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.