Raw Transcript
Hey, it's Mike here and today, did scientists just solve IBS? Well, we have a recent genetic study that actually throws out the word causal, which is very rare for scientists. You know how they are. In particular, researchers are pointing to a vitamin that people with IBS might be missing and not necessarily in their blood levels, but at their gut wall. And that vitamin is thamine, which is vitamin B1. So, we're going to touch on the fascinating mechanism here, as well as the gene connection. There's also an area that I'm not seeing the news cover at all and that is dietary drivers that either boost or deplete thamine at the gut wall and even some pesticides involved with that as well. And then we can also cover some somewhat tangential but very interesting side topics here that are connected like POTS as well as postcoid issues. So let's go to start off we have of course thamine being a vitamin and that is vitamin B1. So, one might say, "Help me." Oh, B1, you're my only hope. That's what IBS patients might be saying if they can sit through the lame jokes for the information. Anyway, you might be wondering, "What foods is B1 in? Is thymine in?" And we have top 15 foods here, virtually all of which are actually either plant-based or fungi with nutritional yeast. That nch in the charts, fortified, super duper high. I mean, that's basically a supplement, but unfortified. Naturally, it has a ton. Uh based off this list, tahini might have to be my number one source. No, but also beans are on the top chart. Of course, you eat more of those, but definitely a good source. I should mention that therapeutic doses that have been seen in some studies that we're going to get to do involve supplementation, not just a tahini based diet, which hey, maybe that would get you there. All right, let's get to this very recent genetic study, 2026 study. And we're talking once again about a Mandelian randomized study. Almost every video I've mentioning these and this is where we're looking at genes and how they influence outcomes and in that way we can split groups that do and don't have the gene in a way that we randomize control trials essentially. And the particular result of interest here is quote fine mapping converged on vitamin B1 metabolism highlighting single variant causal effects of SLC 35F1 a thamine transporter and XPR1 a phosphate exporter essential for thamine activation. And the way they did this was they looked at stool frequency and mapped that against these genes and they found a U-shaped curve where people have either significantly higher or lower frequencies of stool activity. Yes, this could be considered poopology. Anyway, interestingly found that stool frequency was associated with genes in about 7% of Europeans and 5 1/2% of East Asians. Now, there's certainly going to be some variability and other factors here, but we can look at the IBS prevalence in the population and find it's about 5 to 10% depending on how strict your criteria is, how often you're having discomfort for the definition of it, but I mean, this matches up to some extent. I don't think that every IBS case is caused by this, but it could be a major factor for a lot of people with it. But again, we have that SLC gene transporting thymine into cells. And then we have that XPR1 gene that exports phosphorus which activates that thy. So why does this matter? What is it actually going to do affecting your gut? And that brings us to the mechanism here. Perhaps the main effect here has to do with motility and how this all ties into something I've been meaning to talk about for a while. Dise autonomia. Dysotenomia is really an irregularity in function of any of the part of your body that is not conscious. Your autonomic nervous system. things like breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and of course the autonomic function of digestion with motility is how your intestinal muscles are essentially squeezing along food all the time without you purposefully squeezing those muscles. That involuntary movement is referred to as peristalsis. And we have a whole web of neurons in our gut that trigger that movement based off signals. And that's where thamine comes in. So our vagus nerve which goes all the way down our body from our brain communicates with our gut neurons through mainly acetylcholine and a co-actor that is key for that is thamine. So if you have a lack of thamine you can end up not having enough acetylcholine to trigger those gut movements. This is a bit like not having enough data on your data plan. you know, the internet is still there, everything's still ready to go, but you just can't access it because you've run out of data, and then the result is poor motility, things not moving as fast as they should, potentially due to constipation, IBSC, which can then flip-flop to diarrhea and other issues. And through diving into this topic, I found another aspect that no one is talking about in the context of IBS here, and that is in order to make hydrochloric acid in your stomach, you also rely on thamine as a signal. And this really adds up because undigested food entering the small intestine can lead to SIBO which would be really another type of IBS driver. So we have the constipation related one and then that would of course be the undigested bloating etc type. You know maybe certain people have stomach specific issues and I would really love to see research on that but I don't think it exists yet. And the thymine connection also adds up with how the vast majority of IBS cases are women because unfortunately estrogen regulates the production of acetylcholine from thamine. So if you have a fluctuation in your estrogen levels during your cycle, you could have dips