 Hi everybody Dr. O here, welcome to chapter 10 which is on the water soluble vitamins which are all of your B vitamins and vitamin C. We're beginning a unit where we cover all the vitamins and minerals so we'll cover the water soluble vitamins first then the fat soluble vitamins then we'll cover what are called the major minerals and the trace minerals but we'll go into more detail with those later. But remember that from what we learned in chapter 1 that vitamins are organic and that doesn't mean you buy them in a farmers market that means that they have carbon and their structures are built around a carbon skeleton whereas minerals are inorganic so that's one of the main differences between vitamins and minerals. They both kind of have similar functions in the body anyhow and then the water soluble vitamins like the name implies are soluble in water so they can be carried in water and the good news there is they're they're absorbed and transported very easily. The bad news is any excess in almost every case just enters your urine and you lose them so if you have so it's so you really can't store almost all of your water soluble vitamins. If you consume more vitamin C than you need this morning the rest will just be kind of passed through you. B12 is an exception. B12 is a water soluble vitamin but up to five years worth of it depending on who you ask can be stored in the liver. So water soluble vitamins are absorbed and transported very easily because they can be dissolved right in the watery plasma of your blood but the downside is excess is lost in your urine. So these you don't really have to worry about toxicity because levels don't build up to too high if you consume too much vitamin C unless you reach just ridiculous numbers it shouldn't hurt you but the downside is they need to be consumed on a very regular basis because you can't store the excess. So you know even talk about something like vitamin C let's say you take a thousand milligrams of vitamin C for a day or a day for some reason I'm not saying you should or why you do that but let's say you are you'd be better off taking 250 milligrams four times a day or at least 500 milligrams twice a day than you would a thousand milligrams once a day. Alright that's just kind of some of the basics about the water soluble vitamins we'll dive into much more detail so let's go ahead and get started. Also as we're going through the list of individual nutrients I am going to be calling on a couple of documents I have sitting here in the classroom or in the course shell I have this is a document from the FDA about the vitamins and minerals so there's I have a couple things I like to say from there and then I have my own document that that I put together so I just want to make sure that we have all of the the key stuff in one place as we're going through this video so I will be kind of bouncing off the PowerPoint a little bit just so you know. Okay the icebreaker I like this one what is the role of vitamins and keeping you healthy so we're gonna be saying about minerals but what do vitamins do right we all know we need vitamins we all we all know that we should be consuming foods that are rich in vitamins or supplementing with vitamins these types of things but why what do they actually do what foods are best in delivering vitamins do you take extra vitamins when you feel run down or as though you are getting sick why are we not so all these are great questions excuse me so early in the morning when I start these my throat's not ready what is the role of vitamins and keeping you healthy so the key thing here is vitamins do not provide energy they're not worth any calories right when you when someone talks about be vitamins they often talk about them as the energy vitamins and I think that's how I would describe them as a group as well but they don't actually provide any energy so by vitamins power the processes that allow us to use our macronutrients so the reason that be vitamins are considered energy vitamins is because almost every step in the metabolic pathways that allow you to turn carbohydrates lipids proteins into energy rely on be vitamins you know so we'll cover the examples as we go through so the best analogy that I have for this is imagine a house right so your house that the foundation is the concrete right and you've got the and you've got the boards that make up the walls and things like that well so those really big structures that the majority of your house are made of so wood dry wall I'm not a carpenter wood drywall concrete right the the huge majority of your house would be your macronutrients like your carbs and lipids and your proteins how do vitamins and minerals function they're going to be like the nails and the screws or whatever else you're holding things together with right so so your your vitamins would be like the nails and screws that are holding all those things together so they're not a huge part of the house by weight or by volume but you but your house wouldn't function without them right if you remove vitamins remove minerals you will die I mean that the essential vitamins and minerals are there they're called that because a true enough deficiency can lead to death so so that's kind of how I like to look at him so that you know the the carbs and lipids and proteins do most of the work but they couldn't do their job without things like vitamins all right what foods are best in delivering vitamins this where we talk a lot about bioavailability so how you cook and prepare your foods matter the type of foods matter you know most overall I believe in getting vitamins in in there in its preform state meaning getting vitamins that are in the form that your body needs them so for example you've got you can consume beta-carotene or you can consume vitamin A because beta-carotene is a precursor to vitamin A and beta-carotene can be converted to vitamin A but genetics studies have shown that some people have deficiencies that make that very difficult maybe 30 plus percent of people so are you better off getting beta-carotene and then asking your body to turn it into vitamin A or consuming vitamin A my personal opinion is you're better off consuming the vitamin A directly so that one of this is one of the benefits of consuming animal products animal products generally have the nutrients that are in the same form that we need them because we're a lot more similar to an animal than we are to a plant so we don't really use beta-carotene right we can eat it but we need to turn it into something else just like when you consume the essential fatty acids your body still has to turn like let's say you eat flax seeds to get the essential fatty acids your body has to convert that ALA into EPA and into DHA and that conversion is pretty poor so I think you're better off consuming fish or getting fish oil and getting that right in the in the best format so so this is what you know I'm a big fan if you're looking at nutrient dense foods I'm a big fan of organ meats and seafoods and the because these are you're going to get the vitamins in the form that your body needs them but if you're nothing wrong with getting vitamins from plants it's just you have to understand that plants have compounds called anti nutrients that can actually impair digestion absorption of some some nutrients and you probably will need more because you're you're getting them in a less bioavailable state another you know that again this is not a vitamin but looking something like iron right the iron in you know the heme iron that's in meat is absorbed much better than the non heme iron that's in plant foods so you can get all the iron you need from plant foods you just need to get more of it so so the less bioavailable a nutrient is the more of it you need to consume because that you're digesting and absorbing and actually getting to use a smaller percent of it so back to that question what foods are best in delivering vitamins you want to find foods that are nutrient dense that have a lot of vitamins and you want to make sure they're prepared and we'll talk about this too but you want to make sure they're prepared in a way where you're not destroying the nutrients but also prepared in a way where you're releasing the nutrients so things like fermentation is a good way to actually release nutrients like you take if you take a heavy cabbage and turn into sauerkraut that sauerkraut is going to have maybe 10 times more vitamin C in it than then the cabbage did and part of that is because you're getting it from the microbes that did the fermentation directly so kind of cool stuff alright do you take extra vitamins when you feel run down or as though you're getting sick that's a quite it's asking you that question but I'll tell you my answer we have something we call the cocktail here in the house this is not medical advice but if someone feels like they're getting sick or someone is sick the rest of us will well the person that's sick as well but the rest of us if we're trying to worry about if we're worrying about prevention will increase our intake in a few nutrients so the cocktail that we use has some vitamin C in it it has vitamin D in it vitamin A because I think those are those are the three key vitamins when it comes to immunity there's also lysine which is amino acid that does appear to have some antiviral properties and zinc zinc is very important when you're sick so that's kind of our cocktail good not not medical advice not telling you to do that but the answer for me to this question is yes when when if we if we feel like we're getting sick or someone is sick we will increase our intake of those nutrients there so why are we not I just explained why trying to just you know stimulate the immune system a little bit give it a little tiny boost I don't think these things are miracles but give it a tiny boost for for a few days to to hopefully keep you from getting sick or keep you from being sick as long so if you have a different answer feel free to share all right so