Dr. Ada Ozoh – Page 4

Vitamin B1 (thiamine) is an essential nutrient for all living things. The human body can’t make thiamine. You have to eat it in your diet.
Vitamin B1 is abundant in pork, fish, liver, nuts (macadamia, sesame seeds) and yeast.

Are you diabetic? You need this vitamin! Everyone with diabetes should consider taking vitamin B1. Deficiency of this vitamin is much more common if you have diabetes. These problems arise from persistent high blood sugar.

What causes vitamin B1 deficiency?

Once again, a diet high in processed food is one of the culprits. Processed food is taken from its natural form and transformed into something else, usually less healthy.
For example, take a potato that becomes a potato chip. Another example is wheat which is processed to make bread.
Often, these steps needed to transform this food remove many of the vitamins and minerals. A diet that is high in processed food can lead to many different deficiencies.

Another cause of thiamine deficiency is eating too much sugar. Yet another is drinking too much alcohol. Some medications like antibiotics and vaccines can cause vitamin B1 deficiency. Bariatric surgery which alters the stomach and intestine in various ways, can also cause vitamin B1 deficiency.

Only about 5% of the vitamin B1 you eat is absorbed, so you’re more likely to develop vitamin B1 deficiency if you’re not eating enough.

Why is vitamin B1 deficiency a problem if you have diabetes?

Like everyone else, if you have diabetes, you may develop vitamin B1 deficiency from not getting enough in your diet. But there are also additional risks:

the kidneys don’t function well in diabetes which can lead to increased loss of vitamin B1 in the urine and
there is decreased reabsorption of vitamin B1 back into the blood so more is lost in the urine.

Symptoms and signs of thiamine deficiency

In the early stages of thiamine deficiency, the signs and symptoms are very non-specific. These may include:

tiredness,
excessive sleeping,
hair loss,
health problems,
nausea and vomiting and
loss of appetite.

You may also have symptoms like:

burning pain and
a feeling of pins and needles in your hands and feet.

That is similar to what you would find in nerve damage due to diabetes. Eventually, these symptoms and signs progress to:

uncontrolled body movements
difficulty in walking
loss of memory and other mental problems.

At this stage, you cannot reverse the damage that has occurred. In diabetes, vitamin B1 deficiency can manifest as elevated blood sugar and persistent mental problems.

What does Vitamin B1 do & why is it so important in diabetes?

Under normal conditions, when glucose levels are normal and all the required nutrients like vitamins and minerals are present, sugar in the diet is converted to energy in the mitochondria.

The byproducts of this process are called Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). These ROS are very harmful to the cell. There are mechanisms in place to handle them and ensure that they don’t cause harm to the cell.

When you have high sugar levels for long periods, the mitochondria can’t handle the load. So much ROS are produced that the cell can’t cope. The mitochondria try to protect themselves by churning out large amounts of a powerful antioxidant. In small quantities, this is great, but too much for too long is a problem.

Eventually, this leads to damage to the cells lining the blood vessels. It also causes problems with your nerves which leads eventually to the burning and tingling sensation in the hands and feet.

The cells try to find other ways to process all the sugar. These alternative pathways are not as efficient as processes that take place in the mitochondria. They produce unwanted chemicals as they’re trying to use up all the sugar. These chemicals damage the cells, especially the ones that line your small blood vessels and your nerves.

How does thiamine help in the cells?

Your body needs vitamin B1 to break down sugar efficiently. It helps other enzymes to do their work. In its absence, they cannot work efficiently. So, even if you have high blood sugar and high sugar in the cells, having enough thiamine helps limit the damage it causes and offers some protection.

In diabetes, there is a lot of sugar circulating in the blood. There is also a lot of sugar inside the cells. Your nerve cells send signals to the brain carrying information about what’s happening in your body and in your environment. There is so much sugar in the cell that it can’t be turned into fuel.

And that is the purpose of sugar. It’s supposed to turn into energy. When the sugar is too much, it gets shunted into other pathways that eventually lead to complications like burning and tingling of the hands and feet.

What vitamin B1 does is that it prevents this excess sugar from being channelled into reactions that will give rise to complications. So vitamin B1 is required to process glucose efficiently inside the cell. Unfortunately, people with diabetes tend to be deficient in thiamine when they need it so badly.

Treating thiamine deficiency

You can treat thiamine deficiency in several different ways by:

improving your diet and eating more natural food,
limiting your intake of alcohol,
limiting the amount of sugar in your diet,
supplementation (if you have a severe vitamin B1 deficiency you may not be able to get enough vitamin B1 from your diet).

What is benfotiamine?

