known to control the mechanisms of inflammation, an essentially defense mechanism that occurs in many disease conditions.

Beriberi is variably polysymptomatic. None of the symptoms are exclusive to the disease. The reason seems to be adequately explained by the fact that it is the most obvious energy deficiency condition known. Potentially affecting every cell in the body, it would be expected to have its major effects in the most metabolically active tissues. It is well known that the brain, nervous system and heart are the organs that answer to that criterion. I have always been interested in seeing a written report of a neurological disease in which heart disease is seen as an unexpected complication. The observer usually believes that this represents the appearance of a second disease instead of looking for energy deficiency as the cause of both.

Protein Folding and Thiamine

Enzymes are proteins and are constructed from long chains of amino acids bound together, possibly by electro-magnetic attraction. When not in use, the chain has to be folded, presumably for storage. When required for use as an enzyme it has to be unfolded. The folding/unfolding details of these chains are exquisitely complex and repetitive but the mechanism remains unknown. Every polypeptide has the capacity to misfold and form a non-functional protein.

A normal protein called the prion protein exists in the body. Its functions are largely unknown. It is also the key molecule involved in the family of neurodegenerative disorders, also known as prion diseases. Several forms of disease result from an accumulation of a variably misfolded isoform of this protein. Of profound interest, it has been reported from animal studies that the prion protein binds thiamine, leading to the hypothesis that thiamine metabolism might supply the energy required for protein folding and unfolding.

Genetics Versus Epigenetics in Charcot Marie Tooth Disease

The relatively recent discovery that nutrients can have an effect on genes has led to the science of epigenetics. It seems to be apparent that, although genes can cause a disease on their own, many genetically determined mechanisms may be insufficient to cause a disease by themselves. Perhaps the symptoms of a well-established, genetically determined disease such as Charcot Marie Tooth disease might respond clinically and biochemically to an epigenetic trial of a nutrient associated with its structure and consequent function. The symptoms of Charcot Marie Tooth disease are those that could be expected from a deficiency of energy affecting the genetically determined associated cellular defects.

Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s diseases and prion disease, as well as a variety of other disorders, are regarded as examples of an anomalous aggregation of proteins and all associated with thiamine. Also, Costantini and his group have shown that Parkinson’s disease responds clinically to high dose thiamine. This group had already reported that high dose thiamine had relieved the fatigue associated with ulcerative colitis and Crohn ‘s disease, implicating that energy deficiency was the cause of fatigue. The question arising from all of this – is energy deficiency the cause of disease, represented in a massive conglomerate of different manifestations ?

Conclusion

Charcot Marie Tooth is now an old-fashioned way of describing a disease, particularly because a single gene defect has been implicated to be responsible for this disease as well as EoE, two entirely different conditions. It is suggested here that the genetic changes lead to energy deficiency in the affected cells. Evidence is accumulating that Selye’s explanation of human diseases as the “diseases of adaptation” may be correct. Perhaps it may lead to general acceptance of Orthomolecular Medicine as proposed by the late Linus Pauling.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Benefros at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was published originally on July 14, 2021. 

Related posts:

serotonin syndrome thiamineSerotonin Syndrome and Thiamine: Is There a Connection? pregnancy, thiamine, preeclampsiaThiamine, Pregnancy, and the Energy Connection thiamine pre-eclampsia sugarNotes on Thiamine and Pre-Eclampsia: The Sugar Connection Modern thiamine deficiency - foot dropGenetic Thiamine Deficiency Ravaged My Family

You might be interested in

The Red Thread and Thiamine

Published on
22.6K views
thiamine red thread

There is a saying in China about a Red Thread connecting people who are destined to meet and/or help one another in a profound way no matter how far apart they may be. Our adopted daughter Abby is that red thread. Abby was abandoned and found on the day our oldest daughter, Kayla, turned thirteen. It was at this time Kayla’s health issues were becoming worse. Although we didn’t know exactly what was amiss, we knew that something was wrong. In our efforts to help Abby, our family’s health issues were brought into stark relief. It seems that all of us have suffered from longstanding thiamine insufficiency. Even though my two daughters were born worlds apart, that red thread connects us. We published Abby’s story last week in the hopes that it might help someone else. Here is Kayla’s story.