what are our learning objectives here for chapter 10 remember we're not covering all the vitamins here just the water soluble vitamins describe how vitamins differ from the energy nutrients which would be your carbs and proteins and how fat soluble vitamins differ from water soluble vitamins so we've talked about the water soluble vitamins we'll come back and talk about the fat soluble ones identify the main roles deficiency symptoms and food sources for each of the B vitamins so you'll leave here with kind of a checklist of the of the foods you should be eating if you if you're not getting enough of these nutrients and of course you wouldn't know that unless you were tracking your diet I mean that's why I like the chronometer and my fitness pal you should be tracking your diet and just even for a few days and if it looks like your diet is deficient in a certain nutrient then come back to this PowerPoint come back to these things and see where can I get a few foods to to bump up my intake and then identify the main roles deficiency symptoms and food sources for vitamin C which is the other water soluble vitamin um what else about that just in general I think vitamins and minerals are very important but I've always believed that if you get the macro nutrients under control then these things become um a little less important what I mean by that is if you focus on eating the highest quality carbohydrates you can find the highest quality fats you can find and the highest quality proteins you can find chances are you're you're taking care of most of the vitamins and minerals now there are some nutrients and I'll highlight them as we get as we go through there are some nutrients that even on a really healthy diet you may not be getting enough of you know things like iodine and magnesium whenever we bump into one of those I'll explain why someone eating a really healthy diet still might not be getting enough and then so we'll kind of highlight that but I think generally speaking if you're eating a really good quality diet with a lot of whole foods then your risk of nutrient deficiency is pretty low unless you're unless you don't meet all those pillars we talked about with meal planning like uh there's no variety in your diet so you're always getting the same nutrients but not getting others so we'll look at that and then the idea of a supplement right so should you supplement with vitamins or not I just told you a time when we do but again I'm not saying we don't take vitamin A pills every day or zinc tablets every day this is a few days a year we kind of we bump up our intake of these things so I think that like the name implies a supplement is a supplement it should supplement a healthy diet vitamins won't make up for a crappy diet right we talked about that a little bit with fiber supplementation right remember I said that if you you know if you have a poor diet and you supplement with fiber you could actually making things worse because you could be you'll be absorbing even less of the minerals in your diet because the fiber is going to be pulling it through your body but if you're eating a high fiber diet with a lot of whole foods in it yes you're going to lose some of those minerals from your food but you're eating so many more because you're eating healthy foods that you're not creating an efficiency so there are situations like that where where supplementing a poor diet can be almost worse for you than not doing it at all so just remember that um really really focus on quality foods and whole foods and avoiding foods that have a bunch of empty calories and chances are you're going to be meeting most of your nutrient needs that'll get you 95% of the way there and then look at your diet track it using something like the chronometer app or or website and see okay here's a couple nutrients I need to try to find a little more of and and bump up that intake okay an overview of the vitamins so they support nutritional health and the main reason we need them like I told you that they kind of they function as the the nails and screws holding this home together uh so they're critically important even though you don't need a lot of them right you need you need uh you know grams or really milligrams or micrograms of the vitamins and minerals whereas you need grams of the macronutrients um they they primarily function as coenzymes they're primarily function as as the ignition for your enzymes so enzymes are made of protein and we know that enzymes are super important they power almost every metabolic reaction in your entire body I mean we would not be here without without the enzymes that support our metabolism but those enzymes are like a car that doesn't have that doesn't have an ignition the the vitamins excuse me vitamins and minerals especially vitamins function as the as the ignition that turn on the enzymes so that they can power our metabolism so you would not have a metabolism without enzymes and you are not alive without a metabolism all right differences from energy yielding nutrients I've mentioned this but just remember that um your macronutrients they provide the energy they have that's why there's four calories in a gram of carbs four calories in a gram of protein nine calories in a gram of fat because they're that they're the nutrients that we actually extract energy from vitamins and minerals don't provide energy directly right you take a b complex pill it doesn't have any calories in it because vitamin b vitamins don't have any any energy but it they allow us to extract energy from our macronutrients so structurally how are they different you see that they're individual units so a protein is going to be a chain of amino acids a triglyceride is going to have these long fatty acid tails that are chains of carbons and then carbohydrate carbohydrates are going to be chains of your monosaccharides like glucose whereas your vitamins are just individual units so there's nothing there's nothing to tear apart nothing to break down which is why they don't yield any energy so we talked about no energy yielded um food contents again it's going to be different the main thing I would look at you know with generally speaking the vitamin and mineral content of food is it has started to drop uh and and mainly with minerals I think minerals is a whole separate story because minerals can't be created right the the plants the the plants and animals that you consume they can generate they can make vitamins they don't make minerals minerals come from the soil so really um when we garden and I'm all for soil health and and good agriculture uh a plants plants can really only be as healthy as the soil that they're grown in and then animals can really only be as healthy as the plants they consume so that's so that's very very true but more more so with minerals than vitamins all right and then what similarities do they have with energy yielding nutrients I mean we talked about they're organic so they they they are built around carbon they just don't have they're not long chains of carbons all right bioavailability and we still haven't talked about the fat cell items we'll come back to that but so what's this term here bioavailability you'll you'll see it a lot when you're talking about vitamins and minerals the rate and the extent to which a nutrient is absorbed and used so let's say that if the bioavailability of of a nutrient is 90% then that means that you know 90% of what you put in your mouth will be digested and absorbed and used if the bioavailability is 50% it's going to be a lot lower so a real good example let's say like calcium so like the cal calcium that you'd find in a container of yogurt is going to be very bioavailable so the it's still not all of it but let's say that you know the majority of the calcium in a container of yogurt you are going to digest absorb and use the the the calcium and spinach not the case because spinach has these anti nutrients like oxalates that decrease bioavailability so there's there's about as much calcium in a serving of spinach as there is in a serving of yogurt but you're only going to be able to digest and absorb and use about five percent of it so a small fraction so that means that the calcium and spinach is not bioavailable the calcium and dairy products is and that's that's kind of an exception there are there are plenty of plants where you can get calcium from but that's just a really good example so what else could influence bioavailability let's look at the list here and then talk about a few more things influenced by the efficiency of digestion so again it doesn't matter what you you're not what you eat you're what you absorb so if you if you eat something that can't be digested properly then it can't be absorbed and if it can't be absorbed you can't use it and that's where cooking comes into play right so cooking uh so you see preparation on the last part of the list um cooking does destroy some nutrients but it also makes other nutrients more available so so i think the net change is good so cooking your food as a species when we started to harness the power of fire and cook our food um it made our food more bio available it made the nutrients in our food more bio available and it's been a it's been a net positive so preparing your food so if you prepare your food properly yes you will destroy some nutrients but the nutrients that are left behind are going to be more bio available so there are some exceptions to that rule but generally speaking that's the case so if you uh let's see like carrots right when you cook carrots you release more beta carotene than if you eat them raw so nothing against eating carrots raw but the prep preparation does matter but then at the same time you want to make sure you're not destroying your nutrients when you prepare your foods so um more gentle preparation methods like lightly saw tang vegetables would be better than um then then certain cooking methods if you're going to boil or steam vegetables then one thing you can do is actually