Transcription
This is Tom Biernacki, and today, I'm talking about benfotiamine. So this is something that's synthetic. It's a vitamin that we should be getting, vitamin B1, but the beauty is there's novel uses compared to thiamine. This is a vitamin that's now 120 times more potent, and now, it's shown in double-blind clinical studies to be effective against neuropathy, nerve pain, chronic pain that's not getting better, and Alzheimer's. Is this thing worth taking? Well, we're gonna go over in the most recent studies, the symptoms, the deficiencies, and we're gonna look at who should be taking this potentially miraculous vitamin. We're starting now. (upbeat music)
So vitamin B1 is also known as thiamine. This is a water-soluble vitamin. Now, this was generally given by IV for people who were alcoholics or people who had a condition called beriberi. What are the symptoms of a vitamin B1 or thiamine deficiency? There's two types of deficiencies. There's wet beriberi and dry beriberi. Wet beriberi: This is cardiovascular issues, like heart problems, blood flow problems, fatigue, dizziness. And generally, if you got an IV bag with thiamine, this would get a lot better within about 24 hours. Around the world, especially in prisons, in alcoholics, this is very, very common. And there's also dry beriberi. So dry beriberi is the neurological problems. So the neurological problems, specifically, are numb hands, numb feet, burning hands and feet. So this is a very well-known older disease. You probably heard of beriberi, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about benfotiamine. This is that water-soluble molecule with a fat lipid shell around it. So it can actually be absorbed by our body because that was the problem with thiamine. I like to think about it as a fatty transporter that can kind of pass through to our digestive tract, and then the water-soluble vitamin goes into our bloodstream and starts doing its work.
Now, the studies are pretty amazing if we take a look at them, what's been happening in the 2020s plus. Normal levels of thiamine or B1 in the blood flow are 20 to 80 micrograms per liter. But the beauty is, as we show in the studies, because it's a water-soluble vitamin, a lot of the times your kidneys can excrete the extra stuff. With the B vitamins, what usually does happen is people who take too much, they're generally safe 99.9% of the time, although not every time, so don't take this as gospel. Some studies say B1 can actually help the kidneys and chronic kidney disease, but other studies show that it did cause a little bit of damage. There are some conflicting results here and it's hard to say what the perfect answer is. So just be careful and don't go do it extreme amounts if you have chronic kidney disease. The majority of the time, you can just pee it out, although there are some side effects, and we'll talk about that if you do take extreme amounts.
So benfotiamine is found in some garlic, in some onions, but not in high enough levels to normally eat. Regular thiamine is found specifically in lean pork chops, pork meats, hams. It's found in fish, salmon, flax seeds, beans, green peas, tofu, squash, asparagus. But the thing is, when I looked over the studies and the research paper and reviews, no one's just getting regular thiamine. The studies don't show that thiamine is all that effective because benfotiamine is 120 times more potent. You'd have to eat extreme levels of this synthetically-derived vitamin to match the thiamine needs needed within these specific studies. And the thing is, it's not overly expensive, and we'll talk about the best places to get it at the very end.
What is the synthetic molecule? Well, it's basically in a lipid shell, that's how I like to think about it, and it likes to pass through the skin. It's a little bit more complicated, but what happens is benfotiamine turns into thiamine after it gets into our bodies. So it's a precursor. Basically, thiamine can't get into the body by itself, and what thiamine does is it creates the activation of transketolase enzymes by way of thiamine diphosphate. So there's something called the pentose phosphate pathway. The precursors here get turned into advanced glycation end products. So this is from high blood sugar levels, diabetes, for example, and it can be related to Alzheimer's disease and diabetic neuropathy. But basically, what happens is the precursors to create these advanced glycation end products, thiamine uses those up so that you can't form those dangerous advanced glycation end products. To highlight this, a study in 2013 basically showed people who had high levels of thiamine or B1 in their system, even though they had high blood sugars, the endothelial vascular damage and the nerve damage did not happen to quite the levels that it did with people who did not have high levels of B1. So it doesn't necessarily lower your sugars, but it really lowers the bad products that develop from the sugars. So that kind of achieves the goal, even though, ideally, you just want to eat healthy. And if you want to eat healthy, we have a lot of great videos on healthy diets below. And if you're interested, our top seven inflammatory foods, which sugar is one of them, is down below. Very, very helpful video for these nerve disorders.
Thiamine also decreases metabolic stress and acts as an antioxidant, and it's not just preventing beriberi. Benfotiamine has been linked to decreasing anxiety, decreasing peripheral neuropathy, decreasing diabetic neuropathy, helping with Alzheimer's disease, depression, fibromyalgia, sciatica, thyroid disease. Now, the highest level studies, so the double-blind studies, are really for diabetic peripheral neuropathy and Alzheimer's disease, and it's kind of by those pathways that I mentioned. And in these studies, they basically gave people between 300 to 1,000 milligrams benfotiamine, and what this did was they did studies and questionnaires. So basically, they did neurological exams like as your Alzheimer's getting worse. It got better in the people who were taking it versus the people who did not in a statistically significant way. And the numb hands, the burning hands, the numb feet, the burning feet, that significantly got better as far as symptoms as well. And there's a great study that started in 2022. It's not complete yet, but they're working with high levels of people on both sides. So a placebo, people not taking it and they're blinded to it, versus people who are taking it and they don't know they're taking it, and they're gonna compare the results as far as neuropathy pain goes. Based on the previous papers in smaller levels, it's probably gonna work out in the vitamin's favor versus not taking the vitamin.
These are some very, very impressive studies, and the beauty is that toxicity is relatively low. Theoretically, water-soluble vitamins, like B1, you just pee it out. Unless you have kidney problems, unless you have other stuff going on, it's probably not a problem. In one of these papers, they didn't find any problems until people started taking about 7,000 milligrams per day. That's pretty high, but it gave you some nausea, some dizziness, some anorexia, some other stuff. Don't take it for weight loss. The beauty is, with this, it's not the world's most expensive vitamin and there's some high-quality vitamins available. So between that 300 to 1,000-milligram level, it's generally considered safe to take. So if you have numbness, burning, and tingling in your feet and your legs, it's worth a try. But here's the disclaimer: Always check with your doctor. In most studies, people take about 300 milligrams to about 600 to 900 or so per day, as long as you don't have chronic kidney disease or get over 7,000 is really where the negatives start to kick in. There's a lot of low-cost pill bottles available, and also we put links that you can get blood tests below. But nothing beats going to see a doctor for testing and evaluating. In these tests, it did take at least two to three months to start seeing some results, but it may be sooner. So the beauty is neuropathy from a B1 deficiency is only one out of many, many, like basically 100 plus different causes. So if you wanna learn more about neuropathy and ways to help that, come visit us in Michigan or click on this video for the most common causes. So if this video helped you, definitely share it with your friends and catch you on the next one.