energy metabolism Archives - Hormones Matter

Health Requires Energy. Energy Requires Nutrients.

Published on June 27, 2023

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A Fundamental Issue

I was horrified to watch the “60 Minutes” program Sunday, April 12th, 2020 on television that dealt with the colossal number of Americans suffering from obesity, chronic fatigue and diabetes, both types I and II. About half of the program dealt with the essential consumption of natural food, reminding us that Hippocrates, 400 BCE said “let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food”. This must have been said thousands of times but everything in our modern civilization is totally destructive to the whole idea. I have seen so many hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose illness was caused by themselves. It was treatable by making sure that each individual understood the fundamental issue. So before I illustrate a typical illness situation within my experience, I will try to state what I mean by describing what I consider to be the “fundamental issue”.

“We behave according to what we eat”.

I have stated this so many times but unfortunately the American medical profession is the major inhibitor to its clinical success. When a suffering patient with many symptoms arising from what I call “dietary mayhem”, goes to his or her physician, they simply do not recognize the clinical expression of the popular high calorie malnutrition. The many symptoms are usually referred to as psychosomatic and the unfortunate patient is told that “it is all in your head”. I have witnessed this so many times; I cannot understand why the physicians don’t pay a little more attention to what the patient is trying to tell them. Often the patient has discovered the real cause of the problem but find that her words are considered to be the voice of ignorance and delusion.

Food and Energy

Our food consists of fuel that must be burned (oxidized) to liberate energy. In any text this element of the food is described as “calories”. The energy quality of our food intake is measured in kilocalories and a single one is defined as “the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water through 1°C”. Notice the use of the word energy, the result of oxidation. Now, as everyone knows, vitamins and minerals, known as non-caloric nutrients, are vital to the release of energy from the caloric elements. To understand how this combination of chemicals works, there must be a ratio of calories to the noncaloric elements. That is why high calorie foods without vitamins or minerals are known as empty calories. It is the consumption of empty calories across America that has given rise to the idea of high calorie malnutrition. I have actually seen a written statement that this is an oxymoron. “How can excess of calories be considered a form of malnutrition?” It seems that few people understand this vital ratio and they seem to think that as long as you are consuming calories, you will flourish. Also, the food industry fills the grocery store with cartons of temptation and seems to have no regard for the well-being of its consumers. They keep using the term “all natural” so much, it becomes meaningless.

A Typical Case of Energy Deficiency

I was a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic and one of my interests was sudden infant death (SIDS). So one day I was having lunch with one of the surgeons who practised ear nose and throat surgery. He told me that he had been called to the medical ICU because a woman had stopped breathing and he had performed a tracheostomy. He was intrigued by the reason for this disaster and, knowing my interest, he suggested that I should take a look. Pediatricians are assumed to be familiar with diseases of children but ignorant of adult disease and I knew that I was not welcome. I found a 50-year-old woman who was grossly edematous and unconscious. Without considering the technical details, I proved that she had the vitamin B1 deficiency disease beriberi. With injections of thiamine she became conscious and the edema disappeared. During her recovery she developed a progressive anemia, thought to be evidence of internal bleeding, but all the tests were negative. I took some urine from her and subjected it to a special type of test. It showed that she was deficient in folate, another B vitamin. It is important to note that she did not develop folate deficiency until she began her recovery from thiamine, it was masked by cellular energy deficiency. When she began to receive folate there was an immediate recovery from the anemia but she had been given at least one injection of thiamine by then.

She was discharged from hospital, wheelchair bound, taking both thiamine and folate. When she returned as an outpatient, I found that she had a skin rash and that her legs were, if anything, weaker. It had long been known that anemia would develop from either folate or B12 deficiency, but the folate deficient variety required B12 supplementation as well as folate. If B12 was not provided, the patient would develop paralysis of the legs and I had forgotten this. Also, it is not well-known that vitamin B12 deficiency can cause a skin rash. I gave her an injection of B12 and the rash disappeared. However, for a few days she had muscle aches and fever that I did not understand at that time. Looking back I would now assume that this was what we call “paradox” on Hormones Matter. To those that may not have read about this it is the temporary worsening effect by introducing an essential nutrient to someone who has long been deficient in that nutrient. One of the things that had probably been a serious indictment on self cause was that she was a chronic cigarette smoker, a well-known habit that damages oxidation.