you will lose a lot of nutrients in the water so one thing you can do if you steam your vegetables is don't throw that water out right you could even you could drink that water or you could use that water as like a base for um soups or stews and the nutrients that actually were leached out of the broccoli for example would still be in that liquid so you could still you could still um get them all right um and then the one in the middle we we skipped previous nutrient intake and nutrient nutrition status remember your body is always trying to maintain homeostasis so the the more deficient you are in a nutrient the higher percent of it you will absorb if you're constantly consuming calcium your body will decrease the absorption of calcium so you don't get too much but if you're never consuming something like iron your body will up regulate the the absorption of iron so all those are true all right synthetic and fortified foods influence bioavailability so let's look at it like an example would be like a calcium fortified orange juice for example so if they were to put if they were to put a a less bioavailable form of calcium like calcium carbonate in there then um it wouldn't be very bioavailable but the the calcium fortified orange juices i've seen they use a a more bioavailable form um called calcium citrate malate i believe and um so that the calcium in a calcium fortified orange juice is basically as bioavailable as the calcium from a glass of milk so that so that the nutrients that go into the foods matter a lot you see like a lot of your breakfast cereals have a whole bunch of of nutrients added to them well they're really only as good no matter what they say on the side of the box about having a hundred percent of a certain vitamin they're only as good as how um bioavailable that form is all right so that's the basics of bioavailability and you're not what you eat you're what you you absorb precursors so precursors are substances that are converted to an active form of the vitamins so the best example that i've already mentioned we've beta carotene beta carotene is not essential beta carotene is not a vitamin uh beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin a so that's what a precursor would be something that's kind of one step away or something that is converted to an active form uh the organic organic nature fresh foods naturally contain vitamins so that they can be readily destroyed during processing so again how you process and how you prepare foods matters oh let's see what one example would be like you know how a lot of your produce is frozen well that that freezing process you might lose about a quarter of the nutrients that are that are that are in the in that bag of peas or whatever but it does preserve the rest of those nutrients very well so you so you buy those peas you store those peas and then a month later you eat those peas you had that initial loss but it preserved the rest whereas um when foods are sitting out so let's say you you go to the store and you see and you see some peas in the produce aisle every day they've been sitting there every every minute that they've been off of the vine so to speak um they have been loose losing nutritional quality so some studies have shown that if you let like let's say i had a spinach sit out or let let a let a bowl of spinach sit out for a few days before you consume it it might have lost 30 or 40 percent of its nutritional value so so so you see you got to kind of method you know these processing methods do matter um the fresher the better that's one of the reasons i like gardens right we literally we literally we have hydroponic gardens in the house so we will we will cut our vegetables and put them in our mouths right so they so there so there wasn't any time for them to be for them to lose that nutritional value so kind of a cool thing all right so all this stuff matters but don't overthink it if you're eating a bunch of whole foods and eating a bunch of healthy foods yes you're going to be losing some nutritional value by sauteing your vegetables a little bit but um you also made some other ones more bioavailable and there's usually plenty to go around all right so dose level and effects when it comes to toxicity so we mentioned earlier that water soluble vitamins aren't really aren't stored so toxicity is not generally a big deal because excess is lost in urine this will be a bigger conversation when we talk about the fat soluble vitamins because they are stored with um with water soluble vitamins since that since you lose the excess i'd say deficiencies are more common like making sure that you have to have a constant supply of them since there's nowhere to store most of them but toxicity um so you see here just kind of like the dose makes the poison as they say on the left here as you progress in the direction of more the effect gets better and better with no end in sight um real life is seldom if i like this so in a in what i was saying in in in a fictitious world then more would be better like how much vitamin c should you consume as much as possible how many fish oil pills you take a day as much as possible that's not true um the second one as you progress in the direction of more the effect reaches a maximum and then a plateau becoming no better with higher doses so this would be something where especially with the water soluble vitamins yes you reach a point where you're making sure you're getting an optimal intake anything above that is really just making your urine more expensive so that the excess would be lost but even then there's a limit to that like vitamin c yes the excess you lose in urine but man if you start getting over three grams a day you start to see some problems so i would say with water soluble vitamins this might be true in most cases except there is an extreme there is a point where that's no longer the case then on the far right we see what's called a bell curve this is almost always what we look at when we're talking about nutrition right not having enough of something is bad but having too much of something is also bad you want to find that happy medium now that that you see that bell curve there on the far left side we probably have the rda where you're making sure you're getting enough to not be deficient on the far right side we'd have the up the u l the tolerable upper intake level before before things become toxic somewhere in the middle is the optimal intake and that's where it gets really tricky because we don't know what that number is we know what the floor is we know what the ceiling is we don't know what the optimal intake for you for that nutrient is but it's somewhere in between those two extremes all right as you're progressing the direction of more the effect reaches an optimum at some intermediate dose that'd be our optimal intake level and then declines showing that more is better up to a point and increasingly harmful beyond that point that too much can be as harmful as too little is true for most nutrients so that's that's the stance that i would take for really all nutrients i was just saying that with your water soluble vitamins if you if you consume too much thankfully most of it's just going to be lost in your urine anyways all right so match these you can pause this if you want to uh affects absorption transport storage and excretion that'd be solubility so how easily something is carried through your gut and carried into your bloodstream etc readily destroyed things you know organic things again organic meaning carbon based structures not um not uh farmers market so the so vitamins are are are going to be destroyed in ways that minerals aren't right for minerals the key is were the minerals ever there because they had to be from the soil so if you if you grow food in nutritious nutrient dense mineral rich soil there's going to be going to be plenty of minerals and then the key is unlocking them and making them bioavailable but vitamins can be destroyed by cooking and processing methods inactive forms that are converted to active forms those are your precursors beta carotene being the best example oh they give it to you right next there example beta carotene being a precursor and then adverse effects in high doses use the ul that remember the ul is one of our dris from an earlier chapter the tolerable upper intake level so if you go above that number you can become you can develop toxicities all right so the two kinds of solubility fat and water soluble more is better is not the case excessive intake of vitamins from supplements may be harmful and that's generally where you see toxicity it's it's it's hard to eat a diet that becomes toxic but with supplements you absolutely can consume too much of things right people you know you're just getting a super physiological or unnatural doses if you use supplementation like how could you eat that much of that nutrient well you can't but you can easily do it in supplement form okay so we haven't talked about fat soluble enough we have a whole chapter coming up but we talked about so solubility water soluble vitamins they're digested they're absorbed you know they're right there in the water of the water the six or seven liters of fluid that are in your gut today they're going to be absorbed right into your bloodstream and carried through your blood to where they're needed so those are your water soluble vitamins very easy to absorb and transport but then excess just spills over into the urine and not all of it is going to be recaptured so we lose excess in our urine fat soluble vitamins are different so fat soluble vitamins are digested and absorbed with fat and remember fat like long chain fats they're going to be absorbed into your lymphatic system not your bloodstream so first of all if there's fat soluble vitamins in a meal there has to be fat in that meal for you to absorb it so like i think of an example like not to put shame on anyone anything but like a total like total has those cereals where they say total raisin