Top 3 B Vitamins That Could Heal Your Chronic Fatigue, Gut Issues
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Well, today we're going to talk about health with a guest who joins us now. His name is Christian von Uffel. He is a gut health researcher. He's the author of the Digestive Toolkit, and he's someone who explores bioenergetics in general. So thank you for joining us, Christian. Thank you for having me.

So we were just talking beforehand that, you know, there's a lot of wisdom to be found within the paradigm of Ray P and the bioenergetics community. But you, I guess, approach the health space because of some gut issues you were having. Is that right? Yes, that's correct. So tell us a little bit about your background. What was the problem you were having and what did you find as a solution? Yes. So basically in February of 2022, I got pretty sick with chronic fatigue and

I all of a sudden had heart palpitations. What is that? Is that chronic fatigue? Oh, chronic fatigue. Okay. And so basically what happened is I lost energy extremely quickly. I could no longer do basic exercise. Walking up even two flights of stairs was a huge pain. And so my digestive system seemed to basically collapse. What happened basically is that

When you develop chronic fatigue syndrome, you get into what's called peristalsis, which means your digestive system no longer moves food throughout its digestive tract. And then what happens is you develop something called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which then sort of leads you down a nasty spiral because basically you develop dysbiosis, which then can hurt other things, including creating a lot of inflammation and pain.

Now, is this related to insulin resistance? Is that something that people feel like is a common thing in American diets? Is fatigue related to inability to process glucose efficiently? Was that what you were having or does that have nothing to do whatsoever with this? No, for me, what it seemed like was actually happening was I developed a severe deficiency of thiamine.

And so through that deficiency, then I was no longer able to process and create the ATP because basically my citric acid cycle was sort of blocked, which is the metabolic process that your body uses to utilize energy. And when you're just really deficient in one of the key nutritional requirements for this enzyme process to actually create energy, you can't do anything. Your body basically shuts down.

You become low body temperature and a whole lot of other problems start to pop out of nowhere. Why were you deficient in B1? Was there a particular diet that avoided the foods with B1 or what was the thing that caused that? No, actually. So I was a combination of environmental stressors. So I was in an environment where I had black mold in my apartment.

And I didn't really know that it was going to cause, you know, severe issues. But I was also stressed personally. I had some recent problems at work. I had some recent just relationship, you know, personal issues. And so it all sort of, you know, wrapped up together in a way that was much more severe and climactic than I would have imagined. Yeah.

So you had mold, you had work stress and personal stress. Yeah. And that was the combination. So it wasn't that you were eating foods lacking in B1 necessarily. No, I was not. It's just that those stress mechanisms were blocking B1 absorption into your body. Is that right? Or is that not the right? Yes. So when you become stressed, it then utilizes more thiamine vitamin B1 than normal.

But when you're experiencing a lot of stress from an environmental toxin, such as mold, or for instance, mercury, both of which would cause lots of anxiety, then they really ramp up and synergize to create a really big problem. A lot of people say that they have big problems with these mercury-based fillings that they had. Is that where that a lot of people's latent anxiety and stress is coming from?

You know, I think that was probably more common about 10 or 15 years ago because the mercury amalgams were much more common back then. I do know there are lots of people who have had cavities in their early 20s or even in their late teens, and those people could have issues with the mercury fillings. However, I'm encountering at least personally a lot more anecdotes where people will talk about exposure to mold.

being what created panic attacks within them and overall anxiety issues. Now, how do you know if you have mold exposure? What is the best? Do you have a kit or something that you recommend that is the best way to find out what is going on with the mold issue? So there are two ways that I know of. I don't know if either are the best, but they're from two people who I consider reputable. So there's a kit called Got Mold from a man named Jason Earle.

He's a really smart man who basically is writing on this topic of mold. And then there's another gentleman by the name of Michael Rubino, who has a company called Home Cleanse, and he has a product there called the Dust Test. Now, I have used the Dust Test. So I have used the product from Jason Earle called Dust.

uh got molds however what that does is it sort of compares the values of mold and types inside the home and outside however the dust test could be a little bit more effective at least based on what i'm seeing because what you're looking for specifically inside a home is to understand what type of mold is going to be in the dust that would be basically uh

feeding into the mold system that you have in your home. Because basically what happens is once you develop mold growth in your home, then it can kind of overtake the environment and form what I would call home dysbiosis, which is you have a breeding ground for mold in your home based on the drywall and the moisture content. And if it starts to develop, you know, a good feeding ground or breeding ground for that mold, then it's going to

it then ramps up with very specific species because the environment is just really attuned to one particular type of mold sort of overtaking all of the rest. So once you find out that you have mold, do you have a recommendation for proper dealing with it? So there are a lot of different strategies that I've been looking into. So far, I don't have the most conclusive protocol yet, but

I am definitely working on a protocol at the moment. What I notice is that there are certain vitamins and minerals that deficiencies of those will then always create mold problems, including fungus on the skin. And that's where people seem to experience jock itch and some other problems. So if we just look at that and sort of like extrapolate, we can see that people, when they have a deficiency of biotin and niacin,

encounter a lot more skin issues, including fungus. So one thing I like to start with in this protocol is just to make sure we get more than the average RDA for that, and then look at other causes and other details afterwards. That's so interesting because, you know, I don't know if you saw recently, I had Georgie Dinkoff on with my friend, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, and he was talking about what he used B1, which is thiamine, like you mentioned, and then B3,

He used niacinamide. I don't know if that has a difference with niacin. And then B7 biotin to do some really effective work on cancer in rodents. So how does that, is there any parallel insights as to why you've mentioned biotin, niacin, and thiamine in relationship to mold?

