Diabetes Ping List
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Thanks to JRochelle for the heads-up!
Posted on 08/07/2007 6:10:11 PM PDT by blam
Diabetes damage linked to vitamin B1 shortage
Last Updated: 1:43am BST 08/08/2007
Diabetics have three-quarters less vitamin B1 in their blood than healthy people, research has shown.
A study by the University of Warwick has linked this shortfall, which occurs in sufferers with both type one and two of the disease, to damage to the kidneys, retina and nerves in the arms and legs that are all common symptoms of the disease.
Prof Paul Thornalley, from the university, said that vitamin supplements could be taken by all diabetics and would work alongside conventional glucose controls.
The study is published in Diabetologia, the diabetes journal. A LACK of vitamin B1 has been linked to vascular disease in diabetes sufferers.
Researchers at the University of Warwick found that diabetics - both type one and type two sufferers - had three quarters less thiamine (vitamin B1) in their blood than healthy people.
In what could be a major finding for treatment of diabetes-related vascular conditions, the experts found the shortage was linked to damage to the kidneys, retina and nerves in the arms and legs - common in diabetics. Prof Paul Thornalley, lead researcher, said a vitamin B1 supplement could be taken by all diabetics and would work alongside conventional glucose controls.
He said: "This is a particularly important study because thiamine has been found to prevent vascular problems in previous research.'' The study - published in diabetes journal Diabetologia - compared 26 type 1 and 48 type 2 diabetics with 20 healthy patients.
It found thiamine concentration in blood plasma was decreased 76 per cent in type 1 sufferers and 75 per cent in type 2 patients.
Wow, thank you for the info. I’ll start taking it right away. I never take vitamins, but I will now.
Vitamin B1 or Thiamin is found in a variety of animal and plant food. Important sources are vegetables, wholegrain products, pluses and nuts. The best animal source is pork meat. Other sources are also milk, cheese, peas, fresh and dried fruit, eggs. Thiamin has a number of important functions: It works with other B-group vitamins to help break down and release energy from the food we eat and it helps keep nerves and muscle tissue healthy.
Ping.
My diet now consists of more fruits and vegatables, (in smaller portions), and my daily pill intake includes an over the counter multivitamin. I take 7 pills in the morning, 3 at 6:OOPM and three at bedtime, (which includes two aspirin!)
pluses? What are those?
BUMP
Thanks for posting this. I was just diagnosed as being prediabetic, despite being very slender and fit. Scared me half to death, because there isn’t much I can do to improve my diet or lose weight. A coworker just died of diabetes a few months ago and she too was slender, fit, and disciplined about eating.
My question also. Must be a typo.
Beans, beans, the magical fruit - the more you eat, the more you toot, the more you toot, the better your feel so have some beans for every meal!
I’m busy at the moment trying to find out if seal meat is a good source of vitamin b1. Since seals have 25 times more iron(compounds) in their tissues than the average mammal, B1 ought to be in there. Reindeer tissue is 3 times higher too.
I caught this curse seven years ago (dad was, my aunt was) and have found the number one benefit is exercise. A swim of a half hour walk can improve control dramatically.
Another form of Thiamine is Benfotiamine
Every morning I take my dogs for a two- to three-mile walk/run in a nearby nature preserve. After work I hike out half a mile to catch my horse, hike half a mile back in, ride for an hour (which is both aerobic and strength-building), then walk her around to cool her out. Late at night I take the dogs for another walk of roughly two miles. (They’re thin, too.) I also do weight training, do major home-improvement projects, cut the grass, and garden. Tell me when or how I should get more exercise or lose more weight.
A site in Finland that with a little bit of work enables you to find ALL the nutritional content of everything in everything.
They think a lot about food. 's cold up there!
Pork edges out reindeer meet on B1, by about 2% or so. Not to worry. On the other hand raw iron content in reindeer is 10 times higher than that in lean ham.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine
Thiamine is essential in forming thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP), a coenzyme used in the “oxidation” of glucose to pyruvate. Pyruvate is then broken down by the Kreb’s cycle or the “oxidative-phosphorylation” pathway if you will by the energy packets called “mitochondria.” The deficiency of thiamine could reflect TPP being broken down driving excess glucose into the oxidative pathway. Otherwise, glucose is just metabolized by simple glycolysis [which is anaerobic] (does not need oxygen) and yields far less energy.
In other words, this could reflect not simply a deficiency of thiamine which is plentiful in the routine diet as documented here, but its depletion as the body “tries” to rid itself of “excess glucose” that would get stored as fat. The authors have no evidence of which is at play here.
I still think the problem is more likely to involve problems with insulin receptors or their modification but I am not a sugar biochemist.
Małecka SA, Poprawski K, Bilski B. II Kliniki Kardiologii Katedry Kardiologii w Poznaniu.
Usefulness and application of vitamin B1 (thiamine) and it's derivatives (benfotiamine, sulfotiamine) in some environmental diseases like congestive heart failure and diabetes is described. Possibility of its use in geriatry and in pain-associated diseases is also analysed. Concise description of the role of thiamine in the human organism, its content in some food products and results of this vitamin deficiency are also presented.
