I have been taking extra B's but make sure I take a B-Complex, I read a long while back that if you do not take the B-Complex with them you will throw them off.

I"m taking extra B-1 right now as well. It is suppose to help with the Krebs cycle. If I have a reaction to the carbs that I can eat, then I pop one of those in (sublingual) and it helps.

Here are several excerpts about B-1 from an article on doctoryourself.com:


Beverage alcohol is ethanol, C2 H5 OH. It is a simple carbohydrate, much like sugar, supplying lots of energy and no other nutrients. Thiamin, vitamin B-1, is needed for carbohydrate metabolism. Extra carbos, including extra alcohol, require extra thiamin. (with adrenal fatigue we have trouble metabolizing carbs)

A deficiency of thiamin, just thiamin, produces the following symptoms, according to the respected textbook, Nutrition and Diet Therapy:

Gastrointestinal: anorexia, indigestion, severe constipation, gastric atony, and insufficient HCl secretion. All the above result mostly from a lack of energy to the GI tract cells; no thiamin, no energy, no function.

Cardiovascular: dilation of peripheral blood vessels (edema), weakened heart muscle, and heart failure.

Neurological: diminished reflex response, reduced alertness, fatigue, apathy. Continued deficiency produces damage or degeneration to myelin sheaths (fatty nerve cell insulation material). If you see an obvious tie-in to M.S., you are right. A lack of thiamin causes increased nerve irritation, pain, prickly sensations, deadening sensations, and if unchecked, paralysis. Thiamin-deficiency nerve damage can result in the DT's and hallucinations.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/alcoholism.html






Here's something else:

Let's consider just one lone nutrient, thiamin, vitamin B-1 and one oddball disease, beriberi. Beriberi has been a problem for centuries in impoverished countries. It is a disease of the peripheral nervous system. Beriberi, a description of nutritional exhaustion, literally means "I can't, I can't." It results in pain (neuritis) and paralysis, swelling and anemia, decreased liver function and wasting away. Note, please, the wide variety of symptoms.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/calcdef.html




VITAMINS AGAINST MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS

Nearly every person with multiple sclerosis that I’ve met has had two things in common: a lack of hope, and a lack of vitamins. Klenner’s patients lacked neither, with a treatment schedule calling for massive quantities of B-vitamins to, said Klenner, “effect nerve repair.” He based his protocol in part on work, in the late 1930’s, by “Stern from Columbia University, (who) was employing thiamin hydrochloride intraspinally with astonishing results in multiple sclerosis. He reported taking patients to the operating room on a stretcher, and following 30 mg thiamin given intraspinally, they would walk back to their room.” (24) While, Klenner commented, “the response was relatively transient,” it indicated that multiple sclerosis might be a severe form of avitaminosis.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/klennerbio.html




THIAMINE (Vitamin B-1)

Most everyone has heard of beri-beri, and few are all that passionate about it anymore. But beri-beri, which literally means "I can't, I can't," may all too well describe the learning disabled child. Such children, recognized as truly disabled by the Americans with Disabilities Act, are not unwilling but rather unable to perform well in school. To see the physical incapacitation thiamine deficiency causes in impoverished countries is all too easy. To see the mental incapacitation in American classrooms is not difficult, either. Yet both may be caused by thiamine deficiency, and both helped by thiamine supplementation. Harrell zeroed in on this topic sixty years ago, demonstrating that supplemental thiamine improves learning. One reporter wrote, "An experiment was conducted by Dr. Ruth Flinn Harrell which involved 104 children from nine to nineteen years of age. Half of the children were given a vitamin B1 (thiamine) pill each day, and the other half received a placebo. The test lasted 6 weeks. It was found by a series of tests that the group that was given the vitamin gained one-fourth more in learning ability than did the other group." (6)

Carbohydrates, including sugar, increase the body's need for thiamine. Children eat a lot of sugar. An unmet increase is effectively the same as a deficiency. This may be part of the mechanism of ADHD and other children's learning and behavior disorders, as many so-called "food faddists" or "health nuts" have proclaimed for decades. Vitamin deficiency can become vitamin dependency. Chronic subclinical beri-beri may result in thiamine dependency in the same way that chronic subclinical pellegra results in niacin dependency.

B-COMPLEX

The B-vitamins as a group are absolutely vital to nerve function, and it would be difficult to imagine the juvenile owner of malnourished nerves performing well in school. Specifically, it is well established that thiamine deficiency causes not only loss of nerve function and ultimately paralysis, but also according to The Nutrition Desk Reference (7), "memory loss, reduced attention span, irritability, confusion and depression." (p 43) Riboflavin (B-2) deficiency causes "nerve tissue damage that may manifest itself as Depression and hysteria." (p 45) Niacin (B-3) deficiency causes "loss of memory and emotional instability." (p 46) Pyridoxine (B-6) deficiency results in "impaired production of neurotransmitters (and) mental confusion." (p 48) Folic acid deficiency causes irritability, apathy, forgetfulness and hostility. (p 49). Cobalamin (B-12) deficiency causes "degeneration of the spinal cord, fatigue, disorientation, ataxia, moodiness, and confusion." (p 51)

Though these symptoms generally appear after prolonged deficiency, they are very serious and, if untreated, the ultimate result in each case would be death. Practically speaking, a shortage of any one of the B-vitamins can be seen to lead to neurological damage sufficient to contribute to learning and behavioral troubles.

Harrell recognized that thiamine and the rest of the vitamins work better as a team. She used two clinically effective but oft-criticized therapeutic nutrition techniques: simultaneous supplementation with many nutrients (the "shotgun" approach), and megadoses. Working on the reasonable assumption that learning disabled children, because of functional deficiencies, might need higher than normal levels of nutrients, she progressed from her initial emphasis on thiamine to later providing a wide variety of supplemental nutrients.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/downs.html