Energy Metabolism

Can we extrapolate from this case any general ideas about how medical treatment should advance? Perhaps the general opinion would be that this is a rare and unusual case, an outlier from the “usual and customary diagnosis”. But if we consider the facts; long-term cigarette smoking, dietary indiscretion and genetic risks appear to be quite common. I treated a 12-year old girl with a conventional diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, using a nutritional supplement. Without discussing the technicalities of laboratory evidence, it was clear that defective energy metabolism was the underlying cause. The combination of genetic risk, failure to adapt to any form of stress (infection, trauma, chronic useless brain activity etc) and inadequate energy metabolism are the three factors that either collectively or singly lead to breakdown of health. As Selye predicted, energy for adaptation is the essential ingredient.

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This article was published originally on April 22, 2020.

Is Thiamine the Answer?

by Derrick Lonsdale MD, FACN, CNS

Published on December 29, 2022

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Since we have shown that many people with complex disease patterns respond to megadose thiamine and magnesium, irrespective or their symptoms, we have concluded that disease is due to a breakdown of health from energy deficiency. We have proposed that 3 interlocking circles (as in Boolean algebra), labelled Genetics, Stress, and Energy (or Fuel) must be considered singly or collectively as the cause of any disease. Energy is the force that enables any form of mental or physical body function. Its deficiency affects one or more of the three circles.

Genetics is not often a sole cause of disease. It usually requires other factors and genetically determined disease can often be treated by epigenetic energy stimulation. Symptoms of Type 1 diabetes often appear in middle age, often after a mild stress event such as a common cold. Surely it would appear at birth if genetics was the sole cause.

Any form of stress (infection, trauma, prolonged mental stress) demands cellular energy to meet it. The hind brain controls the complex response and is automatic. This part of the brain is highly sensitive to cellular energy deficiency and thus, energy stimulation is the essential factor required to treat any disease.

Beyond Deficiency

It has been shown by Antonio Costantini’s group that mega-dose thiamine treats Parkinson’s disease, presently deemed to be incurable. They have reported similar clinical benefits in Friedreich’s ataxia (another neurodegenerative disease), Multiple Sclerosis and Fibromyalgia, suggesting that each of these diseases, rather than having separate causes, are all energy dependent manifestations of disease. Just last year, a group of researchers linked a damaged thiamine/biotin transporter gene to Huntington’s Disease. Just this month another group has found that thiamine/biotin treatment compensates for the genetic dysregulation, restores function, and rescues neuronal pathology associated with Huntington’s Disease in mice.

A publication decades ago in a prestigious medical journal reported that 252 different diseases had been treated with mega-dose thiamine, with varying degrees of success.

This information, published in peer-reviewed medical literature is startling, because thiamine, in minute doses, is thought to have its sole responsibility as a vitamin. To use it as a completely non-toxic drug offends the present model used to explain disease. Also, it demonstrates that our knowledge of vitamins is incomplete.

Children’s Health and Thiamine

While I was working at Cleveland Clinic in the seventies as a pediatrician, many emotionally disturbed children were referred to me by pediatricians in private practice in the Cleveland area. I found that the diet of these children was full of empty calories due to their indulgence with candy, soft drinks and a variety of substances usually known as “junk foods”. They had been treated with a variety of pharmacological drugs that either had no effect or even made the clinical situation worse. I treated them with large doses of thiamine and their symptoms disappeared. The explanation by my colleagues was the traditional one, “spontaneous remission”, usually used to explain a mystery cure. My explanation was that deficiency of brain energy was responsible for their symptoms. Thiamine was stimulating its cellular synthesis.

The RDA for Thiamine and High Caloric Intake

I looked up the history of the establishment of the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) for these essential substances occurring in natural foods. I found that the original recommendations had been made by a committee of “experts” and there was surprisingly little science involved. There was no attempt to tie the RDA of the vitamin to the calorie concentration.

The dietary supplementation of vitamins to selected foods by the food industry was thought to have completely removed vitamin deficiency disease from America. Consequently, doctors in practice are commonly seeing patients with many symptoms and failing to recognize the ancient disease known for centuries as Beriberi. Because the laboratory tests, used to confirm the nature of the disease, are normal, the many symptoms described by the patient gives rise to a diagnosis of psychosomatic disease by the doctor. Even worse, the patient is told that “it is all in your head” and he or she is advised to “pull him (her)self together”.

