Thiamine

Overview

Thiamine, also known as vitamin B1, is primary cofactor for pyruvate dehydrogenase, the rate-limiting enzyme that links glycolysis to the Krebs cycle and decides whether glucose gets fully oxidized for energy or converted into lactate. Without enough thiamine, the body gets stuck in glycolysis, lactate accumulates, carbon dioxide drops, and serotonin rises, which is the same metabolic signature seen in virtually every chronic disease from diabetes to dementia to cancer. Old studies from the 1950s through 1970s used high-dose thiamine to treat bipolar disorder and psychosis, and modern trials have shown it can produce remarkable results in Parkinson's, advanced cancer, and even acute conditions like meningioma. It is cheap, broadly safe and one of the first things worth getting right.

Key Points

• Thiamine is the cofactor for converting glucose into useful energy. It works with the respiratory enzymes in the mitochondria, alongside B12 and biotin. Without enough thiamine, glucose oxidation gets blocked, the cell shifts toward producing lactic acid, and energy output collapses. The mechanism is direct: more thiamine means more carbon dioxide produced from sugar, which increases circulation to the brain and stabilizes nerves.

• Ten milligrams is often enough to feel a noticeable effect within the first hour. With B1, the response is unusually fast. A mild deficiency causes sluggishness, depression, and poor short-term memory, and the right dose can change a person's whole mood and outlook in one sitting. For ordinary maintenance, ten or twenty milligrams per day is plenty.

• Doses up to 100 to 300 milligrams are useful in emergencies and in disease states. For acute mental focus issues, 100 milligrams is appropriate. For diabetes, cancer or any condition with very high lactic acid production, 300 milligrams in divided doses can help normalize sugar metabolism and bring lactic acid down. The orthomolecular movement decades ago encouraged large doses, and while the smallest effective dose is the goal, therapeutic doses several times the minimum daily requirement are often where the real change happens.

• Thiamine raises carbon dioxide, and CO2 has direct anti-serotonin, anti-estrogen, and anti-aging effects. Older studies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s used high doses of vitamin B1 for psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and psychosis, both of which are now understood as serotonin-driven. CO2 helps deactivate serotonin by promoting its uptake into platelets. It also has an anti-aromatase effect, lowers nitric oxide synthesis, and activates the longevity gene klotho. Anything that raises CO2 reduces serotonin activity, and thiamine is one of the few vitamins that reliably does this.

• Studies in the 1970s used B1 with acetazolamide and warming to permanently cure severe psychiatric diseases. The combination raised metabolic rate and body temperature, and patients with conditions still considered incurable today were cured. The earlier work involved housing patients in continuously elevated carbon dioxide, with similar improvement of psychopathic conditions. These therapies disappeared because no one can profitably sell thiamine or carbon dioxide.

• Thiamine was recently discovered to be as potent as acetazolamide as a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor. This explains the dramatic effects high-dose thiamine has in conditions involving brain swelling. A neurologist in North Carolina treated a patient with a meningioma that was about to herniate, which would normally require emergency brain surgery, by prescribing roughly one gram of thiamine HCl per day. The tumor shrunk and the patient avoided surgery.

• B1 is one of the essentials for liver function. The liver cannot process estrogen, cholesterol, or polyunsaturated fats efficiently without adequate protein and B vitamins. Low thyroid prevents the use of B vitamins, so the two work together: without thyroid the B vitamins cannot be utilized, and without the B vitamins the liver fails to detoxify and estrogen accumulates.

• Animal foods are the practical source. All animal foods contain B1: eggs, milk, cheese, meat, liver and seafood. A diet that includes liver occasionally, milk and cheese regularly, eggs regularly, and seafood at least once a week generally covers the B vitamin spectrum.

• Brain temperature and B1 work together. If your brain is at 94 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, it will not function well in any way. Studies show memory, quickness of response and clarity of reasoning all increase as brain temperature rises, with mental capacity still climbing at 101 degrees. Thiamine boosts metabolic rate and CO2 production, which is one of the ways it raises brain temperature and improves cognition.

• Cramming for tests and learning languages is one of B1's classic uses. A few hundred milligrams of B1 plus coffee, taken before sitting down to memorize, reliably improves how much sticks. Ray learned 4,000 French words over a weekend this way to pass a graduate school exam. The same pattern (B1 the night before, B1 before the test) was passed on to other students with consistent results.

• Lipophilic forms of thiamine raise the active cofactor far more efficiently than the salt forms. The active form is thiamine pyrophosphate, and the enzyme that converts ordinary thiamine into the active form declines with age and disease. Allithiamine, benfotiamine, sulbutiamine, prosultiamine, and sulfotiamine all bypass this bottleneck. Allithiamine at just 50 milligrams daily was sufficient to raise erythrocyte thiamine pyrophosphate, which is the level that actually matters.