Unhealthy Beginnings for My Beautiful Daughter: IVF and Induction

Common sayings like ‘you are what you eat’ can be haunting, leading to guilt when we see our children suffer the consequences of our own ill health, especially during pregnancy. My gut was messed up and had been for a very long time before becoming pregnant. I was likely deficient in thiamine and other nutrients and perhaps that is why I struggled to get pregnant in the first place. Sometimes gut dysfunction is obvious, as with constipation or diarrhea, but more often it manifests itself in other ways. That was me. I had/have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and most likely also, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome (POTS). I did not know any of this though before pregnancy and have only recently, after hours upon hours of research, come to learn how my health impacted my daughter’s health.

Kayla was our first hard-fought-for child. We were married 10 years and had undergone numerous fertility treatments before we finally achieved a successful IVF. Looking back, I realize that I was not healthy prior to or during my pregnancy, even so it was mostly an uneventful pregnancy with little to no typical unpleasantries. I had low progesterone early on that required progesterone injections and suppositories, but after 13 weeks everything stabilized. I had a high blood pressure reading at only one routine visit in my 39th week. The doctor decided to induce. We didn’t question it at the time, but later did. At the hospital, he administered Pitocin, a synthetic oxytocin, without any nurses in the room and left.  The nurses later commented that they were surprised, since my blood pressure was back in the normal range upon admission. Pitocin is just one of my regrets. Why was my body not triggering labor? Gut dysbiosis? Maybe/possibly/probably or maybe she just wasn’t ready to come out.

A Truly Gifted Child

Kayla was an extremely bright child. She wanted to learn chess at four years old. By age 9, I stopped playing with her because she always won. She gave her math brilliant-grandfather a run for his money.  She was homeschooled through 9th grade followed by private and then public school. She was a straight ‘A’ student, participated in various athletics (swim, track, dance, horse riding, etc.) and mastered two musical instruments by the end of high school. Kayla ranked in the top 5th percentile nationally and did well in first semester of college, but little did we know how precarious her health had become. Perhaps because of her intelligence and achievements, many of her health issues and difficulties were disregarded by physicians. On the surface, she looks well. She is very high functioning, but she has been plagued with an assortment of complicated and largely unrecognized health and neurological issues since birth. During her first semester of college, a series of stressors brought her health crashing down and she is only now beginning to recover. Part of her recovery has been diet, part involves thiamine, but we are still missing some pieces, which is why we are publishing her story.

Early Childhood Symptoms and Triggers

Her early childhood was marked by early bouts of bronchitis necessitating antibiotics. She suffered croup through age 7 years and seasonal allergies through her teens for which she used Claritin regularly. Nighttime enuresis was a problem until we removed gluten from her diet when she was 12 years old. Similarly, her speech was often and seemingly randomly slurred. She received speech therapy through the school to no avail. In 2018, we removed dairy from her diet and the slurring disappeared. It appears that just as a gluten reaction triggered her nighttime enuresis, the ingestion of dairy was some sort of trigger for her slurred speech. I should note, before learning this, we experimented with probiotics, fish oils, digestive and pancreatic enzymes, and a variety of other supplements off and on for years with no noticeable or lasting changes. Her younger years were marked also by body temperature dysregulation, i.e., hot in the winter, cold in the summer. Finally, most things, not all, came easy to her. She had extreme strengths and weaknesses with her strengths often masking her weaknesses. Noticed by many of her extracurricular teachers hard things seemed easy, and easy things hard. Her brain craved complexity.

Vaccinations, Cyclic Fevers, and Green Drinks

In her preteen years, she received numerous vaccinations (required and strongly recommended) prior to our trip to China to adopt her sister. Shortly after, she began to develop worsening mood swings, anxiety, depression, brain fog and has experienced dizzy spells off and on since then.

When her menses began, she bled heavy for three straight weeks. Her doctor put her on birth control pills to stop it; again, a symptomatic treatment. She was borderline to severely anemic and often had PMS and painful periods.