Deficiency of thiamine and magnesium, both essential to cellular energy production in the body, need to be in a concentration that is sufficient to oxidize the calorie concentration. That explains why the concentration of blood thiamine is usually normal in this common polysymptomatic disease, because the doctor fails to recognize the overload of “empty calories”. The concentration of thiamine would be normal for a healthy calorie load, as would exist in an organic natural diet.

We have reported high calorie malnutrition as a common cause of this widespread disease. Dysautonomia is responsible for the symptoms because the hind brain, where the control mechanisms of the autonomic nervous system exist, is highly sensitive to cellular energy deficiency. It matters little whether it is called Beriberi or high calorie malnutrition as long as the biochemical cause is understood.

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What Is Thiamine to Energy Metabolism?

by Derrick Lonsdale MD, FACN, CNS

Published on September 15, 2022

16091 views

What Is Energy?

Energy is an invisible force. The aggregate of energy in any physical system is a constant quantity, transformable in countless ways but never increased or diminished. In the human body, chemical energy is produced by the combination of oxygen with glucose. This reaction is known as oxidation. The chemical energy is transduced to electrical energy in the process of energy conservation. This might be thought of as the “engine” of the brain/body cells. We have to start thinking that it is electrical energy that drives the human body.

The production of chemical energy is exactly the same in principle as the burning of any fuel but the details are quite different. The energy is captured and stored in an electronic form as a substance known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that acts as an energy currency. The chemical changes in food substances are induced by a series of enzymes, each of which combine together to form a chain of chemical reactions that might be thought of as preparing food for its ultimate breakdown and oxidation.

Each of these enzymes requires a chemical “friend”, known as a cofactor. One of the most important enzymes, the one that actually enables the oxidation of glucose, requires thiamine and magnesium as its cofactors. Chemical energy cannot be produced without thiamine and magnesium, although it also requires other “colleagues”, since all vitamins are essential. A whole series of essential minerals are also necessary, so it is not too difficult to understand that all these ingredients must be obtained by nutrition. The body cannot make vitamins or essential minerals. There is also some evidence that thiamine may have a part to play in converting chemical energy to electrical energy. Thus, it may be the ultimate defining factor in the energy that drives function. If that is true, its deficiency would play a vital role in every disease.

Energy Consumption

Few people are aware that our lives depend on energy production and its efficient consumption. A car has to have an engine that produces the energy. This is passed through a transmission that enables the car to function. In a similar manner, we have discussed how energy is produced. It is consumed in a series of energy requiring chemical reactions, each of which requires an enzyme with its appropriate cofactor[s]. This series of reactions can be likened to a transmission, consuming the energy provided from ATP and enabling the human body to function. If energy is consumed faster than it can be synthesized, or energy cannot be produced fast enough to meet demand, it is not too difficult to see that an insufficient supply of energy, a gap between supply and demand, would produce a fundamental change in function. This lack of function in the brain and body organs presents as a disease. The symptoms are merely warning the affected individual that something is wrong. The underlying cause of the energy deficiency has to be ascertained in order to interpret how the symptoms are generated.

Why Focus On Thiamine?

We have already pointed out that thiamine does not work on its own. It operates in what might be regarded as a “team relationship”. But it has also been determined as the defining cause of beriberi, a disease that has affected millions for thousands of years. Any team made up of humans requires a captain and although this is not a perfect analogy, we can regard thiamine as “captain” of an energy producing team. This is mainly due to its necessity for oxidation of glucose, by far and away the most important fuel for the brain, nervous system and heart. Thus, although beriberi is regarded as a disease of those organs, it can affect every cell in the body and the distribution of deficiency within that body can affect the presentation of the symptoms.

Thiamine exists only in naturally occurring foods and it is now easy to see that its deficiency, arising from an inadequate ingestion of those foods, results in slowing of energy production. Because the brain, nervous system and heart are the most energy requiring tissues in the body, beriberi produces a huge number of problems primarily affecting those organs. These changes in function generate what we call symptoms. Lack of energy affects the “transmission”, giving rise to symptoms arising from functional changes in the organs thus subserved. However, it must be pointed out that an enzyme/cofactor abnormality in the “transmission” can also interrupt normal function.

