 Hey guys, this is Dr. Ahmet Ergin. I'm an endocrinologist and a diabetes educator now today We are talking about something exciting the vitamin that every diabetic should take It's inexpensive. It's readily available. It is called thiamine or benphatiamine. Now, what is it? Why do you need it? What is your benefit taking with thiamine? Let's get into that right now So guys thiamine is a vitamin. It's a vitamin B1 now You're gonna be like well, I'm taking a multivitamin or I'm eating food You know, it's vitamins are in the food. Those are great But unfortunately with diabetes we become thiamine deficient Then I say we we consider ourselves as a family our community But problem is with the diabetes you excrete a lot of thiamine in the urine so more than other people and also thiamine is used in The utilization of glucose. So when you eat anything with carbohydrate or or even if you don't eat any carbohydrate Your body makes glucose. Your body has to make something called ATP. That is the energy Molecule so when there's a lot of glucose Unfortunately the mitochondria that makes the ATP becomes overloaded from the excessive glucose intake Now glucose rush into the cell and it needs to be converted to energy And the mitochondria is trying to get the job done But then the backup happens Now the backup means that the substrates because there's multiple reactions that has to take place And I'm not going to go over this because you're not there is you're not trying to get a biochemistry lesson here I'm just trying to give you a good idea of what's going on in your body So due to the excessive load of glucose it backs up and when this backup happens the substrates Unfortunately leads to other pathways in the body that leads to the vascular and ethylial damage with is the main reason for complications of diabetes, which is like blindness kidney disease neuropathy and so forth So there is an enzyme called erythrocyte transketolase transketolase Unfortunately needs thiamine as a cofactor Cofactor means that the factor that has to be there is that co-signing an agreement a cofactor has to be there for that enzyme to function thiamine is an enzyme that's a part of one of the main enzymes that get the job done So when there is thiamine deficiency and high sugar foods and high carbohydrates foods for example alcohol Things like that will definitely reduce the thiamine absorption from your intestine But also it increases the excretion and having insulin resistance To be honest with you is one of the biggest reason for thiamine deficiency as well So even if you eat thiamine in your food, you will be deficient and that main enzyme Unfortunately will not be able to get things done And in a situation where there is an overload then that enzyme really is out of commission And everything starts shifting to the other direction, which is not a good direction So your body tries to do that because something has to be done about that backed up substrates But then they end up damaging your cells. Now the question is Why some cells are affected in your body, but not the others? For example, you get neuropathy, you get nerve pain. You may go blind from diabetes You may have a kidney failure from diabetes But why do you not have a long failure or why do you not have Say for example skin problems as much Well, that's because some cells unfortunately is not able to Go against the glucose normally when glucose rush in the cells decide to take the glucose in or not Some cells do not have that liberty And they just welcome every sugar coming in So the kidney cells the eye the cells in the eye and the nerve cells Unfortunately are the most susceptible because the glucose is coming in It's like there are guests coming into your house and you do not have the Decision to take them in or not and then they come in and you have to accommodate them And if you do not have enough Accommodation or you run out of resources then there's a chaos And the chaos is people, you know, let's say you have like 20 people in your house God knows what they are doing. They may be causing all sorts of damage to your house Same thing that happens inside the cell too much glucose coming in Some cells doesn't know how to handle that it backs up all that backed up glucose shifts to other ways And starts damaging your body now when you have thiamine enough thiamine At least your body can process that sugar and take care of it instead of causing that backup So we need to make sure that you guys have enough thiamine now When I say thiamine, thiamine is a water soluble vitamin So it is not as good as absorbed and you have to be taking this every day and so forth But bent for thiamine is a fat soluble form of thiamine Now that's better because then you can absorb that better and your body actually likes it better because think about Your body is your cells are all formed from cholesterol core And basically we are a good junk of fat So fat soluble vitamins like vitamin d for example, you can go without vitamin d for a long time And your body will still have vitamin d because vitamin d is kind of dispersed in your body in your fat cells So that's like a fat works like a storage So anything that's fat soluble is better absorbed from the intestine and it's better stored as well So as a result, bent for thiamine is the way to go You know a normal person will need anywhere from one to four milligram of the Thiamine and you can look up on the internet and they'll say oh, well eat salmon You know eat meat dairy, etc. They have a bunch of thiamine. Well, that's true But not enough you may have anywhere from one to two milligrams or three milligrams at most of thiamine in your diet But if you are constantly deficient or you need more and more Then you need the supplement now interestingly, of course There have been a lot of studies in vitro which means that you know They have done studies in cell cultures to see what happens to those cells in a laboratory environment And they have identified that most cells when they are fortified with thiamine or benphatiamine They do much better in terms of their outcome So they basically simulate what's happening in the body in the laboratory environment And they observe what happens to the cells and they were able to observe even in some rat studies They were able to observe that the complication risk from high glucose goes down anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent Now we give a lot of medications to diabetic patients to try to reduce the complications But we don't talk about thiamine or benphatiamine as much and what's the reason for that? Well, the reasons are a few fold there are not enough human studies and and scientifically You know most doctors will say oh, well, there is not enough double blinded studies major studies, etc Well, there won't be any major studies about this because benphatiamine you can buy it from amazon You can go to the link below and i'm gonna give you the best thiamine or benphatiamine you can find on amazon Something that's very cheap, you know like none of the pharmaceutical companies will invest Millions of dollars, you know at drug development. We always complain about drug costs But those drugs, you know, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars To produce a drug that is safe and effective and to prove that there's a lot of resources poured into that Now benphatiamine being available in the market is over the counter Nobody is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars that's already readily available over the counter So another application for thiamine is neuropathy. You know, even if you have neuropathy Even if you have complications taking benphatiamine 600 milligrams Will help you dramatically with your nerve pain as well So it can also help prevent the progression of complications So even if you have an eye disease right now or neuropathy or kidney disease fake benphatiamine That's going to help you dramatically to prevent further damage. God forbid, you know Ending up with dialysis or eye injections or a bunch of eye surgeries And the worst-case scenario is blindness. We don't want any of this on you guys So we do our best with the pharmaceutical medications, diet and exercise Anything you can get your hands on to improve your diabetes care But I think benphatiamine is a great way to supplement that I don't recommend every other supplement Don't be a supplement junkie and go buy 20 supplements hoping that everything will help You have to hear from your doctor. It has to be a reliable information I wish you guys were going to PubMed and the pubmed that's most of the scientific articles are And you will find a lot of scientific articles about benphatiamine If you want to do your own research as well And I will include a few links for you in the description below as well So guys, thank you very much for watching. Make sure you share this video. We'll see you in the next one guys