Posted by Larry Hoover on January 1, 2004, at 10:27:51
In reply to Straight stuff about B Vitamins (long), posted by Kalamatianos on December 31, 2003, at 23:15:06
> Too much of any and all B vitamins has an indicator of "yellow river". With adequate water intake, toooo much then gets passed off as waste. Waste costs money. Too much waste costs too much money.
As this seems to be a philosophical point, rather than a physiological one, I hope you don't mind my expressing a slightly divergent opinion.
The yellow river of which you speak, I presume to be the riboflavin yellow-tinted urine which arises following ingestion of B-complex, multi, or pure B2 supplement.
Contrary to your concern about waste, I would argue that the yellow river is the only proof you have of uptake from the gut. Supplements passing in stool are waste. Only those making it from oral intake to kidney excretion are available to the body.
Your kidneys are biological rather stupid machines. They do not discriminate well those substances needed by the body and those that are waste, with the exception of certain electrolytes (minerals) (and a few other special things, but I'm not meaning to get into the details too much). If your kidneys are "seeing", i.e. being exposed to circulating chemicals in your blood, e.g. vitamins from supplements, then so are all the other tissues and organs in your body. That is the whole point of the supplement in the first place, to get your blood concentration up.
I like the compartment theory of body organization. The various tissues and organs of the body can be considered to be separated into 17 different compartments, each surrounded by membranes. The one compartment that touches all the other compartments is the bloodstream. It carries raw materials to, and wastes from, all the other compartments (not considering lymph here), by passing adjacent to all the other compartment membranes. At the same point in time that the kidneys "see" all that riboflavin, etc., and start dumping it into urine (to create yellow river), the muscles and bones and CNS and liver and heart and so on are also seeing the opportunity to have those same nutrients pass across there own membranes, into that particular organ compartment. It is their only chance to do so, before the "stupid" kidneys let the water soluble vitamins leak away.
You need those artificial vitamin concentration peaks to make up for chronic deficiency. That is why Bill W. looked so closely at mega-B therapy. In fact, it is how I got looking at mega-vitamin therapy in the first place, as I came to understand how alcohol-abusers developed characteristic withdrawal symptoms, including depression. Really, the alcohol-withdrawal didn't create the depression, it allowed it to be seen, as chronic alcohol use had its effects long before withdrawal became part of the picture.....but I digress.
What would be wasteful would be to throw vitamin supplements directly in the toilet. Why bother with the intermediate step of the yellow river? No, the yellow river is proof that your tissues are having a shot at taking from the blood what they need. Acute treatment doses would be higher than maintenance doses would have to be, and I do appreciate the distinction you are making there, for maintenance dosing. However, it is impossible to even design a diet that supplies the RDA of necessary nutrients. I have argued that point a number of times before, and I can provide links if you wish. Moreover, the RDA is a level at which demonstrable deficiency effects are still observable (by definition), so even if it was possible to obtain the RDA from diet alone, you could still have deficiency symptoms.
I hope I have not rambled too long, or strayed too far from your thesis, but, I say, "Long live the yellow river."
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:295274
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20031218/msgs/295332.html