In fact, because of inefficient energy production, the symptoms caused by thiamine deficiency occur in so many human diseases that it can be regarded as the great imitator of all human disease. We now know that nutritional inadequacy is not the only way to develop beriberi. Genetic changes in the ability of thiamine to combine with its enzyme, or changes in the enzyme itself, produce the same symptoms as nutritional inadequacy. It has greatly enlarged our perspective towards the causes of human disease. Thiamine has a role in the processing of protein, fat and carbohydrate, the essential ingredients of food.

Generation Of Symptoms

Here is the diagnostic problem. The earliest effects of thiamine deficiency are felt in the hindbrain that controls the automatic brain/body signaling mechanism known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS also signals the glands in the endocrine system, each of which is able to release a cellular messenger. A hormone may not be produced in the gland because of energy failure, thus breaking down the essential governance of the body by the brain. Hypoxia (lack of oxygen) or pseudo-hypoxia (thiamine deficiency produces cellular changes like those from hypoxia) is a potentially dangerous situation affecting the brain and a fight-or-flight reflex may be generated. This, as most people know, is a protective reflex that prepares us for either killing the enemy or fleeing and it can be initiated by any form of perceived danger. Thus, thiamine deficiency may initiate this reflex repeatedly in someone that seeks medical advice for it. Not recognizing its underlying cause, it is diagnosed as “panic attacks”. Panic attacks are usually treated by psychologists and psychiatrists with some form of tranquilizer because of the anxiety expressed by the patient.

It is easy to understand how it is seen as psychological, although the sensation of anxiety is initiated in the brain as part of the fight-or-flight reflex and will disappear with thiamine restoration. It may be worse than that: because the heart is affected by the autonomic nervous system, there may be a complaint of heart palpitations in association with the panic attacks and the heart might be considered the seat of the disease, to be treated by a cardiologist. The defining signal from the ANS is ignored or not recognized. Because it is purely a functional change, the routine laboratory tests are normal and the symptoms are therefore considered to be psychological, or psychosomatic. The irony is that when the physician tells the patient “it is all in your head”, he is completely correct but not recognizing that it is a biochemical functional change and that it has nothing to do with Freudian psychology.

A Sense Of Pleasure

We have known for many years that dietary sugar precipitates thiamine deficiency. A friend of mine had become well aware that alcohol, in any form, or sugar, will automatically give him a migraine headache. He still will take ice cream and suffer the consequences. I have had patients tell me that they have given up this and that “but I can’t give up sugar: it is the only pleasure that I ever get”. They still came back to me to treat the symptoms. We have come to understand that we have no self-responsibility for our own health. If we get sick, it is just bad luck and the wonders of modern medicine can achieve a cure. The trouble is that a mild degree of thiamine deficiency might produce symptoms that will make it more difficult to make the necessary decisions for our own well-being. Let me give some examples of symptoms that are typically related to this and are not being recognized:

Occasional headache, heartburn or abdominal pain
Occasional diarrhea or constipation
Allergies
Fatigue
Emotional lability
Insomnia
Nightmares
Pins and needles
Hair loss
Palpitations of the heart
Persistent cough for no apparent reason
Voracious, or loss of appetite

The point is that thiamine governs the energy synthesis that is essential to our total function and it can affect virtually any group of cells in the body. However, the brain, heart and nervous system, particularly the autonomic (automatic) nervous system (ANS) are the most energy requiring organs and are likely to be most affected.

Since the brain sends signals to every organ in the body via the ANS, a distortion of the signaling mechanism can make it appear that the organ receiving the signal is at fault. For example, the heart may accelerate because of a signal from the brain, not because the heart itself is at fault. Hence heart palpitations are often treated as heart disease when a mild degree of thiamine deficiency in the brain is responsible.

We have known for many years that sugar in all its different forms can and will precipitate mild thiamine deficiency. It is probably the reason why sugar is considered to be a frequent cause of trouble. If thiamine deficiency is mild, any form of minor stress may precipitate a much more serious form of the deficiency. An attack by an infecting organism is a source of stress imposed on the affected person and requires a boost of energy consumption. Therefore the illness that follows can be regarded as a “war” between the attacking disease producing organism and the brain/body that has to mobilize a defense. Either death, recovery, or a “stalemate” might be the expected outcome. If this is the truth, then any disease will respond to the ingestion of nutrients, particularly thiamine. It strongly suggests that Holistic or Alternative medicine could add a huge benefit to health preservation or the treatment of disease.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

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This article was published originally on August 25, 2020.