https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Derrick-Lonsdale
Some links to get you started. B1 deficiency can be caused by things like alcoholism. He also thinks we don’t get enough of b1 in our diet and the current scale is not sufficient.
Symptoms can vary and can involve different nervous systems. Things like tingling, insomnia, fatigue.
A lot of people talk about getting paradoxical reaction or refeeeding syndrome, meaning once they start taking b1 they get massive flare up of symptoms.
Back in the day when we were all doing enough work (men, women, children) to need over twice our base-metabolic-rate number of calories per day, and eating whole foods, particularly red and white offal and leafy greens like collard and beet greens, steamed and roasted, we got enough of these mesonutrients and micronutrients.
Twice your BMR is about 5000 Cal/day for an adult male. You need to do eight hours' physical work (shoveling, threshing, chopping, sawing, lifting, doing the laundry by hand, etc.) to burn off the extra.
Now, the hypothesis says, we are deficient in many of these nutrients because we simply do not eat enough food, only 2500 Cal/day.
I have no investment in the hypothesis. Just reporting it.
e.g. tomatoes have lost most flavor and nutrition over past few decades, some efforts are underway to hybridize them with older variants to get the best of both worlds.
can't speak for nutrition (nor do you provide support for that claim) but as to flavour, you clearly haven't been round long! Old fashioned tomatoes were shite I can testify (at least those available in the UK).
Apparently the mechanisms for absorbing it depend on having sufficient B1, and can get "stuck" in a deficient mode if you went through a period of deficiency, which can then be "unblocked" (kickstarted) with a megadose.
Take this with a grain of salt, it's supposedly based in research, but I didn't check any papers about it yet.
And if you aren't eating a lot of enriched flour you might not be consuming it in fortified foods at all.
Supplementing with B12 helps, to a degree (you're providing more input to a broken machine), but you can supplement 5-MTHF (methylfolate) to get what the mutation inhibits your body from producing.
MTHFR has been hijacked by alternative medicine and exaggerated into an "explains everything" diagnosis.
The first red flag is that MTHFR pushers use it to explain ever vague disorder under the sun: Depression, anxiety, stomach issues, being tired, being unhappy, inflammation, etc. If you name it, chances are someone on an alternative health board will spring up and suggest MTHFR as a narrative, or other variations on the theme ("methylation", etc.)
The second red flag is when they moved to diagnosis anyone with any mutation, including heterozygous people, as "having it". This isn't backed by evidence and was purely an attempt to stretch the diagnosis to cover more people,
Internet MTHFR and "methylation" advice is generally terrible. Don't buy into it.
You can actually test for high homocysteine levels in the blood, but most MTHFR proponents skip that step and just assume they "have it" and that B12 and Methylfolate will solve all of their problems (they don't). Alternative medicine has stepped in to provide endless articles, podcasts, and paid advice about supplements to add to deal with MTHFR, which of course never work because MTFHR isn't the root cause of all of their symptoms. It's terrible.
"Technically"?
I am seeing conflicting reports on B1 aka thiamine. If you don't have a compelling reason to try megadoses, I wouldn't do it. There's a lot we don't know.
But for many things, it's completely reasonable to increase your consumption of B vitamins. There's a lot of space between do nothing and megadoses that is safer to play in than skipping straight to megadoses.
/not a physician and don't play one on TV.
> For example, many suffers of neurological disorders benefit greatly from using B1 even if their levels are not below “good” threshold. There is a physician who has done a lot of work on this. You can technically megadose b1 without any negative side effects.
Megadosing vitamins despite normal serum levels is a favorite of alternative medicine practitioners. The story has played out for nearly every vitamin you can name that doesn't have immediate toxicity upon overdose: Vitamin C, Vitamin D, various B vitamins, etc.
It's never a good sign when there's "a physician who has done a lot of work on this" is the primary source, the claim is that all of medical knowledge to this point has missed it, the range of conditions/symptoms covered is so broad that nearly anyone could be considered impacted, and they preemptively try to claim that blood tests can't diagnose it or must be ignored. It's textbook alternative medicine pseudoscience and it's playing out for every vitamin, mineral, and supplement out there.
However, I am now learning that serum levels don’t often tell the whole truth.
For example, many suffers of neurological disorders benefit greatly from using B1 even if their levels are not below “good” threshold. There is a physician who has done a lot of work on this. You can technically megadose b1 without any negative side effects.
I am now seeing neurologists even recommending things like ALA to patients along with meds to stop symptoms.
I welcome to open mindedness because the online groups of suffers often discover pretty interesting things.
Years ago I talked to a chemist who cured his neuropathy with pirenzepine(drug used for ulcers with good safety profile), there is a startup now with a cream that uses pirenzepine as main ingredient to treat neuropathy. They are in stage 3 trials and have seen success.