In this article, we are going to talk about B complex vitamins. B complex vitamins are cheap and easy to obtain. They don’t cost very much money to produce and to sell and to buy and they are pretty safe and that generally are water-soluble. So they come out of our bodies fairly quickly. Mental Health
On the other hand, B complex vitamins can give us a load of problems with mental health as well as symptoms that can make us feel pretty bad.
So we would like to talk about some of the B complex vitamins today aka L-methylfolate supplements. This particular one will be where we talk about the B complex vitamins for mental health mostly but one of the things that you will notice is that a lot of your supplements will have B vitamin complexes in them because it’s so inexpensive to put them into a product. And the companies got a big bang for their buck because people feel invigorated. They get an energy boost it’s like drinking caffeine. So they feel the stimulant, oomph, and they get a big boost from taking the B complex.
What can often happen is that people feel their heart is racing, they have high blood pressure, and they feel they are sweating, and they come in the think they have a thyroid problem. And doctors look at their supplements and they discover that they are taking four or five products that all have B complex vitamins in them.
Now B complex doesn’t mean every B vitamin it just kind of today means a bunch of B vitamins it does not have a standard meaning. So B complex means more than one B vitamin. So now since there’s B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, B7, B12, B17, and so on, there is a number and there is para-aminobenzoic acid which is another B vitamin. There are a bunch of things alpha-lipoic acid is very similar to B vitamins there’s a whole load of stuff.
So when a product has B complex in it, the most common energy level B complex usually says B 50 and it means it has a whole bunch of vitamins in it with a certain dose that’s way more than what you need as far as every day.
So when a person has a B complex problem sometimes they are taking too much B complex and the biggest culprits of this are the ones that are most likely in the product. This is B 12 and this is B 6. These are the ones that are just pile derived into these products. So a person may take them and feel a great deal of energy and if they don’t have enough minerals to sustain that level of production or they are taking just plain too much. They can feel just crazy afterward and it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to feel that. And then they will say at first it worked and then it made me worse and I got really tired and I got really sluggish. But I had really good energy at first or I take them and then I can’t sleep at night. That is another very common one.
You will also see a trend toward not just the standard cyanocobalamin which is a pretty typical inexpensive B12 in people’s supplements but now a trend toward methylcobalamin. Now 80% of people are under methylators that means they don’t provide the methylation reaction which is adding a methyl group or a ch3 group to a molecule to make it active. That is a process that’s done in metabolism every day by your liver, and by other organs, and by really every cell in your body undergoes some degree of methylation to allow a molecule to be active. Methylation certainly also takes place in the DNA to suppress DNA activity and kind of dampen DNA expression and keep genes from turning on. So methylation at the gene level is usually a turning-off event and methylation at a more cellular level a macro level outside the genes is much more of an activation process.
But nevertheless giving methyl B 12 or methylcobalamin is not a bad idea for about 80% of people. The problem is that 15 to 20 percent of people may be over methylators or they may have some other problem that isn’t exactly over methylation but they have got some difficulty with the pathways of methylation where they don’t do well with this push. So they don’t do well with methyl B 12 so they have to take a hydroxyl or adenosyl B12 and not the methyl B12 at least for a while.
