Top 5 Amazing Health Benefits of Vitamin B5

So I just want to go through here the key functions of B5 in the body that are well-known and things that you might otherwise not have thought of. And then I want to have an ending discussion just quickly about supplement forms of vitamin B5, because it's certainly easy to supplement as a water-soluble B vitamin. Hey, it's Dr. A answering some questions about specific nutrients, and we got some great ones on vitamin B5, also known as pantothenic acid. So let's get in that, break it down. So the first thing is the B vitamins generally are water soluble, meaning that we have to eat them or get them somehow from the outside. And whatever we don't use today or within a reasonable amount of time, because it's water soluble, we will urinate out. And so we have to replace them all of the time. So first off, pantothenic acid is vitamin B number 5, and it is just like the other B vitamins being water soluble. The next thing, and this relates to another video that we did or series of them about carnitine, the amino acid, is that Pantothenic acid is part of an enzyme complex called CoA, and the CoA complex is partly vitamin B5, and that is critically important in the movement of fats through the use of the carnitine shuttle into the mitochondria to make energy. So vitamin B5 is considered to be implicit in the breakdown of fats, the production of energy, and then because of the movement of fats requiring some of these same substrate cofactors, it's also important in the metabolism of cholesterol, the steroid hormones, red blood cells, antibodies, all sorts of things that we often maybe don't think of in regard to vitamin B5. Another important thing that vitamin B5 does, just generally speaking, is it helps in the movement of glutathione and its formation in our cells. And of course, glutathione is an incredibly important primary water-soluble antioxidant in the human body. And we often don't think of it needing vitamin B5 either, but it does. So the first thing, as mentioned Would be energy production. And B5 is primarily involved in the high concentration energy production of fats, fatty acids, so they can be burned and beta oxidized into ATP by the mitochondria. And because fatty acids are bigger and longer than carbohydrate residues, we get more energy out of a fatty acid than we get out of a carbohydrate. So energy's a big thing. The next thing, as was mentioned, is your whole endocrine system, but especially the fat soluble hormones, your things You know, such as the cholesterol-based, the steroid hormones. So that's your reproductive hormones. That's vitamin D. That's cortisol, cortisone, that whole family, and a bunch of others. We mentioned fatty acid metabolism. So if we are moving fats through the body and we're burning them up, that's one fate that vitamin B5 gets involved in. And then also vitamin B5 is involved in some of the other uses of fatty acids inside the cell or for the cell. So whenever we're moving fatty acids around, often Vitamin B5 is used as a cofactor through its role either in CoA or other places. Now, a place that's not often talked about but is important, especially if you're recovering, say, from being anemic or you're recovering from surgery or some other thing, is the production of red blood cells has vitamin B5 as one of its constituents to help red blood cells be produced by the bone marrow. So in what they call the hematopoietic system, we start with the progenitor cells, which can turn into all sorts of things, and they'll go down and they'll become different types of blast cells. And one of those blast cells will turn into the red blood cell or erythrocytes. And that process is heavily dependent on vitamin B5. As I mentioned earlier, the metabolism of glutathione, and in teaching about glutathione, often, you know, we will focus on the more famous sort of cofactors and helpers, things such as N-acetylcysteine or alpha-lipoic acid or vitamin C, all certainly terribly important. NAD and FAD and zinc and selenium. But it turns out vitamin B5 is just as important because glutathione is a complex tripeptide. It's a little longer than a single amino. So it's a complex molecule to move around and get into the cell. And B5 has a role in that process as well. Another one from the bone marrow would be the production of antibodies from your B cells. And again, we often don't think about bone marrow and vitamin B5, but indeed a lot of bone marrow cell supports are partly vitamin B5. Function of the nervous system. So we often think of other B vitamins in the nervous system. Might think of, you know, vitamin B12 and folates for methyl donation and moving methyl groups around. Might think of vitamin B6 to help out with certain enzyme systems. Might think of NAD or vitamin B3, active B3, for other particular either enzyme systems or neurohormonal transporters. The vitamin B5 use is much less talked about, but a lot of things like portion Portions of serotonin balance are vitamin B5 dependent. Portions of other sort of your bigger picture pathways where we make, you know, we start with maybe an amino acid or 2 and then we create a whole bunch of other neurohormones or neurotransmitters. A lot of those use up a lot of vitamin B5 as well. And then directly in the neurotransmitter world, a neurotransmitter we use for all sorts of things, but in the central nervous system, we use it a lot for memory circuits, is the formation of acetylcholine. And that is the use of B5 is very implicit in forming acetylcholine. So a lot of times in memory support formulas and things like that, vitamin B5 will be looked at, which is a very reasonable thing to look at. Now, from the supplement point of view, if you're using pantothenic acid, plain vitamin B5, it's water soluble, it's just fine. And it absorbs decent, not great, but decent. So if somebody's really low in pantothenic Acid, we might be giving them 1,000 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams a day for a month or two and then back off. But there's another supplement called pantethine, and pantethine is— so a lot of times supplements, you wonder, well, is it any different than B5? This one's actually a legitimate thing. Pantethine is B5 that has some chemistry added to it so it absorbs easier through the gut. So whereas I might give you 1,000 milligrams or 2,000 milligrams of pantothenic acid, I may only need to give give you 500 milligrams of pantethine. Now, of course, as usual, the designer supplement pantethine is more expensive, so there's probably going to even out as far as the cost goes. But you literally have about a 50% lower dose or even more with pantethine than you would with pantothenic acid. So we use a lot more pantethine nowadays than we used to, and that's— there's nothing wrong with that. So we did get questions about pantethine as a supplement, and is it legit, and does it really make a difference from pantothenic acid? The first answer is they both work. But the second The answer is pantethine absorbs much better, so you need less by a factor of 50% or more. All right, well, that goes through basic questions that we got about vitamin B5 and all the places we don't think of it's probably working in the body. Wonderful, very useful supplement to add to your B complex if you're in the course of, say, healing from any trauma or surgery or something like that. As we mentioned, anemias, or you're coming out of an acute illness, something that's taxed your body, and many, many other things. I want to thank everybody in the community. Thank subscribers. 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