During her teen years, she had repeat and unexplained fevers. She was sick with high fever/flu-like symptoms for three days every four weeks for three years. She’d get sick like clockwork! She would become weak, sleep a LOT, as if she were in a coma. Her doctor was stumped. I had been reading a lot about the use of systemic enzymes used by German doctors. The book by Karen DeFelice mentioned viruses often have a cyclical pattern. So we used high doses of ViraStop2x according to her protocol for a 3-week “holding spell” and it was gone. No more cyclical episodes.

In trying to get healthier, she began “green drinks” (spinach/fruit) 5-6x week. Six months later she was very sick: anemic again, double ear infection, abnormal EEG with heart palpitations, chest pain, and shortness of breath. The cardiologist had put her on a heart monitor for three days, but the results were normal. Perhaps oxalates? I began learning more about oxalates and we began eating less of these foods overall. I’m grasping at straws…

The Red Thread and Thiamine

In 2018, we learned about TTFD/thiamine and began taking Sulbutiamine. My younger daughter, Abby, has improved immensely. In fact, my entire family now uses thiamine and we all feel much better. Before taking thiamine, we all used to be so tired after spending a day at the beach and everyone would need to nap. Now, after supplementing with thiamine for a while, everyone still has high energy levels after these trips. Except for Kayla. Her results with thiamine have been mixed. There seems to be more at play. Perhaps she requires a higher dosage of thiamine or maybe additional nutrients are needed.

Her recent labs for CBC/CMP, thyroid, A1C, vitamin D are all normal. Manganese is low and prostaglandin F2 is elevated. There is some indication of malabsorption based on her bloodwork.  Recently, an Organic Acids Test indicated normal oxalates, low dopamine and serotonin, and extremely high ketones/fatty acids. She has had high folate levels in the past, but at present are normal. Her B12 levels at present are elevated.

In 2019, she began having occasional extremely painful periods where she would be on-the-bathroom floor curled in the fetal position until Ibuprofen kicks in. Her skin is often very pale. Her doctor is not concerned about the increasingly painful menses or the ketones/fatty acid elevations.

My frustration as a parent is that because most of my child’s bloodwork is normal, the doctors write-off her symptoms as stress-related and recommend things like yoga, meditation or saunas or some fluff. Not that these things are bad, but there is something more at work here and no one seems interested in figuring it out. I am bothered that when they do see markers of inflammation or malabsorption they ignore them or really don’t know what to make of it.

Environmental Causes Of Ill-health and Longstanding Thiamine Insufficiency

Over the course of these last years, I have come to realize how important diet and environment are to health. When the pond is poisoned, sadly the tadpoles are hit first, are hit the hardest and display the affects most noticeably. Our youngest child was hit hard. Her circumstances prior to adoption were not conducive to health and she has had many struggles to overcome those early stressors and nutrient deficiencies. Likewise, owing to my ill-health prior to and during my pregnancy and the subsequent western medical treatments, Kayla struggles too. The pond was poisoned for both of them. All lifeforms that drink from a poisoned pond will manifest problems at some point, in some way. Perhaps if we had known about thiamine when they were younger, their problems wouldn’t have manifested the way they did.

Fortunately, Kayla has always eaten healthy, and has been active and athletic throughout her life. As an adult, she experiments with the removal of foods for periods of time to see if things improve, such as grains or cow’s milk and she is cooking creatively. She has been sugar-free for over a year. She takes vitamins and minerals and Sulbutiamine. She recently switched to Lipothiamine and Allithiamine and is now slowly increasing it to see if her dizziness will abate at some point.

I would trade all of her past accolades to have her in better health. We don’t know where her road will lead. Healing is multi-dimensional and someday we hope to look back at today with those oft used words “remember when…”.

Michelangelo was nearing 90 when he said “I am still learning.”  I hope to be too.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

This story was published first on August 31, 2020. 

Related posts:

thiamine deficiency - dry beriberi legsDiet and Medication Induced Thiamine Deficiency – Dry Beriberi Dr. Lonsdale thoughts on COVID-19COVID-19 and Thiamine: An Interview With Dr. Derrick Lonsdale Thiamine pregnancyNotes On Thiamine Status During Pregnancy hyperemesis thiamine deficiencyLong Term Consequences of Hyperemesis Gravidarum Induced Thiamine Deficiency

You might be interested in

1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 13