Diabetes Damaged Linked To Vitamin B1 Shortage

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 8-8-2007

[irishtenor]

Wow, thank you for the info. I’ll start taking it right away. I never take vitamins, but I will now.

[blam]

What are the best food sources of vitamin B1

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.

[Egon]

Ping.

[Young Werther]

I'm Type 2 and had a "stealth" heart attack last year. I now monitor my glucose more closely, (I had become lacksidaiscal!).

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!)

[rahbert]

pluses? What are those?

[kitkat]

BUMP

[Fairview]

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.

[Eighth Square]

My question also. Must be a typo.

[JasonC]

Methinks he meant pulses, i.e. beans...

[edcoil]

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!

[muawiyah]

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.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

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.

[Uri’el-2012]

Another form of Thiamine is Benfotiamine

[crazyhorse691]

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.

---

I really hope that this proves to be true...I watched my dad(a WWII vet)take the brittle diabetic slide downhill until he mercifully died.
But, his health was further complicated by TB and a host of parasitic infections(he had been in the South Pacific almost the entire war). I grew up believing that it was his insulin that had caused his physical and mental problems.

[Fairview]

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.

[muawiyah]

http://www.fineli.fi/food.php?foodid=7186&lang=en

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.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Holy Cow !
My regimen is swimming every day that I can here at Lake of the Ozarks where we live. I can stand the water from late April through Thanksgiving. Today, the air temp is 100 F and water is 90. I think I could pop a sweat doing laps.

[Frank Sheed]

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.

[Frank Sheed]

[Prophylactic and therapeutic application of thiamine (vitamin B1)--a new point of view] [Article in Polish]

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]