brand whatever hundred percent of all these vitamins and minerals okay so there's a hundred percent of the vitamin a in in this bowl of total but if you eat this cereal which doesn't have fat in it with skim milk which doesn't have fat in it then yes there's vitamin a in that meal but it will not be absorbed and because you need fat in a meal to absorb the fat soluble vitamins i think a nice safe number i say that a meal needs to have eight grams of fat in it to properly absorb the fat soluble vitamins and it's not just fat soluble vitamins other things are fat soluble too like the crotinoids so like if you had if you have a salad for example if a salad has no fat in it then you're not going to absorb the beta carotene anywhere near the same level as you would if that meal had fat so put some nuts on it put some seeds on it a little bit of fat in a vinaigrette or something and now you're going to absorb let's say five hundred percent more of the crotinoids from those from those plants so you need fat to absorb fat soluble vitamins and i'm not saying that eight grams a day is a magical number it's just a fair number right some would say the number has to be higher but i don't want to terrify you until you have to eat 20 grams of fat in every meal i think eight grams is a is a fine number to shoot for all right um and that's a small number if you eat three meals a day and only have eight grams of fat in each meal you're not eating enough fat unless you're on a super low calorie diet right even even people on low fat diets the the amdr for fat is still you know 20 to 35 percent of your calories so so 20 percent of your calories should be coming from fat no matter what kind of diet you're on so fat soluble vitamins need fat to be absorbed digested and absorbed properly they're going to be carried into your lymphatic system but then the other big differences fat soluble vitamins are stored right there's they're stored in your body tissues so for example um let's say you work as a lifeguard all summer you're outside you're uh you know you have your shirt off a lot you're exposing a lot of skin and remember that's how your body produces vitamin d so uv light hitting the cholesterol in your skin makes vitamin d so if you make a whole bunch of vitamin d during the summer you can go the entire winter i'm not saying you should do this but but some people can go the entire winter without consuming any vitamin d and they'll be fine because they can live on the vitamin d stores that they created during the summer or but with the fat soluble vitamins this is where like occasional high doses work just as well as a bunch of little doses whereas with water soluble vitamins that's not true a high dose you just lose the excess so fat soluble vitamins like with like vitamin d supplementation me and my family we do something with vitamin d we do it once a week so once a week we basically take a a decent sized dose dose and we we take it with a fattier meal and we absorb it and then we kind of live off it for the next for the next week um same thing so again i'm a big fan of organ meats and like for example liver is liver is probably the best source of vitamin a on the planet um so but i don't recommend eating liver every day i think you can actually eat too much liver right i recommend you never consume more than a pound of liver a week because it's so nutrient dense and it's got so many of these fat soluble vitamins that you could start to see toxicity issues so i have you know let's say i have a serving of liver a week and then i live off of those fat soluble vitamins for a few days and then i do then i repeat so that's going to be the main differences between fat and water soluble vitamins water soluble vitamins are readily absorbed but excess is lost in urine but then and they're not stored except for except for b12 uh fat soluble vitamins need fat to be absorbed but they're stored so you don't have to consume them all the time all right activity one we're going to skip this because i can't i can't go through every single nutrient to this detail we'd be here all day but um so the activity is to assign a single water soluble vitamin or a single vitamin to a group and you can answer these kind of questions but you can find this information real easily i will um i'm going to talk about quite a bit of as we go through the individual nutrients i have like the again this FDA document that i that i like to use so for whatever vitamin you're looking at if you want to learn about it what does it do what are its main functions we'll cover that today explain your vitamin signs of deficiencies in name of deficiency disease so some of them do we'll talk about things like palagra and berry berry today um what's the rda which remember the rda is enough of a nutrient for to meet the needs of 98 percent of the healthy population it's not your goal the rda is the floor that is the bare minimum you should be consuming the optimal intake is going to be higher um list three foods that are good or excellent sources of your vitamin that's a great thing to know if you're trying to boost your intake and then is toxicity an issue generally is going to be with fat cell vitamins and then if there is what is there a tolerable upper intake level so you can certainly go through that project yourself all right this is just uh so we've talked about these kind of things quite a bit already so water soluble vitamins your b vitamins of vitamin c absorbed into blood travel were freely but the excess see the kidneys detect and remove excess in the urine so it is possible to reach toxic levels but you really have to do it with supplements you need we're talking about mega doses uh there are some people to believe and take in 20 30 40 50 grams of vitamin c a day um i've seen you know there are some recommendations to basically increase don't do this but um to increase your vitamin c intake and tell you develop diarrhea and then back off which means some people are taking 60 or 70 grams of vitamin c a day you could never do that naturally uh so don't don't do that but the requirements are the important parts the water cell vitamins they're needed in frequent frequent doses one to three times a day really at every meal because the excess is you're not storing it for later you you use it or you lose it fat cell vitamins they're absorbed with with long chain fats so into the lymphatic system then the blood they have to be carried because they're they're not water soluble they have to be carried by transport proteins or they're carried in your um lipoproteins like LDL and HDL they're stored so they're stored in the cells associated with fat so fat cell vitamins are stored with fat um they they remain in your fat in your fat storage so that you do you do have dose you know basically you're storing them for later so toxicity is much more common because you are storing them and then you don't need them needed in periodic doses perhaps weeks or even months so i so i mentioned every every week i might get a dose of organ meats and every week i might or two weeks i might get a big dose of vitamin d that's kind of how we do things all right let's go through the b vitamins finally so without b vitamins the body would lack energy so that's why they're called the energy vitamins but remember they do not provide energy directly they power the the enzymes that power the metabolic processes that allow you to get energy from your from your calorie containing foods carbs lipids and proteins so they help their body use macronutrients for fuel they are coenzymes so that's that you'll see i'll show you a picture here but um um they they they turn on the protein portion of an enzyme to activate it so without coenzymes enzymes cannot function so without b vitamins you would run out of energy but it's not because the b vitamins give you energy it will indirectly do it's because the enzymes that harvest energy from your food would no longer be functioning so rda's and ai's we cut we'll we'll talk about that kind of individually but um i have the numbers right here when we get to them but remember the rda is just that floor the bare minimum adequate intake is going to be when we can't set an rda rda so like vitamin c we know we know exactly how much vitamin c a typical person needs to not get scurvy but some of these nutrients we can't do that right they don't they uh we we can't set that number a good example would be uh well mainly with the fat cell vitamins but vitamin k would be a good example because we don't know how much vitamin k you're getting from your gut so it's hard to say exactly how much you should eat uh vitamin d great example we don't know how we don't know where you live we don't know how much you're outside do wear sunscreen or not so we don't we don't know how much vitamin d your body's producing so we can't tell you how much you should be consuming okay vitamins give us energy falls they uh they um they allow us to get energy from other nutrients i've said that several times now here you see what a coenzyme is so the enzyme is that orange orangish yellowish orangish thing that's going to be the protein but the the ignition that turns on the enzyme is going to be uh going to be the vitamins so enzymes are worthless without without vitamins or or minerals to power them so these are called coenzymes if this if this was a mineral it'd be called a cofactor but we'll come back to that in a couple chapters all right let's get started so here we have we have thiamine first which is vitamin b1 so it's part of the coenzyme thiamine pyrophosphate which is a very important enzyme for energy metabolism so you see here that thiamine is needed to convert pyruvate to acetyl coa so without thiamine basically your your metabolism your glucose metabolism would shut off because glycolysis turns glucose into into pyruvate and then pyruvate needs to become acetyl coa to run through the krebs cycle or the tca cycle uh thiamine is also needed for nerve and muscle function so that's going to be