Thiamine and Niacin: Two Key Nutrients for Survival
Vital nutrients that most people don't understand
Thiamine and niacin are two of my favorite nutrients. They are very important to me in cases of acute illness, in addition to the nutrients listed in this blog post.
This is why I included Perque Health’s Lifeguard in my Acute Cold and Flu Protocol - this single supplement has a much thiamine and niacin as you’re likely to need to recover from acute illness, plus a lot more. You can see the protocol here.
They are also integral to the labs that I run to assess someone’s fitness as we go into cold and flu season. Should you be afraid of colds and flus in the first place? That’s a story I cover in this blog post.
There are two secrets to these vitamins, when it comes to metabolic syndrome and sepsis, that we need to talk about.
Thiamine and niacin are critical to metabolism. Thiamine controls how much glucose can be broken down and turned into energy.
It is the gatekeeper to the mitochondria.
I have seen acute thiamine deficiency. The truth is, I suspect many physicians have seen it, but they aren't looking for it.
Acute thiamine deficiency is also called "beri-beri." It was first discovered when polished rice was invented. The brown portion of rice is what contains the B-vitamins, such as thiamine, necessary for its metabolism. Without the thiamine, the glucose cannot be metabolized. Likewise, thiamine participates in many, many critical reactions within the cell.
What does thiamine deficiency look like?
Patients develop heart failure. Their blood doesn't pump properly through their bodies. Their legs swell up with fluid. Their lungs fill up with fluid. They weaken. Their minds don't work properly. They become confused. They will "confabulate." Which means to make up stories.
I only saw beri-beri twice. The second time was the most obvious. He was a middle-aged man who came into the hospital in the middle of the night. He lived in rural New Hampshire with his dog and he loved hiking. He was morbidly obese and decided he wanted to lose some weight. He went on a juice fast for three weeks.
What doesn't juice have?
Thiamine.
You know what has thiamine? Meats. Whole grains. Nuts and seeds.
His legs were swollen to the size of tree trunks. He took short, light, labored breaths, due to all the fluid in his lungs. He was weak and he talked constantly, but nonsensically.
We gave him IV thiamine and he rapidly improved.
He also had a bacterial infection in his blood. And this brings me to the immunological properties of thiamine. Your immune cells frequently find themselves in environments where there is no oxygen. In those environments, they must burn glucose to generate the respiratory burst needed to control microorganisms (i.e. kill bad bugs that will otherwise multiply and take over your tissues).
Many, many patients presenting to the hospital with what is known as "sepsis" have probably got beri-beri. Doctors do not appreciate this and they don't even have the proper test available to rule it out. Even if they did, the moronic adherence to considering the "normal" distribution (Gaussian distribution) "healthy" blinds doctors to the reality that optimal is not normal and normal in modern America is sub-optimal.
That's all part of the Big Pharma agenda to normalize disease, so that they can normalize long medication lists, high insurance premiums, and increasing control over society. Read all about it in my book, Dying to Be Free.
This led some very enterprising researchers, notably Dr. Pierre Kory and Dr. Paul Marik, to ask an obvious question.
What would happen if we gave thiamine empirically (without evidence of gross deficiency) to patients presenting in sepsis?
They combined thiamine with vitamin C and hydrocortisone. This powerful trio proved extremely effective in improving outcomes in the hospital.
I had very, very few opportunities to use this trio when I worked in the hospital.
Why?
Because hospitals don't stock IV vitamin C, and when they do, they charge an absolutely criminal sum for it.
Most people reading this will know Marik and Kory as the two mavericks who started the FLCCC. What they don't know is that these two were making waves in critical care LONG before COVID.
And long before COVID, their vitamin C research was catching flack from morons in academia who seem to be allergic to anything that doesn't come off of a blue-chip pharmaceutical company assembly line.
"Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education."
- William Osler
What does this have to do with niacin?
Niacin basically runs the Krebs cycle inside of mitochondria. It's my favorite B-vitamin, because without it, you'll feel terrible. Without niacin, energy generation is hopelessly inefficient.
Despite how important it is, we know relatively little about how to measure deficiency of niacin. This is largely because of how many things it does and how many OTHER micronutrients, like minerals and amino acids, are necessary for those reactions. It is like asking if society has enough water.
Enough water for what? Watering the lawn? Washing your face? Cooking dinner?
I guess we could always use more water, right? Not so. Eventually, you get a flood.
And this is where things get interesting with niacin and thiamine... this is where, after 20 years of study and 8 years of practice, I have my own view of how we should supplement with these things...
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