Thiamine is a water-soluble vitamin. Only about 5% of what you take in your diet passes into the blood. However, there is another form of vitamin B1 that is better absorbed. This form is called benfotiamine. Benfotiamine is fat-soluble and is absorbed much better than regular vitamin B1. So you will achieve higher levels in the blood.

It also gets stored in the nerves because they have a high-fat content. That means that it can work better than regular vitamin B1 to relieve nerve pain and abnormal sensations that you may get from vitamin B1 deficiency.

Taking thiamine can reduce some of the complications of diabetes by up to 50%.
If you already have complications, taking benfotiamine can help to slow the progression of these complications and stop them from getting worse.

Even if you’re using benfotiamine with all its benefits, you still need to change your lifestyle by treating your high blood sugar and insulin resistance. That would include changes to your diet and managing your sleep and stress.

As always, anything you do that affect your health should be run by your doctor or healthcare provider first.

Have you used benfotiamine before? Or maybe you have been using the more popular form of vitamin B1 form, thiamine? Let me know in the comments.

Make your own yoghurt – It’s easy and cheap

Yoghurt has been a staple in our home for years now and we almost always have some in the fridge. The supply has been virtually unlimited since I started making my own at home. It is incredibly simple to do. It is one of the oldest and most popular fermented foods that is eaten in most cultures that keep animals for milk.

What is yoghurt?

Yoghurt is a semi-solid sour food prepared by adding bacteria to milk and allowing it to ferment. The most common bacteria used to make yoghurt are Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus.

Benefits of eating yoghurt

Why is it good for you?

Yoghurt may improve your gut health

It may help with issues like:

constipation,
diarrhoea,
inflammatory bowel disease and
Helicobacter pylori infection (a common cause of peptic ulcers).

Benefits for colon cancer

It may help to prevent colon cancer by:

changing the balance of the bacteria that are found naturally in your intestines and
decreasing the time it takes for food to travel through the intestines.

More health benefits for chronic disease

It may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.
It contains calcium and vitamin D which may help to prevent osteoporosis.
Blood pressure and cholesterol levels may be reduced by eating yoghurt.
Yoghurt may help to reduce anxiety and improve mood.
It may help with brain-related disorders like Parkinson’s Disease.
Yoghurt may help increase your immunity by stimulating white blood cells which help you fight disease.

Are you’re lactose intolerant?

About 70-90% of black Africans are lactose intolerant. Milk contains lactose (milk sugar) which is broken down in the body by an enzyme called lactase. If you don’t have this enzyme or can’t produce enough of it, the lactose passes on to your large intestine. This leads to varying degrees of abdominal pain, belching, farting, diarrhoea and vomiting. The lactose in milk is broken down by bacteria in the fermentation process. The longer you leave the milk to ferment, the more lactose is broken down and the more sour the yoghurt will be.

Yoghurt benefits for weight loss and exercise

Yoghurt helps to keep you fuller for longer so you will less tempted to eat unhealthy snacks.
It may help you lose weight and especially help to reduce belly fat.
Yoghurt may soothe muscles and help them recover after exercise.

More advantages from eating yoghurt

It may ease the diarrhoea which can occur after antibiotic therapy.
It may discourage vaginal infections by helping to keep the pH of the vagina low (i.e. increases the acidity).

To get all these benefits from yoghurt, it must have live cultures in it. This means that the bacteria in it must still be alive. Some brands kill the bacteria in the yoghurt so it can last forever on supermarket shelves. With live cultures, it will eventually go bad. Your nose will tell you when that happens.

Why make your own yoghurt?

Now the big question. Why should you take the time and the trouble to make your own?

You’ll know exactly what’s inside it.

Many commercial yoghurt has lots of yummy extras, like thickeners and preservatives added to them. You avoid all that by making your own. Remember the great British horse meat scandal? It became glaringly obvious (if it wasn’t already!) that we don’t actually know what we’re eating a lot of the time. Assuming what you’re using is actually milk, when you make your own, what you get at the end is plain fermented milk and bacteria. To be sure of your milk supply, you could always keep your own cows and/or goats. 😀

Some other great reasons to make your own yoghurt

It’s cheaper than buying it.

My homemade yoghurt typically costs half as much as the one I buy, though recently milk prices have gone up somewhat. This of course depends on the brands of both the milk and the yoghurt you use for your starter.

You can make it just as sour as you want and we like ours cheek-smackingly sour!
As long as you have milk you can make yoghurt. Milk is easy to find and will keep for a long time (eg. UHT, powdered and evaporated). With planning, you will always have a steady supply.
It’s really easy to make. Really.
It takes literally minutes to make. The rest of the time is down time spent waiting for the bacteria to do their thing.
You can make as much as you want. I typically make 4-5 litres at once. You are not restricted by the size of the jars.
This last reason is really important. You get to pat yourself on the back and bask in your thriftiness and ingenuity.