that's going to be a big deal there uh what else do i have so critical functions and energy production supports proper heart function i have some i have some foods we'll come back to but a deficiency what you see here what this child has is something called berry berry and it's you see that edema that's a that's basically a thumbprint that just stayed stuck in that in in the foot there um what's the fda page say so the conversion of food into energy nervous system function we've said all that all right as far as uh let's see here we'll i'll show you the thiamine in food i just want to make sure i'm getting all right average intake meats or exceeds recommendation so this is something that's very important i like to focus on the vitamins and minerals that we struggle to get the ones that almost everyone gets we don't need to we don't need to spend as much time talking about what you see here fourth thiamine um the the recommended dietary intake is 1.5 milligrams but getting there is very easy i have a few you see here a list of food sources you can look at this but i'm going to give you the ones that i have many quality sources throughout the food groups including organ meats pork and whole grains asparagus and brussel sprouts are good examples uh and then on the the fda site beans and peas enriched grain products like breads and cereals nuts pork sunflower seeds and whole grains so lots and lots of good examples there and then i love this these charts here in the book because you can see it's actually showing you the the thiamine amounts in all these different foods so they're all over the place then i like how it gives you these excellent and sometimes unusual sources so just so you know like if you're not getting enough thiamine and you're really worried about it then look at this list and find the longest bars and try to consume them so you see pork is just off the charts compared to other uh other flesh i'm not not sure why uh and then you see soy milk and acorn squash being other really good examples there all right so that is thiamine generally they don't talk too much about that one but berry berry being that important um nutrient deficiency next we have riboflavin so this is going to be vitamin b2 it serves this is what we have talked about serves as a coenzyme in energy metabolism so flavin mononucleotide or fmn and then flavin adenine dinucleotide this is the one we've talked about so you see here that fad becomes fadh2 that's one of the two electron carriers we talked about in our metabolism remember those casino chips if each fadh2 harvests electrons and hydrogens enough to make two atp in the electron transport chain so riboflavin is a big part of your energy metabolism the name too flavin it actually talks about the color so just an interesting fact excuse me this is um this this is the one like if you take a multivitamin and then you wonder why your your pee's glowing in the dark it's basically riboflavin but it's actually named after the fact of how how much it changes your your urine color when you consume it okay uh let's see recommendations i'll come back to them deficiencies cause inflammation of membranes you can see like some inflammation in the mucous membranes of the mouth things like that there is no toxicity because again being a water soluble vitamin you would just pee out the excess and it makes sure you're in pretty i guess so what else do i have here uh for riboflavin vitamin b2 critical functions in energy production protect cells from oxidative damage which is which is a good thing it keeps your dna from being damaged uh it is light sensitive so i'll come back to the food sources but um this is the main reason why i think it actually says it's coming up but this is why you don't see a lot of milk and clear glass containers anymore because uh uv light and light can destroy riboflavin so you are better off buying your milk in in containers that are dark like you see like the um the white milk jug instead of the clear milk jug there will be a difference in riboflavin intake there or content all right so the sources i have and then look at the ones the book have milk meat and organ meats are all good sources spinach eggs and broccoli are good as well then the fda site riboflavin conversion of food into energy growth and development and red blood cell formation uh you need 1.7 milligrams per day and the list of food sources eggs enriched grain products meats milk mushrooms poultry seafood like oysters and spinach which the following is not true about riboflavin that would be that it is destroyed by cooking it's not destroyed by cooking it's destroyed by the light and that's what i talked about with the milk containers so here you see some there's some more examples from the book notice liver is off the charts like i i'm not i you know liver is the most nutrient dense food on the planet you know a liver from a healthy animal like a organic grass-fed beef liver or something like that just extremely nutritious so nutritious that i that i put a cap on how much i recommend people eat you know i i think it's i think everyone should and you probably don't i think everyone should but um you should not eat too much of it because you you see here one one serving of uh liver would meet all your needs but when you see that though just remember that you need to be eating it several times a day so if you have liver with with your supper and you didn't get any riboflavin the rest of the day that's not a good situation but you're going to find it look at the list of foods it's everywhere all right next we have niacin so niacin is the first one that has a couple different forms so niacin has two chemical structures nicotinic acid and nicotinamide which nicotinamide is the one that the major form of niacin in your blood but the reason these forms are important is because of supplementation you know people when you supplement with these nicotinic acid is would be one that it's more rapidly absorbed and utilized so it can lead to some interesting things like skin flushing but the nicotinamide is going to be like if you find a niacin that's a no flush niacin it will have nicotinamide but if there are concerns about niacin it'd be it'd be too high of intake intake impact in the liver and nicotinamide be more likely to do that but i'm not not not not too concerned about that the the study only studies i've ever seen that have shown that niacin can cause any issues with the liver we're talking about levels 10 times higher than even i would recommend as like a prescription dose right now there are prescription niacins that you can that you can use and i and i think you'd have to go 10 times past those doses before you got you're worried about damaging the liver but get not medical advice so what do we need niacin for so two coenzyme forms that are power power our metabolic reactions but the key one is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide NAD so go back to we just said riboflavin forms that FADH2 which is part of your metabolism niacin is even more important because NAD forms the NADHs and remember when you're metabolizing glucose you generate 10 of these NADHs and each one of them is worth 3 ATP so the huge majority of the energy that your body produces is carried on NAD which is built with niacin so see there carries hydrogens and their electrons and then we have NADP which is the phosphate form not near as important so niacin recommendations the RDA is stated in what are called niacin equivalents and i have that here for you so like 20 milligrams would be would be the intake that the FDA recommends as far as as far as functions the FDA page has cholesterol production conversion of food into energy digestion and nervous system function so obviously very very important the body does manufacture niacin from tryptophan so it occurs only after protein census needs have been met so you need to make sure you're getting ample protein because if your body needs tryptophan to build proteins it's certainly not going to build niacin with it so you need to have this excess in that kind of amino acid pool that they talk about so if you don't get enough niacin you see here the condition in the image this is called palagra or a niacin deficiency it can it can lead to death you see here it caused deaths in the southern united states in the early 1900s until we started to fortify our food products and that that was actually a very big deal niacin toxicity so again large doses certainly can lead to issues but we're talking very very large doses all right niacin is less vulnerable to food preparation losses than other vitamins then here's the food sources they have so i'll read the ones from from my my sources as well so niacin i said it's vitamin b3 we talked about the two forms good sources meat fish asparagus and organ meats i mentioned that skin flushing can be kind of interesting i've done that before just on purpose i used to work with a pharmacy where i would do their training and i and i took volunteers and we took a high dose of niacin just to see what happened what happened one guy i mean his head looked like a cherry tomato the skin flushing really hit him we were just kind of having fun with it but then i didn't think it bothered me at all i go to the car after i was done when they get in the car and i turn the air conditioner on that contrast and temperature just boom immediately causes causes my skin to flush and so i have felt it and it's quite interesting i had a roommate in college that that also his cholesterol was high and the doctor recommended niacin which we'll see here is called high dose niacin therapy is used to help decrease cardiovascular disease risk it's called niacin but it should be done under a doctor supervision due to the rare but potential risk of elevated liver enzymes but my so my friend was doing this and he would just sit there in the morning and just like his skin was crawling that was this kind of skin flushing effect but it was unbelievable he actually had a