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Vitamin B Run Amok; Vitamin D on Target

Although it's been some time since I got over my sinus infection (after three rounds of antibiotics, the last of which ended a month ago), I haven't felt quite right: lethargic, unmotivated, and painfully bored. As I took my new multi-vitamin pill Friday morning, I thought, "It's just like that time I had those drinks with the B vitamins." (See Feb. 13 comment in linked post.) Indeed, the vitamin pill label showed B vitamins in amounts 25 to 33 times the recommended daily allowances. This was for three tablets, and was taking only one, but that's still way over the top. Even a 100-gram serving of liver has B vitamins in the low single milligrams, or less, not the 50-gram doses of B-1, B-2 and B-6 and the 200 microgram dose of B-12 per three tablets of the vitamin. The bottle recommends taking three to six pills daily. Of course, I stopped taking the vitamins, and today I felt peppy enough to try a new hairdo, buy some clothes and take my dog to the dog park.

This may be another reason I feel better not eating wheat: wheat flour is enriched with B vitamins. Not in the amounts contained in the vitamins, but still several times the amount in a piece of meat, I see from looking around on nutritiondata.com. Apparently, I get all I need from eating meat. Last week, I had a wonderful balsamic vinegar glazed lamb dish at a restaurant, and I've gotten a few new cookbooks. One is called The Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan; the other is French Cooking in Ten Minutes by Edouard de Pomaine. Both gave me great new ways of cooking cuts of meat I was tepid about. More on that in a future post.

I've had good results with some other vitamins: my vitamin D level is now 52, just within the ideal range of 50-80. Using some information from the Heart Scan blog, I took 3,000 IUs per day. I also used less sunscreen this summer (I have to use some to keep from burning).

Just to be clear, your results may vary with different vitamin dosages. I seem to have an odd sensitivity to B vitamins in anything but very moderate amounts. Some people require B supplements.

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Unknown said…
I need to check my vitamin D levels and compare them to earlier this year. This is the first I have heard of vitamn B causing symptoms such as yours. Which B complex are you suspecting as the cause?

I like to use this site as another good source of nutrient information:
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=108
November 21, 2011
Lori Miller said…
Donald, I don't know which B vitamin might be the cause. And since these weren't n=1 experiments where I kept everything else the same, I can't be sure it wasn't something else. Be that as it may, comparing the new vitamins to the old ones, the new ones have several times more thiamin, riboflavin, B6 and B12.

I don't know what the mechanism would be for affecting my mood. I wonder if it might be an imbalance of nutrients, as I had with zinc and copper. Here's an article from Michael Eades's site in folic acid v. B-12 (although I doubt this is what went wrong in my case--3 pills contain 3,333% of B12 and 100% of folate):

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/folic-acid-and-cognitive-impairment/

Thanks for the link to the whfoods site.
November 22, 2011
Discount Vitamins said…
I also didn't check my vitamin B level but i personally feel that it will have some quantity as i am getting wheat on daily basis and its enriched with vitamin B. So i don't think there would be a sign of worry for me regarding Vitamin B.
November 22, 2011
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