PMID: 17017487 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Peas, beans and lentils are known as pulses. They are the seeds of plants belonging to the family Leguminosae, which gets its name from the characteristic pod or legume that protects the seeds while they are forming and ripening. With approximately 13,000 species, the family Leguminosae is the second largest in the plant kingdom and it is very important economically.
Ping.
More barbecue, please.
Thank you. I appreciate this information.
Thanks for the heads up, I’m very much into nutrition including lots of veggies and fruits.
Thanks to JRochelle for the heads-up!
Check into benfotiamine. My son’s a Type 1 and he takes it twice a day.
Within a month, all of the symptoms that led me to the dr were gone. By the end of month three, I'd lost 20 pounds and felt wonderful. After a year on the 60g a day diet I gradually "fell off the wagon" and still did really well for several years. Just now I'm starting to "feel it" and I know that it's time to do the right thing again.
This doctor really did cure me of type 2 diabetes. Yes, in the beginning the diet sucked and got really boring. But the 60g a day wasn't that bad.
My son’s a highly active diabetic. Activity can actually screw up control for anyone using insulin and cause them to go low at night until they figure out how to manage the metabolic boost.
Benfotiamine! WONDERFUL STUFF! :-)
Two good resources:
Alternatively, the Type IIs may have a process at work which is designed to rid the body of excess levels of thiamin.
If, for example, the normal diet were reindeer or similar game for a couple of hundred thousand years, with side orders of seal, when available, or salmon in season, and hold the veggies, you could have an adapted population that would be swimming in thiamin.
So, is there some toxic level of thiamin we should know about?
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/vitamins/thiamin/
The B complex plus C is widely available in “Stress tab or Stress vitamin” formulations. These have levels of up to 1000% the MDR for these compounds.
I take a routine “over the counter” B complex tab each day in addition to the morning multivitamin. I’d be careful about too much niacin, though, as it can cause problems in ultra-high doses. That is why I avoid Stress tab formulations.
The old saw from biochem is that it is the “fat solubles” that can get you into trouble including A, D and E. If you want an antioxidant instead of E, might be better to go to alpha-lipoic acid which has shown some interesting results in stopping free radical formation.
Funny, I am not convinced this is a symptom of diabetes or a symptom of the diet most diabetics are placed on...
Look at the sources of B1... Milk, Cheese and fruit are generally limited in their intake by diabetics due to their carb levels.
Is this a symptom of the disease? or a result of the restrictive diet diabetics generally are placed on?
Thanks for the reinforcement. It’s good to hear that minimizing carbs can work to eliminate this. I’m doing Phase I of South Beach and it does restrict carbs considerably. I’m not interested in bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice anyway, so no great loss. In the future, I’d be able to get by on 60 grams of carbohydrates a day.
Sleep-walk?
Thank you so much.
AGREED, and thank you so much!!!
You are right, according to another article which seems more detailed than the one posted.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/health/6935482.stm - Diabetes problems 'vitamin link'
A simple vitamin deficiency may be the cause of many of the side effects of diabetes, a study suggests.
Researchers found people with the disease expelled thiamine - vitamin B1 - from their bodies at 15 times the normal rate in a study of 94 people.
The Warwick University team said thiamine helped ward off complications such as heart disease and eye problems, the Diabetologia journal said.
Not a cure, but can be a huge relief and improvement in quality of life.
That’s a great read. I hope folks on this board check it out. Thiamine is really inexpensive.
Bones offer new hope for diabetes
Bones may play a more active role than previously thought in regulating the body's chemistry, scientists say.
An international team found the molecule osteocalcin, produced by bone cells, is active in helping to regulate blood sugar levels in mice.
This is important in the development of diabetes and obesity, so the findings, in the journal Cell, offer the hope of new ways to treat these conditions.
But experts have warned more research is needed to confirm the link.
...
Novel function
Lead author Professor Gerard Karsenty of the Columbia University said: "Osteocalcin has been known since 1977 to be made by osteoblast cells, but it had no known function."
However, the team found a novel function of the molecule.
Usually, an increase in insulin levels in the blood is accompanied by a decrease in insulin sensitivity.
But the authors found osteocalcin boosted both the secretion and the sensitivity to insulin.
In mice, increasing the activity of the molecule stimulated pancreatic cells to produce more insulin and at the same time directed fat cells to release a hormone called adiponectin - which improves insulin sensitivity.
It also stimulated the production of the insulin-producing cells themselves, which is currently considered to be one of the best, although unattainable, potential treatments for diabetes.
Increasing the activity of osteocalcin also prevented the development if type 2 diabetes and obesity in the mice, and mice who could make no osteocalcin had type 2 diabetes and increased fat mass.
New therapies
Professor Karsenty said: "The discovery that our bones are responsible for regulating blood sugar in ways that were not known before completely changes out understanding of the function of the skeleton and uncovers a crucial aspect of energy metabolism.
"These results uncover an important aspect of endocrinology that was unappreciated until now."
And the finding could provide a new therapeutic target to help treat diabetes in humans too, as people with type 2 diabetes have been shown to have low osteocalcin levels.
The researchers will now investigate the role of osteocalcin in regulating blood sugar in humans.
...
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