familial genetic condition a familial hypercholesterolemia and he was able to bring his cholesterol down without any other cholesterol-lowering medication he was able to bring his cholesterol down a few hundred points i was just i was shocked by it all right um so let's see here so the other food sources so beans, beef, enriched grain products, nuts, pork, poultry, seafood and whole grains now you know you're going to notice that these food lists are really really similar if you're eating these kinds of foods that's why i said you don't have to worry much about nutrient deficiencies if you're if you're if you're eating the foods that check all these boxes at the end of the day you should have enough of these nutrients all right next is biotin so biotin it's a coenzyme that carries activated carbon dioxide so you need it for the Krebs cycle or the tca it delivers carbon to pyruvate to form oxaloacetate meaning that without biotin the last step of the Krebs cycle can't start the first step of the Krebs cycle i don't care if you know exactly where they're needed but this is what i mean when i say they're needed to generate energy uh biotin is also needed for gluconeogenesis which is the conversion of non-carbohydrates into glucose and fatty acid synthesis so you need biotin to to break down your food to make glucose and to make fats also needed for the breakdown of fatty acids and amino acids so you see it's everywhere but it's widespread so the reason so it's critically important that you're getting enough biotin but the reason we don't spend a ton of time talking about it is because it's everywhere so if you're eating food you shouldn't you shouldn't have any real concerns here so biotin is b7 i have critical functions in energy production also important in the sense of new fats in the body which you saw here good sources include organ meats beef almonds walnuts and swiss chard my wife grows that i love that see what's the government site say so energy production protein carbon fat metabolism we covered all that where is it found oh we need 300 micrograms of it a day where is it found avocados cauliflower eggs fruits like raspberries liver pork salmon and whole grains so no no tolerable and uplaring take level so you don't worry about toxicity and finding enough of it just eat food you should be good all right pantothenic acid so part of the chemical structure of coenzyme a so when you take remember that for example so acetyl coa pyruvate you take that third carbon off turn it into carbon dioxide becomes a two carbon acetyl group you add the coa which needs pantothenic acid and now you have acetyl coa which is the which is the keystone of our entire metabolism all right i don't think i put this one on that list because it's just it's found in so many places so uh widespread and food like i just mentioned so its functions conversion of food into energy fat metabolism hormone production nervous system function and red blood cell formation need 10 milligrams of it a day it is widespread and food but it's readily destroyed by freezing canning and refining processes which but it's but it's everywhere so we're losing a chunk of it but since it's everywhere it's still not a big deal speaking of everywhere where do we find it avocados beans and peas broccoli eggs milk mushrooms poultry seafood sweet potatoes whole grains and yogurt so there's a long list there again they're not even showing you the list of foods because they're just everywhere and that's why deficiency is so rare next vitamin b6 so i would say you know when i when i think of the b vitamins like your folate and b12 are the and the niacin of the first year i think of a b6 is a very important one as well you see here we have three different forms of it pyridoxyl pyridoxine and pyridoxamine not a huge deal but okay so conversion to the coenzyme plp which is needed for amino acid metabolism and carb and fatty acid metabolism it's needed for the conversion of tryptophan to niacin or to serotonin we covered that a few chapters ago and it's needed for the synthesis of heme so which we use in in red blood cells nucleic acids and lecithin so b6 is stored exclusively in muscle tissue so kind of a neat kind of a neat little um side side effect there we don't talk about that on being stored very very much but um so it's important for nerve health muscle health etc a note that i have here is that b6 helps prevent homocysteine from building up in the blood so homocysteine is it kind of like sludges your blood up a little over simplification but it is an independent risk factor for heart disease you do not want to have elevated homocysteine levels if you do b12 folate and b6 are the treatment right there's no medical treatment needed no prescription needed more of these b vitamins can help your body um get rid of this this homocysteine knowing where what it is but but it's important all right um where do you get it i put organ meats uh fish like tuna as well as chicken let's see what the FDA says here got b6 you need two milligrams a day so very small amount needed for immune function nervous system function protein carb and fat metabolism and red blood cell production it's found in chickpeas in fruits other than citrus so not citrus fruits potatoes salmon and tuna all right so you see that um alcohol can lead to b6 deficiencies because they impact its its absorption so generally speaking alcoholics or group of people that we consider to be a very high risk for b-vibe deficiencies because of absorption issues but also poor diet etc a b6 toxicities can certainly uh can lead to neurological problems b6 is often used to to to treat some neurological problems maybe treats a strong word but it's been linked to improvements in carpal tunnel syndrome and a few other things as well all right we talked about the food sources here you see here you see the list you can just pause and take a look at those make sure you're eating basically whenever we come to one of these slides just pause it make sure you're eating you know enough of them to reach that rda at the bare minimum but so kind of add those bars together oh good i'm eating those four foods i'm getting way past that dot dotted red line i'm moving on all right next we have folate i'm going to mention this was one of my one of my favorites so uh also known as folicin or folic acid so it's a primary coenzyme form is called tetrahydrofolate it transfers one carbon compounds during metabolism so it converts b12 to its coenzyme form it's needed to make dna and that's a really big deal and it also regenerates methionine from homocysteine so i just mentioned that folate will help you get rid of homocysteine it does so by regenerating it into methionine but synthesizing dna is going to be the key here right this is what when you think of folate and folate intake almost everyone thinks of preventing neural tube defects so folate very important early in pregnancy as the neural tube which is where the spinal cord is going to be is developing in an infant so you know the first first six to seven weeks of during pregnancy folate critically important preventing neural tube defects neural tube defects used to be very common in the us until we started to fortify our grain products with folate so now whenever you're eating enriched grain products you will you will uh you'll be you'll be getting hopefully enough folate to prevent these kind of problems all right so we'll come back to that but before we get there with folate to see what the two sites say folate slash folic acid important for pregnant women and women women women capable of becoming pregnant absolutely agree with that prevention of birth defects that's that's a key reason to consume folate protein metabolism and red blood cell formation and you see we keep mentioning red blood cell formation that's why b vitamin deficiencies can can cause certain types of anemia a folate deficiency would cause a macrocytic anemia so same thing with b12 so basically you have an anemia where you have you have too few red blood cells but they're too big and they're not very good at carrying oxygen i like to put it this way the reason we have these big red blood cells is they're supposed to be dividing in two but without these nutrients you can't get proper cell division uh need 400 micrograms a day if you you know if you're pregnant or capable of becoming pregnant you would double that number to 800 but uh food intake asparagus avocado beans and peas enriched grain products like bread cereal pasta and rice talked about the fortification program there um green leafy vegetables like spinach and orange juice then on my sheet i know i'm bouncing around a bit but i want to make sure i hit all these things so folate which is b9 very important to note that folate and folic acid are not the same thing um so you see that um synthetic folate can be is is more bioavailable there is there is a key difference there so folate is a general term for a group of water soluble b b vitamins also known as b9 um folic acid refers to the oxidized synthetic compound that's used in supplement supplements and food fortification best food sources from from my list are beef liver and other organ meats uh pastured chicken and leafy green vegetables very important in dna production cell division and cell differentiations we talked about preparing the neural tube etc uh deficiencies cause elevated homocysteine levels mentioned that and neural tube defects in the first eight weeks of pregnancy okay so here we see folate absorption and activation um not not a big deal not a big deal here but folate in our food you have to you have to break you have to break it down and digest it like you do other things then you have to activate the folate before it's ready to be used more facts about folate bioavailability ranges from 50 to 100 percent increased need during pregnancy i talked about how we should double that intake from 400 to 800 micrograms a day during pregnancy folate disposal it's secreted by the liver into your bile remember