Once I decided I wanted to make my own yoghurt, I went out and bought myself a cute little yoghurt maker. Let’s just say, that experiment didn’t go well!

Some major disadvantages of using a yoghurt maker

It’s expensive when you can find it here in Nigeria. I bought mine before the era of Konga and Jumia and had to cart it back across the waters with the threat of excess luggage hanging over my head. I recently found a listing for a yoghurt maker on Jumia. It had a generous 2.5 star review from an extremely angry shopper who said it was basically a pile of junk.
It takes up space. How many gadgets do you have gathering dust at the back of your cupboards? Do you really need one more?
The jars are usually made of glass. If they break, you’re stuffed. Where are you going to get replacements?
It needs electricity. That’s a biggie. If you don’t live in Nigeria you may not understand what I’m talking about. Electricity. That scarcest of commodities! The yoghurt maker needs about 8 hours of constant electricity. How often do you have power for 8 hours at a stretch? Are you going to burn petrol or diesel in your generator just to make 6-8 teeny, weeny jars of yoghurt?

The main job of this bulky kitchen appliance is to keep the milk mixture at a constant, warm temperature. That’s it. Nothing else. Nada. Zilch. And I’m sure we can come up with a gazillion ways to keep milk warm. 🙂

How to make your own healthy yoghurt at home

Sterilise your containers.
Mix 1 or 2 tablespoons of plain yoghurt with 1 litre of warm milk.
Pour into prepared containers.
Insulate (keep warm) for about 4-6 hours or until the yoghurt sets.
Refrigerate for about 8 hours.

When it’s ready, freeze some and keep it for your next batch. That way you may never have to buy yoghurt again. Is it really that simple? Yes it is. Now let’s look at each step in detail to make sure you get perfect yoghurt every time.

Containers

You need to use clean dry containers to make yoghurt. Let’s make sure you’re encouraging good bacteria to grow and not the ones that will make you sick. If you wish, you can boil your containers in a pot for about 5 minutes and allow to cool. I recycle my tall, glass mayonnaise jars (sooo ecofriendly!). I’ve used plastic ice cream containers. You can use a pot, casserole dish, anything that you can cover. You don’t even have to sterilise, just make sure your container is clean and dry.

Warm the milk

Warm the milk to about 43°C which is supposed to be the best temperature for making yoghurt. I never bother measuring temperatures to be quite honest. I drop a little milk on the inside of my forearm. If it feels comfortably warm without burning, them I add the plain yoghurt. Please don’t burn yourself. You can heat the milk on the stove or in the microwave. Make sure it doesn’t:

boil over, or
burn.

Mix milk with yoghurt culture

Use 1 or 2 tablespoons of plain, unsweetened, full fat yoghurt for each litre of warm milk and mix thoroughly. I use a little whisk. Pour mixture into desired container. I like to recycle glass mayonnaise containers[/caption]

Keeping your milk warm

Finding different ways to keep your milk/yoghurt mixture warm is a fun mental exercise. Here are a couple of ways that have worked for me.

I put my jars in an old microwave. This was a bit limiting because the microwave was small. I like to make big batches.
I put my jars in a pre-warmed gas oven. Forgot to turn off the oven one time and totally cooked the yoghurt. Other than that one mishap, it worked well. Sometimes though, I needed to use the oven for something else (like baking bread) so it was occasionally inconvenient. You can leave off warming the oven and just put a pot of hot water or a rubber hot water bottle in the oven. Once, I forgot the hot water bottle was still in the oven when I lit it. Minutes later, the smell of melting rubber perfumed the evening air.
I’ve put the jars in a cardboard box and covered with blankets. This worked great.
Hot water in plastic containers – I put my jars inside a picnic cooler, put in the containers with hot water and leave for about 18 hours. This is the method I use now.

Here are a couple more ways to keep your milk warm:

An insulated thermos flask,
A cooler with a hot water bottle or heating pad inside,
A slow cooker

How long should yoghurt be cultured?

The experts generally recommend 4-6 hours, or overnight. After 6 hours pick up your container and tilt it slightly to the side. If the mixture stays put, then it’s set and you can decide to stop or leave it a bit longer. We like ours nice and sour so I leave mine for about 18 hours. Also, I no longer warm the milk before hand so some extra time is needed for the mixture to warm up before the process can get started. Some people leave their yoghurt up to 24 hours. It’s up to you to experiment to find out what you like.

Refrigerate

If you leave your yoghurt in the fridge, it will last for days without going bad. Refrigeration slows down the fermentation process and makes it firmer.

Author: Dr. Ada Ozoh

What does vitamin B1 do? + A powerful upgrade for diabetes