in the amount of thamine that is delivered to your gut wall cells theoretically which could then create this issue and might be why people have worse digestion at different times of the month. And then digging deeper, I found another potential mechanism for why people can have digestive pain as a result of this. Because when you don't have that thamine, you don't create that acetylcholine. Then you move to lactic acid instead, which can be a bit more abrasive, you might say. Essentially creates an acidic environment in your intestine and then can actually activate pain receptors and lead you to have stomach pain. And this makes me think of all the people who have IBS that have probably had imaging and been like, "Oh, it hurts sort of all over. Take a look." And it's like, "Oh, well, we don't really see anything because you can't see the what would essentially be a coating of acid created from an alternative metabolism to even get your gut to move." This is why we need to study this more. And this brings me to the question, what the heck is the cause of all this other than that hormone fluctuation I mentioned? And we have a lot of mysteries here still, but I think we can find some of the answers in dietary contributions. First of all, we have, you guessed it, fiber. I know people are going to say, "Hey, well, fiber can be hard on people with IBS, and that's especially insoluble fiber." Now, this study, for example, in meta analysis shows positive results with soluble fiber. So, it depends on the type of fiber. And of course, if you have an inflamed gut, just more potential abrasion isn't going to be good with that insoluble fiber. But in general, we're seeing a pretty clear pattern and that is that fiber is feeding a lot of these different types of bacteria that produce their own thamine in your gut that you can of course then utilize. For example, we have bidto bacteria and ruminccus both that feed on fiber and produce thamine. And then we have bactaroides which can feed on fiber and produce that thamine but then if you're eating a high meat diet can actually switch it up and start depleting you of thamine becoming a thamine consumer. And as a loyal consumer it can go all Black Friday on your thamine supply. And to further support this we have a study on the EA Lancet diet which is a highly plant-based diet that is meant to reduce emissions but they have a lot of studies on it. And one found that people with lower adherence scores to an eat lancet diet when just looking at their existing diet had a 74% higher odds of having IBS. So a lower eat lances score would also mean lower fiber and higher meat consumption. And then we have another fiber fermenting bacteria that produces thamine and that is prevatella. And this is where it also gets very interesting and can be maybe a potential cause. This is kind of indirect and not well studied but it is glyphosate. Yes, the evil chemical that is responsible for everything also has a role in this. Yes, by reducing the levels of prevatella in your gut, glyphosate might glyo suck the thamine levels downward. So yeah, we need more research on that. But that also implies really that any chemical, any antibiotic, anything that we're putting in our bodies that would lower the level of these thamine producers would be bad. And that's just the producers. We also have ones that are again thamine suckers which brings me to other ones that particularly create thamine which is an enzyme that cleaves thamine so that you can't use it just does the choppy chop. Those for example are claustrdium species some of which go up from high meat as well and some of which also go up from a high consumption of refined carbohydrates. Again why you want to be eating whole foods. And then in terms of splitting thamine, there's also just straight up chemical cleaving of thamine, which can be achieved through sulfites, which of course can be in processed meat as well as some wines and other foods as a preservative. So you definitely don't want that. A whole another reason to not have that in addition to the colctal cancer connection. But I just had a realization right now filming this. Of course, that sulfite can increase your hydrogen sulfide production in your gut, which is genotoxic. But imagine if it's also lowering your thamine production, therefore increasing the gut transit time by slowing motility. It's like a one-two punch really depending on how much of the thamine it's really killing. So I was really trying to answer the question, what percentage of IBS cases could be caused by this? And we had those stool frequency gene connections as a rough percentage, but you know, there's a lot of genes going on. And we have a bit of an answer, indirect answer from the inflammatory bowel disease studies on thamine. Of course, we're not talking about IBS, but there's a lot of overlap going on here. Of course, inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's, and ulcerative colitis. And so, it started with a pilot study back in 2013 by Constantini at all was small, just 12 people who were given a therapeutic dose of thamine supplementation, but they were just looking at fatigue here because fatigue is a big aspect of it. But they did find that quote 10 patients out of 12 showed complete regression of fatigue while the remaining two patients showed nearly complete regression of fatigue compared to the chronic fatigue syndrome scale scores before therapy. And that pilot study certainly inspired this 2021 tariff study. We're even tariffing studies now. No, it's a study on inflammatory bowel disease once again and this therapeutic dose of thamine a bit larger now. And in particular, they were giving people 300 mg of thamine daily. And again, really the focus is fatigue here. This is interesting because we're talking about people that were already in remission from their main bowel symptoms. Fatigue was the remaining issue. I mean, after all, Tariff stands for thamine against reducible IBD fatigue. So many potential acronyms they could have done, but to keep the Star Wars jokes going, I would have called it the TIE fighter study, the thamine IBS fighter study. Anyway, the findings were at 6 months. 