that bile is squirted into your gut to emulsify fats but it's also a way your body can get rid of things and then then that if you're eating a very low fiber diet most of this is going to be reabsorbed again but if not some will be trapped and carried out neural tube defects i've mentioned several times now supplement used during pregnancy one month before conception through the first trimester i think that's a really important thing we have talked about if capability coming pregnant we all know where babies come from if you can become pregnant you should already be consuming this it's it's worth it you know take a prenatal vitamin if you could become pregnant because the problem is neural tube defects occur really early in pregnancy and you might be i mean i've had students that say they didn't know they're pregnant for like nine or ten weeks well that's too late so if you're capability coming pregnant you should be doing these things already all right um so folate anemia i just kind of mentioned this if you're folate or b12 deficient you you're not going to get proper red blood cell division so you're going to have two you're going to have what's called a macrocytic anemia macro meaning large so you're right you'll have too few red blood cells but they'll be they'll be too big and they won't carry oxygen properly so we covered all that let's see food sources heat and oxidation destroy folate same as most of your other vitamins talked about anemia i think we're good there all right so folate food sources i've mentioned a couple things but you can look at this list here next we have b12 so we're almost done with the b vitamins here um so vitamin b12 and folate depend on each other for activation so why is that important that means that um sorry it's got to find it here all right they they kind of can hide problems with one another so a whole bunch of b12 can mask a folate deficiency a whole bunch of folate can mask a b12 deficiency the key is to get both of them together i've really never recommended one without the other like if somebody if you if you're having an anemia or you're having an issue and you're like you're not sure if it's b12 or folate it's a culprit well the simple solution is just to use a b complex or increase intake of both but uh but they are needed they're both needed for regeneration and methionine from homocysteine so again if you have homocysteine levels that are elevating your blood not medical advice but i'd recommend getting folate b12 and b6 for sure and then also i recommend something called choline but again not not medical advice just friends talking here so b12 is needed for the synthesis of dna and rna which i mean that's why you know you need uh you you need b12 to for proper cell division uh all right individual roles of vitamin b12 so on top of just the basic cell division stuff b12 is needed for nerve function so if you have a b12 deficiency it can lead to some neurological problems um digestion and absorption this is a neat one because of something that happens in the stomach so the stomach generates a compound called intrinsic factor and intrinsic factor is needed for the proper digestion absorption of b12 this is why i think if you were to tell me like if you know without knowing what i know well if you were to tell me name a nutrient that the typical american is not to worry about i'd say b12 right it is in all animal products which the average american consumes about 200 pounds of animal products a year it is you only need micrograms of it which means a microgram is a thousandth of a milligram right so we don't need a lot of it it's in all animal products which the typical american eats and b12 is stored up to five years worth is stored in your liver so if you were to tell me what's a nutrient that you'd never have to worry about i think it's this one the problem is millions of americans are not have low vitamin b12 levels in their body and i think it's because of poor stomach health i think that um you know as we get older or we or we eat poorly our stomach doesn't function very well we're having issues with intrinsic factor we're having issues with digestion and absorption this is why if you have a b12 deficiency they might they might try to treat it with a supplement but most of the time they just go to injections b12 injections they bypass your gi tract all together and just dump it into your bloodstream so i think that most people most americans and let again unless you're a vegan and you're not finding these foods because they're in animal products um the typical american if they're b12 deficient it's because of gut issues more than intake issues and that's why they use the b12 injections as a treatment all right so where do we get b12 food sources found almost exclusively in animal products and that's because it really comes from microorganisms but that that they that that give the nutrients to animal products but um you see things like so bioavailability issues um but again all animal products are going to have plenty of it there's no toxicity level uh let's see here so b12 plays an important role in nerve health and dna synthesis we mentioned that b12 is the only water cell vitamin that's stored in any large amount so it's stored in the liver uh it's necessary to have adequate stomach acid and a protein called intrinsic factor for problems of absorption i said that b12 is found only in animal products unless food is fortified so you can find foods that have b12 added no problems there um best food sources include organ meats like beef liver and seafood and then on this list here we have dairy products eggs fortified cereals meats poultry seafood like clams trout salmon haddock and tuna and the intake needed is six micrograms a day very small number and deficiencies can cause neurological problems and elevated homocysteine levels coline i just mentioned coline when we talked about um uh talked about homocysteine levels so coline is is is a vitamin like substance right it's not so it's not like technically a vitamin but it is essential meaning we need to consume it so so coline is an essential nutrient it is commonly grouped with the b vitamins mainly because of function it's used to make lecithin and acetyl choline uh which is a you know a neurotransmitter so it's manufactured from methionine so if you're if you're um that can that can impact homocysteine levels and that's why choline intake is is linked to lowering homocysteine levels it is a conditionally essential nutrient if you don't have enough methionine uh and then adequate intake you don't know how much right that that's kind of a trick tricky issues here but uh all right so you won't i gotta jump ahead to my vitamin like substances on this document here i apologize for those of you just watching this on youtube you don't you don't have access to these these course resources but uh so coline i have here is not a true vitamin it's a vitamin like substance very important for fat slash cholesterol metabolism and transport important in homocysteine metabolism so food sources include egg yolks grass fed butter potatoes and cauliflower and this is an important one deficiencies can cause fat accumulation in the liver possibly again possibly like it says here it's not fully understood possibly leading to non-alcoholic phyliber disease so i if someone has phyliber disease which is becoming more and more of a problem especially non-alcoholic phyliber disease i definitely recommend getting more nutrient intake of all sorts of nutrients but coline is really high up on that list all right just a few other things here so these non-vitamins just you know other other kind of important things but uh we haven't don't worry about these as much but inocital is part of cell membranes carnitine is needed for they called the carnitine shuttle it's needed to transport fatty acids into your into your mitochondria for oxidation and metabolism uh pava is para amino benzoic acid uh bacteria need that a lot because they actually make folic acid out of it but doesn't matter to us as much bioflavonoids just the chemical you know the phytochemicals chemical compounds that are found in our foods that's why we don't eat individual nutrients we eat foods and and that's why we we try to we try to create supplements that the taco oh here's a compound we know seems to be good from spinach let's just put that in a pill form doesn't work right when you eat spinach you're consuming thousands of compounds that are working together so spinach makes you healthier than any spinach extract supplement ever could at least as far as we know now all right so interactions among the b vitamins this is i mean the interactions are are a huge deal but almost every nutrient in your body is going to have synergistic relationships meaning that the two two nutrients help each other and make them work better but almost every nutrient is also going to have an antagonistic relationship too which means that um this nutrient will impair the absorption of this nutrient and we'll see that a lot with minerals like high intakes of one mineral decrease the absorption of others so just there there's there's constant interactions if you if you put all the vitamins and minerals kind of on a chart and then put all the webs from the lines from where they connect whether for good or bad reasons it would look like a really messy spider web all right um so interactions among the b vitamins each b vitamin coenzyme is involved in energy metabolism both directly and indirectly we talked about all that um deficiencies b vitamin deficiencies seldom show up in isolation because again if you're so malnourished that you have berry berry because you're not getting enough thiamine then you're probably deficient in other nutrients as well and then polygrap being a nice deficiency um toxicity very rare um excess is eliminated through urine so that's why it's very rare um the main issues with toxicity would be with high high doses with supplementation all right so those are all your