Is high-dose Thiamine therapy safe?

[mostlylurking]

Yeah I will be able to suss out the estrogen stuff and I did notice the sugar is bad slant. I really wish I had kept up on the thiamine way back yrs ago when I knew I'd need more of it consuming so much sugar. My son developed adhd and was drinking 5 cans of soda a day at times. We finally got him off it and he's doing a lot better. I also stopped drinking coffee with 1/4 cup of sugar! Plus no more coke. I am doing better, but have a ways to go to get back to what I'd say is healthy energy levels without that feeling like I might die if I do too much exercise. Panic attacks were a huge issue for yrs too. Thankfully only get one here and there now due to known circumstances. Anyway thanks for sharing your experience with it here it's very helpful.

you're welcome, glad to try to help.

 

[AncestralJoy]

This is what I wrote in another thread about my experience with high doses:

how long we you taking about a gram a day before you experienced shedding?
I don't have thick hair to begin with so i heartily want to avoid the happening but am taking a couple hundred to a1000mg a day though its not consistent every day

 

[Dr. B]

In a recent email exchange I had with Ray about memory, he referred to 50mg as a "big dose", so I would expect he has reservations about much larger doses. I later asked if he had a preferred form of thiamine, and I presumed HCL would be safe, but he did not reply. Perhaps bearing this in mind, if one is only supplementing it to address deficiency, an even smaller dose might be advisable? Of course one doing this might have different concerns to people looking into it's potential therapeutic use.

It's not an area I've looked into much before he mentioned it, though - I know some proponents advocate 500mg daily, and the 2g a day mentioned earlier in the thread by @mostlylurking sounds absolutely colossal, but if it works, I suppose it works. From looking around online I think it's quite awkward to get supplements that go that low, but one can always purchase a bigger one and re-distribute it into smaller pills.



@mostlylurking , from what you know, is it anything like ascorbic acid in that capacity increases with need? Perhaps there is an equivalent threshold to Cathcart's titration to bowel tolerance...? Like I said, I've never looked into it!

i asked him about benfotiamine allithiamine he said regular thiamine hcl is good, 10mg. i dont remember if i asked specifically about megadosing, ill review again. it seems he does like the thiamine hcl though
there were some posts here saying benfotiamine is toxic for some reason.
the rda is 1.4mg, so its possible, the 10mg dosage daily like ray recommends is enough to resolve a simple deficiency. but if it dose dependently inhibits carbonic anhydrase then there are a lot of benefits attainable from higher doses. the supplements ive seen do tend to be 100mg minimum, and up to around 500mg. youd probably need to get a powder, or a b complex mix or multivitamin to get the 1mg, 2mg, 10mg etc dosages.

theres posts on here from Haidut about thiamine increasing or decreasing PDH (cant remember the details) but its a rate limiting enzyme for glucose metabolism.

ill probably try out 500mg a day soon, but i may be starting it alongside some policosanol, 20mg of that, so i wont be able to evaluate the effects directly of thiamine, unless i try that out alone first.

Reading this article now and am blown away by some of the research on this website. I think I've been thiamine deficient ever since starting the Peat diet full of sugar! And I'm going to give it to my kids who also downed soda like it was water at times. I knew of the importance but just figured we'd gotten 'enough' everyday. Clearly NOT!
Energy Deficiency and ASD - Hormones Matter

orange juice and milk have 0.2mg and 0.1mg thiamine per cup (but thats pasteurized standard forms) organic/grass fed etc maybe have more, raw maybe has more. white bread if its enriched actually has some thiamine added back into it. its possible if Peating and using things like white sugar or white rice, you need to add supplemental thiamine. Liver has it but it may be needed to process the liver itself, if you add plain sugar into the mix you may need to supplement some.
ive heard varying things on HFCS but peats older article said hfcs sodas have starch materials which contain carbs and arent listed on the label, its like triple the calories listed on label and theyre starch based so HFCS sodas despite supposedly being 50g carbs/sugar are actually much more fattening than the mexican and higher quality sodas using cane sugar.

 

[sweetpeat]

how long we you taking about a gram a day before you experienced shedding?
I don't have thick hair to begin with so i heartily want to avoid the happening but am taking a couple hundred to a1000mg a day though its not consistent every day

I would say probably a month or two. I started increasing thiamine dosage end of Jan 2020 and was up to a gram by end of Feb. Then I have a note the following Apr that I had been shedding for a few weeks and was suspecting the thiamine and consequently lowered the dose. I got labs a few weeks later that confirmed low iron.

 

[Dr. B]

I would say probably a month or two. I started increasing thiamine dosage end of Jan 2020 and was up to a gram by end of Feb. Then I have a note the following Apr that I had been shedding for a few weeks and was suspecting the thiamine and consequently lowered the dose. I got labs a few weeks later that confirmed low iron.

do you think it increases utilization
was your diet already low in iron, what if you combined the thiamine with ancestral supplements blood product. i think its 6mg or 8mg iron per 500mg capsule

 

[sweetpeat]

do you think it increases utilization

Could be.

was your diet already low in iron

No. I checked my cronometer from that time period. I was getting 10 or more mg of iron per day.

what if you combined the thiamine with ancestral supplements blood product. i think its 6mg or 8mg iron per 500mg capsule

If I decided to try high dose thiamine again, I would probably need to supplement iron. Or at least have vit C with high iron foods. I wasn't doing that before due to Peat's cautions about iron.
Honestly though, I don't feel at all inspired right now to try higher doses. I don't feel it benefited me any more than lower doses do.

 

[Dr. B]

Could be.

No. I checked my cronometer from that time period. I was getting 10 or more mg of iron per day.

If I decided to try high dose thiamine again, I would probably need to supplement iron. Or at least have vit C with high iron foods. I wasn't doing that before due to Peat's cautions about iron.
Honestly though, I don't feel at all inspired right now to try higher doses. I don't feel it benefited me any more than lower doses do.

did you get any signs of boosted co2, other benefits from the high doses

 

[sweetpeat]

did you get any signs of boosted co2, other benefits from the high doses

I had one day, maybe two, of clearer thinking. That's about it.

 

[tommyg130]

Only 1

Thiamine is a chelator for heavy metals and reduces toxicity of high Vitamin A. I've been using thiamine pyrophosphate, because I couldn't stand either HCl or Allithiamine. But in all cases, you have to dose to the half-life, support sulfation pathways, etc. along the lines of Andy Cutler's protocol without the Vit A. I had to stop the B1 for 4 days, then restart at much lower doses and take every 2.5 hours (blood half-life for B1 pyrophosphate), along with low-dose B2. Am now able to take it OK again, gradually increasing, but am probably going to stop at 2-4 mg/day total, which looks like an adequate level for me.

I think a lot of the therapeutic value for allithiamin or high-dose B1-HCl comes from heavy metal detox and effects on Vit

Only 2-4mg ? Seems very low? Still benefits from that ?