66% or 2/3 of people had their fatigue improved, which is also great. Again, not IBS, but they say this could be a signaling issue as well. And again, talking about these more neurological secondary effects of having gut issues, which is also shared with IBS. So, I think it's super relevant. Another potential cause could have to do with just these chronic diseases that we have. We have diabetes in particular. where we can see pretty dramatically that people with the condition excrete thamine out of their kidneys at a rate 15 to 25 times higher than the normal or standard population which is quite dramatic. And then when looking at people with obesity who you'd expect to have high intake of all sorts of vitamins from higher calorie intake, they actually see between 16 and 1/3 rate of thymine deficiency and that's in their blood. So who knows what their actual gut wall levels are. And this is where I had to mention another condition that kept coming up in my research and that is POTS, which is postural orthostatic tacicardia syndrome, which there's a whole array of symptoms of this, but the main one is that when you go from laying or sitting down to standing up, your heart rate increases for various reasons, but largely because you're not getting enough blood flow to your brain. And so, you're trying to make up for that by increasing heart rate. And that can be caused for example by your circulatory system not constricting enough lowering your blood volume and fighting gravity to get that blood flow to your brain. And this is another process where thamine plays that key role. It's once again controlling this autonomic muscle contraction. In the gut we're talking about peristalsis and here we're talking about vasoc constriction. And then we can segue into postcoid issues. POTS ironically is one. So this could be connected, but we have just a general postcoid study that was done where they gave people thamine and just looked at a bunch of overall scores. Fascinating study, not the biggest one, but they found that thamine shortens the duration of a ton of different issues. For example, ones that stuck out were again the fatigue scores, which really hit zero at week seven as opposed to not hitting zero by week nine in the control group. And then we also have one that I know a lot of people will be interested in hair loss scores hitting zero dramatically faster than the placebo group. So that was great to see. Obviously all those have different mechanisms etc. Maybe some of them are connected to the same mechanism that we saw with the fatigue in the people with inflammatory bowel disease. Again we need so much more research but it seems that getting enough thamine and making sure that you're not losing your thamine is pretty key here. Once again, we have the mechanism by which fiber increases a bunch of these beneficial thamine producing bacteria. And instead of eating refined carbs and higher meat, potentially giving you bacteria that is going to be enzyatically breaking down thamine, you can then switch to instead of having your classic standard American diet dispiosis to having a healthier pro-thamine, pro- gut motility situation, which is also improved by having actual fiber and bulk, etc. We got that positive onetwo punch unlike that again negative one-two punch of the sulfites cleaving the thamine and potentially slowing things down leading to hydrogen sulfide production. But to bring this all home, we have that again interesting new finding claiming causality, a causal relationship between those genes that transport thamine and IBS, which is great cuz we have very little studies on IBS with actual answers. And who knows what portion of IBS sufferers have this as an issue, but it's something that's cheap and easy to try, which is great. People can easily buy over-the-counter thamine supplements. And for the rest of us out there, I think it's key to just focus on getting enough. You know, make sure you're eating in a way that is not blasting your gut thamine and actually producing gut thamine as well, which is cool. I would love to see a study where you have people intaking the same amount of thamine in their diet but then having different levels of fiber for example and see what the actual thamine gut levels are. We have some better biioarkers like ETKA which could get us some cool results. So again, you know, someone's got a million dollars, might as well just just do that study. Why not? But maybe do that one after the study where you just give people with IBS some thamine cuz that's probably the one that actually needs to happen like yesterday. But for me, I'm going to keep eating fiber. I'm going to go buy some more nooch because I'm actually out of nutritional yeast. And so, yeah, let me know down below what you think about all this. I feel like I was making discovery after discovery researching this. So, let me know if you have anything more to add. And of course, feel free to like and subscribe. I can say that anything with a vegan in the name, including my username, YouTube's algorithm is not really liking it. So, hitting that notification bell ensures that this channel is still seen and exists. So, thank you for those who have done that. And as usual, see you in the next one. And thanks for watching.