b vitamins now we have vitamin c or acorbic acid uh acorbic acid or vitamin c protects against oxidative damage that's why it's an antioxidant so it protects against free radical damage it becomes something called dehydro acorbic acid which readily accepts hydrogens to become acorbic acid okay so its functions as an antioxidant i'll talk about the areas where i think it's most important but it does different defend your body against free radicals so what are those free radicals are these unstable creations in the body they're unstable because they have an unpaired electron and they're only going to be happy if they go harvest an electron from somewhere so they're so you see they're a molecule with one or more unpaired electron well oxidative damage it's going to like it's going to like be a little bullet that shoots through your cells trying to steal an electron but once it does that it creates this cascade effect because now wherever it's stolen electron there's now an unpaired electron and it's unhappy so so these um so antioxidants function by neutralizing these free radicals but just imagine them as bullets that shoot through your cells and do damage they can damage your DNA damage cell structures etc um so oxidative stress of free radicals may and then antioxidants may play a role in preventing diseases there are there's there's a theory of aging called the free radical theory of aging which basically says that we decay because of free accumulation of free radical damage and if you consume antioxidants then that should slow that damage all right describe the role of vitamin c in its relationship to oxidative stress and free radicals i just kind of did so free radicals are unstable and vitamin c can help neutralize them before they cause more oxidative stress in the body vitamin c loses electrons easily allowing it to perform as an antioxidant so giving that electron to these these free radicals antioxidants are protective against free radicals these are unstable molecules because they have one or more unpaired electrons so i said all that vitamin c protects cells and tissues from these unstable molecules that can cause oxidative stress which plays a role in disease development all right so vitamin c as a cofactor so vitamin c is a cofactor in collagen formation so collagen is like this we have imagine like three ropes and kind of knotting it together or braiding it collagen is the most you know most numerous protein in your body right it makes up a ton of different parts of you so you see here it's like the back about 30 percent of your bones are protein in its collagen so collagen is the if you took all the proteins out your body collagen would be the biggest pile and you need vitamin c to make it and that's why you look at um scurvy which is a vitamin c deficiency your your teeth fall out wound stone heal it's because of the collagen issue without vitamin c you can't build collagen without collagen you can't build a human all right so it's a cofactor in collagen formation matrix for bone and tooth formation a conversion of something called proline to hydroxy proline it's also a cofactor in other reactions so it's not the only thing vitamin c does but it's the reason the the most serious one um hydroxylation of carnitine we just talked about carnitine being needed to to break down fat or to metabolize fats the conversion of tryptophan to serotonin conversion of tyrosine to norepinephrine or noradrenaline and and for making hormones so vitamin c has lots and lots of functions and we need it but the collagen one is the big one other roles of vitamin c prevention and treatment of the common cold again i think this is true a slight but consistent shortening of cold duration so i don't think vitamin c is a miracle i don't think anything is when you're when you're fighting an infection but there are things that can help you fight off a little faster vitamin c also deactivates histamine so if you have allergy issues maybe vitamin c could be something beneficial for you to get a little more in your diet um disease prevention and treatment roles being studied again i mean you see there lots of studies done on very high doses of vitamin c and using vitamin c for all sorts of different things but the jury's still out um stress does increase vitamin c needs because the adrenal glands release vitamin c and hormones into the blood so the adrenal glands are where a lot of your vitamin c is concentrated and this is why like our ancestors that ate nose to tail they knew how important it was to eat the adrenal glands because that was a good place to get vitamin c when you couldn't be consuming plant products maybe you live in live in an arctic climate in the middle of winter or something um what else about stress and vitamin c smoking increases the need for vitamin c wait so let me read a couple things that i have here so deficiency causes scurvy i mentioned that they basically figured that out with uh with pirates not pirates but with sailors in the in the british navy they say that up to a million sailors would have died of this before they figured it out but they'd go out for months at a time on these boats they'd be eating like you know salted meat and and beer basically and they'd be getting scurvy and dying they'd be going months at a time without any vitamin c and they and they they fixed this issue by consuming citrus fruits maybe maybe adding a lime to their beer or these types of things so that's why so it was actually epidemiological work looking at these sailors that had very restrictive diets that led to the understanding that scurvy is a vitamin c deficiency all right deficiency causes scurvy it has many important functions but the most important roles are its antioxidant properties and its role in collagen synthesis protects lung tissue and white blood cells from free radical damage that's why it so it helps with immunity and lung function uh dietary intake enhances iron absorption which can be a good or bad thing so it's usually good so vitamin if your iron levels are low then consuming iron-rich foods with vitamin c will increase your absorption so that's normally good but if you have hemochromatosis or your iron levels are too high then you would want to limit iron intake but also limit vitamin c intake because it increases absorption so it's so that's what i mean when i say it can be good or bad vitamin c regenerates vitamin e so this is a really good relationship these two nutrients they're both antioxidants and they work together because they vitamin c can regenerate vitamin e so vitamin e can go back out and do its job again smokers require more than the average person good food sources include peppers especially red peppers so red peppers have two or three times more vitamin c than green peppers strawberries broccoli papaya and pineapple and then vitamin c is is very sensitive to heat light and oxidation let's see what the fda page has for us here vitamin c antioxidant collagen and connect tissue formation immune function and wound healing needs 60 milligrams a day again if you're a smoker you'd want to bump that up whereas it found broccoli brussel sprouts cantaloupe citrus fruits and juices like oranges and grapefruit kiwi fruit peppers strawberries tomatoes and tomato juice vitamin c deficiency we talked about the scurvy already notable signs of deficiency the gums bleed easily around the teeth and then capillaries under the skin break spontaneously so see these pinpoint hammers there on the right and then what's called the scorbutic gums that's because without collagen these tissues are breaking down too easy like the like the lining of your blood vessels so scurvy talked about it sudden death death from massive internal bleeding you know hopefully you never see anyone with scurvy but it used to be a very serious problem especially especially with sailors all right vitamin c toxicity this would really come from just supplementation so we talked about diarrhea and gi distress i mentioned this earlier you basically if you want to know what you're the tolerable level of vitamin c intake for you would be you increase your intake until you have gi problems then you back off don't do that i'm telling you that people some people believe in mega dosing on nutrients like this i am not one of them but i'm just that's you you can consume so much of this that it can lead to diarrhea and gi distress so don't do that i generally recommend just some studies i've seen on blood vessel health etc i recommend never going above this again you notice my my thoughts but i recommend definitely not consuming more than three grams or three thousand milligrams of vitamin c a day there's no reason for that much either but that's where you start some studies have shown some blood vessel issues all right um interference with medical regimens high doses not recommended with certain medical conditions the big big one to me being that hemachromatosis if you have too much iron then you do not want to be increasing iron absorption all right so vitamin c and food i've already read off a couple of lists there you can pause this and take a look but you'll see that it's not uh not too difficult to get enough of it as long as you're eating some eating healthy foods all right we did it now the lesson is over you should have learned to describe how vitamins differ from the energy nutrients we did that they're needed to generate energy but they don't generate the energy themselves and then how fat cell vitamins differ from water cell vitamins we talked about absorption storage excretion etc identify the main roles deficiency symptoms and food sources for each of the b vitamins did that identify the main roles deficiency symptoms and food sources for vitamin c so a lot of stuff here um okay so if you're in my classes you know look at the course shell and you'll have these documents to read along with this as well so i do hope this helps we'll come back and cover the fat cell vitamins in the next video have a wonderful day be blessed