The Real Reasons to Use Vitamin B5

In this particular video, I want to get into a question that has been asked a number of times around vitamin B5. So vitamin B, the number 5, also known as pantothenic acid. So what does vitamin B5 do in my body and why would it be important for my health? Hey, I'm Dr. A, and on this channel we answer all questions, complex chronic illness, health, disease, medications, natural substances, et cetera. So the first thing is that vitamin B5 is called pantothenic acid, and pantothenic acid is a very critical component to a very common biochemical substrate that is used in the body for lots of different things. So B vitamins generally are often involved as either a coenzyme or a cofactor, or they are involved in a pathway to help go from one type of chemistry to another, things of that nature. They get in the middle of processes. Well, vitamin B5 is involved in a number of processes in that way, but it is a piece of what we call coenzyme A. So remember we said that B vitamins are often coenzymes. Coenzyme A is a larger molecule that uses B5 to help form it. Coenzyme A does a number of things in the body. One of the things that's very critical is related to energy maintenance. Maintenance, health maintenance, and the operation of your cells, which of course is very important. And so that has to do with the ability of coenzyme A to help get high-density energy into your mitochondria, where the mitochondria can form energy and help keep your body going, keep your cells going. Without coenzyme A and vitamin B5, we would have a very slow time getting high-density energy into the mitochondria. So it's one of more underrated, or at least underrecognized, effects of vitamin B5, which is the creation of energy. Now, of course, the B5 is not doing it on its own. It's doing it as its role in what we call the coenzyme A and the ability of coenzyme A to help with metabolism. Metabolism is essentially trying to take the food that we eat and turn it into energy. At least that's one part of metabolism. Another area, which again is not as well known, is the fat-soluble, the sterol type hormones made from cholesterol. And so these would be things like your reproductive hormones and your adrenal hormones like cortisol, et cetera, et cetera. So when we are using vitamin B5, we are using a lot of it up in the reproductive organs, the adrenal glands, et cetera, in the production and sort of maintenance of the output of your sterol hormones, which would be your reproductive ones and your adrenal-type hormones for the most part. The Another thing that B5 gets involved with is the metabolism of fatty acids. So obviously fatty acids come from fats and they are the smaller portions of fats that are broken down when we eat fat in our diet. Without vitamin B5, we don't efficiently use all of the fatty acids that might be presented to our cells, whether it's to your liver cells or to other cells for energy or whatever. You need vitamin B5 to efficiently use fatty acids. Another place that often gets overlooked looked is the production in the bone marrow of red blood cells. Red blood cell production is highly dependent on vitamin B5, and there's certainly lots of other things that get in the act there, but vitamin B5 becomes very important for red blood cell production. And we often, you know, don't think of that as much. You know, somebody's anemic and they have low red blood cell counts, et cetera. They might be given iron, which certainly is going to be helpful. They might be given other cofactors such as vitamin B6 and glycine to help in Heme synthesis. But also it's important to remember that the marrow is going to use a fair amount of vitamin B5 to help in the formation of the new red blood cells that are being pumped out. Another place it is very important, which comes from the family called the B cells, B like boy. These are immune cells that sometimes we call plasma cells that help to make antibodies. So antibodies would be things like immunoglobulins, so immune proteins. And there are different families of antibodies, lots of IGG, like George, sort of our memory immunity. IGM, like Mary, that's our more acute acting one. IGA, like Alice. IGA is more of a mucosal type of antibody used in the respiratory system, the genital system, inside the GI tract, et cetera. All of these actually have a lot of dependence on vitamin B5 to be formed. And then probably one of the places where it's easiest to overlook vitamin B5 is in the formation of of a very important neurotransmitter for memory circuits and other circuits as well called acetylcholine or acetylcholine, acetylcholine, however you like to say it. Vitamin B5 becomes very important in the formation of acetylcholine and in the central nervous system acetylcholine is heavily involved in memory circuits. So if I have enough acetylcholine, I have the opportunity to run my memory circuits more appropriately and vitamin B5 is involved in that. Now, is acetylcholine And the only thing involved in memory circuits, certainly not, but as one of the things that we can become depleted in over time and will have kind of far-reaching effects on our body. If we have a depletion of vitamin B5 and it relates to the nervous system, we can wind up with some memory deficits. And there's other places where it helps and works as well. Now, there's a lot of other places we could talk about where vitamin B5 works, gets involved in the serotonin pathways. and metabolizing serotonin to other molecules. It gets involved in your rapidly dividing tissue, you know, hair, skin, and nails, connective tissue. Gets involved in your digestive system's maintenance and function. And we talked a lot about hormonal and blood product and nervous system operations of vitamin B5. Vitamin B5 is literally used everywhere in your body. And so it's so ubiquitous in your body that sometimes it doesn't get much spotlight on it like Maybe, you know, NAD might as vitamin B3's active form, because that's all hot, you know, social media right now, or vitamin B6 is another hot button in social media. But B5, a lot of people don't talk about it. So vitamin B5 becomes important for so many things. Now, a good thing, because we use it all over in our body, is if we have a well-balanced diet, many foods contain vitamin B5. And now that we have the magic of the internet, you can look up very quickly in a search vitamin B5 containing foods and you'll you'll get very long lists of vitamin B5-containing foods. People might want to supplement vitamin B5. We will use vitamin B5 supplementation in people where they are maybe having recovery from a stressful event. Now that could be because it's going to help the stress hormones. It could also be because it helps in the metabolism and energy production, very important. And it could also be because of some of its neurological functions that vitamin B5 would be helpful. So for example, sometimes after surgery we might give people Extra amounts of vitamin B5 when people are recovering from say long COVID, sometimes with their other B vitamins we make sure they have enough vitamin B5. As we mentioned, people with chronic hormonal issues or immune issues, if everything else is being looked at, we might look and say does this person need extra vitamin B5? So you can see it's used everywhere in the body. It's helpful with many many processes that are very critical to health and health maintenance. And so even though it doesn't get a lot of love and doesn't get a lot of spotlight, vitamin B5. Pantothenic acid is one of the broadest used B vitamins inside your body and covers probably the most broad areas of use in all of your organ systems. All right, I'm Dr. A. We love answering these questions. Thank you for subscribing. If you're a subscriber, please do like, share, and subscribe if you haven't joined our community, and I'll see you guys all on the next video.