• B vitamins must be taken in proper ratios because excess of one can create deficiency of others. Taking 500 milligrams of B1 alone without matching B vitamins will largely waste the dose and may even create a stress response, because the body senses the imbalance and reacts to it. The Energin product was formulated with ratios mimicking physiological balance, and people measuring exhaled CO2 with home devices have shown 60 to 70 percent higher CO2 output for five days after a single dose.

Notable Quotes

"If you've been at all deficient in it, it's spectacular what a supplement of 10 milligrams or more of B1 can do for your mental focus and clarity."

[Ray Peat — KMUD: Vaccination, Part 2]

"A great deficiency can cause psychosis and hallucinations and so on, but a mild deficiency can make you feel sluggish and depressed and not have a very good short-term memory - not able to remember what you want or function as acutely as you should."

[Ray Peat — KMUD: Memory, Cognition and Nutrition]

"The way I learned French to pass my graduate school exam, I did it over a weekend with plenty of coffee and a few hundred milligrams of vitamin B1. I sat down and memorized 4,000 words."

[Ray Peat — East West Healing Q&A]

"It makes you produce energy faster, more carbon dioxide that increases circulation to your brain."

[Ray Peat — East West Healing Q&A]

"You can't make a trillion dollars selling thiamine or carbon dioxide."

[Ray Peat — Body Temperature, Inflammation, and Aging with Ray Peat]

"I know of people who have gone to the ER due to flu symptoms. And as part of their hydration protocol, they're always given thiamine. And one of the rationales, the thiamine will lower the lactate and it will make their symptoms of malaise go away. Lactic acid is what causes generally the symptoms of malaise."

[Georgi Dinkov — Digestion and Mood]

"It has been shown back in the 1920s that even a small decrease, physiological decrease in the levels of the plasma levels of vitamins B1 and B2, thiamine and riboflavin, dramatically inhibited the capacity of the liver to glucuronidase, estrogen, and excrete it."

[Georgi Dinkov — PMS, PCOS and Breast Cancer]

Important Things To Consider

Very large doses can expose other nutrient deficiencies. Animal experiments going back fifty or sixty years showed that very large doses of B1 increase the metabolic rate. When animals are border-line deficient in other nutrients, this can make deficiencies show up faster.

Most B vitamin supplements contain impurities and excipients. Daily long-term use of any B-vitamin supplement is not ideal. Using a few doses occasionally rather than continuous chronic supplementation is a better pattern, with the rest of the requirement coming from food.

Thiamine without adequate thyroid is much less useful. Low thyroid makes it impossible to use the B vitamins or protein efficiently. If a person is taking B1 and getting no response, thyroid status, protein intake, and overall energy metabolism need to be addressed at the same time.

The deficiency state mimics serious mental illness. A great deficiency can cause psychosis and hallucinations. This means people with apparent psychiatric symptoms should be considered for simple nutritional fixes before they are committed to long-term drug treatment, especially given the historical evidence that B1 plus warming and CO2 cured incurable psychiatric conditions.

Sources commonly recommended in mainstream nutrition are not the best Peat-style options. Sunflower seeds and bread come up as classic B1 foods, but in a diet that prioritizes animal foods and avoids polyunsaturated seed oils and gluten-bearing grains, eggs, milk, cheese, and liver are the more useful sources.

Avoid the mononitrate form because it raises nitric oxide. Thiamine mononitrate, which is the form used in cheap fortified foods and many supplements, contains enough nitrate to elevate nitric oxide, which is the opposite of what is wanted in a pro-metabolic context.

B vitamins should not be taken in isolation at high single-vitamin doses. Taking 500 milligrams of B1 alone without proportional intake of the other B vitamins can trigger a stress response and largely waste the dose. A balanced B-complex at physiological ratios works better than mega-dosing one B vitamin in isolation, except when treating a specific clinical condition under guidance.

Lipophilic forms of thiamine raise the active cofactor far more efficiently than the salt forms. The active form is thiamine pyrophosphate, and the enzyme that converts ordinary thiamine into the active form declines with age and disease. Allithiamine, benfotiamine, sulbutiamine, prosultiamine, and sulfotiamine all bypass this bottleneck. Allithiamine at just 50 milligrams daily was sufficient to raise erythrocyte thiamine pyrophosphate, which is the level that actually matters.

Thiamine is rapidly depleted by stress, alcohol, smoking, EMF, and chronic emotional strain. Each of these increases B vitamin requirements because every challenge from the environment must be met with an energetic response, which consumes the cofactors that energy production depends on. Alcohol in particular depletes both thiamine and riboflavin because both are required for its two-step detoxification, which is part of why alcoholics are classically thiamine-deficient.

The lethal dose for thiamine is extremely high, around 20 to 30 grams in a human, so the safety margin is wide. Georgi has used the equivalent of one to one and a half grams per day in mice in cancer studies with no cytotoxicity, and human doses up to 1,500 milligrams daily of the hydrochloride salt have shown no issues beyond minor digestive upset. This makes thiamine one of the safer pro-metabolic interventions to experiment with.

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