Vitamin Therapy: The Need for Both Personalization and Awareness of Systemic Effects

Hey, here's a very interesting little bit of news to use as it relates to vitamin therapy. You know, there's been a long standing debate as to whether vitamins given at doses higher than the so called recommended or suggested dietary intake have any benefit at all. And we recognize if we move over into the field of molecular medicine, this is a term that was actually coined by Linus Pauling back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that there are examples of inborn errors of metabolism that respond to therapeutic doses of vitamins and will improve metabolic function and reduce the symptoms of the disease. So somewhere in between these two examples is where we are really starting to look at what the role of vitamin supplements might have on improving function. Well, let's talk a little bit about the B vitamins here. Particularly I want to focus on biotin, one of the B complex vitamins that was discussed in the New England Journal of Medicine. And a very interesting article this is in the August 18 edition of 2016 of the New England Journal of Medicine under the title Biotin Treatment Mimicking Graves Disease. And they go on to point out in this article that the B complex vitamin biotin has been used therapeutically for the treatment of various types of metabolic disorders that are genetically linked. The biotininase deficiencies and the biotin riboflavin and biotin thiamine, inborn errors of metabolism that require up to 1000 fold the normal recommended dietary Allowance levels of biotin in order to improve function in these children that have these neurological diseases that are B vitamin responsive. So here's an example of where, you know, the medical therapy, nutritional pharmacology is giving doses of vitamins at very high levels. And in fact, there are six patients that are described that have these inborn errors of metabolism who are given high doses of thiamine and riboflavin and biotin for their mitochondrial encephalopathies, or mitochondripathies, as they're called, where they have defects in their mitochondrial bioenergetics as a consequence of these inborn errors, of which they can then modify to some extent the blockage that occurs in these enzymes as a consequence of the high intake of these vitamins. And what they found when they gave high doses about and again, about 1,000 times the normal dietary intake that in some of these children, actually five of the six, they ended up with laboratory signs of a thyroid disease called Graves disease. And they were very worried about this and they said, oh, biotin causes Graves disease at high dose. And they went on antithyroidal therapy to try to ameliorate what they thought was Graves disease. However, in further study, this article points out that they actually didn't have Graves disease. What they had was that biotin at high doses in the blood interferes with the blood test that's used for determining thyroid hormones. The thyroxin, triothyonine, thyroid binding globulin are interfered with by the presence of high levels of biotin. It's not causing the disease, it's causing an artifact in the blood test that then suggests the disease. So these children were actually over treated thinking they had Graves disease. I think the important takeaway from this again is that everything has a safe range of function and that vitamins, like anything else, have certain places where excessive doses might produce toxicity. But the range of safety for vitamins is generally far greater than any other substance that we would consume from non natural sources. You have a fairly wide range, but there are certain things that can be interfered with with high levels of vitamins in the blood. Like we know that high levels of vitamin C intake can interfere with the blood test. One of the kinds of blood tests is for sugar in the blood, glucose in the blood, and so you could get a false reading of diabetes when a person is on very high levels of vitamin C supplementation. So you have to be aware that some of these blood tests can actually be interfered with with high doses of vitamins present in the blood. But that their second takeaway is, is that these nutrients, these B complex nutrients, do have the ability to improve function of certain enzymes that are sloppy or sluggish due to genetic alteration in their function, certain SNPs. And that this supports the model that Roger Williams and Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer were discussing as it relates to the important role of utilizing the right level of a nutrient to produce the right function in the right individual. That we can't say. There is a prescriptive number that is perfect for all people. People. I think this is a very good example of how something like biotin can play a significant role in improving function in people who have certain genetic imperfections in the way that it is being metabolized.