Yes, there definitely seems to be. It seems like a lot of the different health processes, as Chris Masterjohn might say, are all energy dependent. And so if we sort of look at the citric acid cycle, we can sort of look at a chart of all the interdependencies that our body would be utilizing in order to maximize our cellular energy. And in that process, we do have a number of those B vitamins. Niacin and niacinamide, it's analog form.

are definitely really important in that process. And so if we try to maximize each step along the chain, we can often overcome or at least take into account and try to mitigate any of the environmental exposures we had, including to mold. I mean, if you have three ordinary vitamins and

And he also used aspirin. And he's using those to take out the most lethal, fast, aggressive cancers in these rodent models. And I had another gentleman on this week, Dr. Katanzaro, who is at Neo7 Bioscience using peptides and other modalities, including the B vitamins, to take on cancer.

And I just find it interesting if something can deal with mold as well as cancer and a whole host of things in between, we should be thinking a lot about those B vitamins, not just those three. But why are those three in particular? So why are they coming up in a pattern sense? Help me understand the molecular relationship of those and these environmental stressors.

It seems like what happens is that when certain vitamins become popular, that the other vitamins that are similar to them mechanistically then become like a new fetish. Or basically, since no one's been talking about biotin recently, and maybe, you know, since Elliot Overton's popularity, maybe everyone's now talking about thiamine.

You know, talking about an alternative vitamin such as biotin becomes a little bit more interesting just because maybe people have always thought about it for beauty. Think about it for like improving their hair, skin and nails. You hadn't necessarily thought about its direct relationship to health. Yeah. I just wonder what those three have a relationship with one another that makes them effective for cancer potentially, as well as defense of mold related issues.

Yeah, I would need to look a little deeper into that to understand, I think. Yeah. So you talked about the, you mentioned on your ex account that you have this digestive toolkit and that you were able to cure your chronic fatigue syndrome. Tell me what your kind of protocol is. Is it you use peptides or, you know, you hear about that? That's another thing that's really interesting.

Trindi, everybody's talking about peptides. Sure. No. Yes. I did not use peptides. Peptides are amazingly interesting because they're some of the most powerful tools we can actually use within our arsenal, but there are tools we need to use very selectively because what peptides seem to do is they delegate resources within the human body towards any goal that we want to fixate them on. But

Our body uses peptides very selectively because we don't want to delegate resources to a specific cause without having the nutritional underpinnings. So for instance, if we were going to try to delegate peptides

let's say, resources towards improving our testosterone, it might steal resources from our digestive system or somewhere else. So I have not focused on that, although it's very interesting and I'm trying to understand more about it, including some antifungal peptides, or at least that's how they're spoken about, such as LL37, which is a very interesting compound.

So as far as what I did for my protocol to actually help myself, it was basically following mostly what Elliot Overton has done with his thiamine protocol. Yeah, I'm not familiar with him. Tell us a little bit about that. So Elliot Overton is a popular YouTuber and someone who really advocates on the use of thiamine. So vitamin B1, as people know it as the energy vitamin, is really, really useful for people with a lot of different cellular dysfunction.

And the reason seems to be that we seem to be in an environment that seems to deplete people of vitamin B1 more effectively or quicker than most of the other vitamins that are involved in our ATP reduction and energy process. So I used his protocol, which is basically to use different analogs of vitamin B1, which are more effectively brought into the cell.

And so the way you would do it using his protocol is essentially to start with a thiamine HCL, which is the normal form that people find within vitamins. And then moving on to more potent forms. So long as we

have vitamin cofactors, which can allow us to upramp because there is a risk that is associated with taking a really powerful form of a specific vitamin if you have a severe deficiency. And that's called refeeding syndrome. And what that is basically is when your body sort of presumes it has the ability to then use this vitamin in synergy with other vitamins, which it may not have. And that's not a good position to put our body into.

How would one know if they're doing it wrong? So they might actually feel worse. So if you were to take a really high dose of, say, thiamine in the TTFD form, and you had had a pretty bad... Is that what Thiamax is? That's a popular one you hear about. Yes, exactly. So if you're going to take a really powerful form...

of thiamine after being really deficient you might actually feel worse and you might put yourself into a position where you know potentially you would have some negative health effects and those could be serious i wouldn't necessarily want to speak to exactly what could happen but i would recommend people sort of work with understanding what the thiamine works with meaning mostly magnesium and a few other b vitamins yeah

A lot of people in the more broader health community talk about B12 for years. How can B12 get so much attention for energy? And, you know, you always hear everybody talking about B12 and it's a very mass popular vitamin in the B category. I would say it's probably the most popular B vitamin in terms of singular vitamins for the mass, the masses awareness of it.

Yes. So a lot of people do have issues with methylation and folate and folinic acid and, you know, anything related to folate, I think is pretty interesting, just because there was a lot of controversy, where in the past, we used to recommend women to take folate.

in a specific form that didn't actually help them and instead seemed to induce postpartum depression. And so because we've had folic acid as a previous recommendation, which actually hurt people, and now people know that there is a comparative difference against what we call methylfolate, which is a much more accessible and metabolizable form of that vitamin, then I think we have a perfect contrast that's really good for storytelling.

But I think, you know, in addition to the storytelling, obviously there are many other B vitamins that which are very useful that I think people would really want to understand. So where would you point people to if they want to start identifying if they need to look at these different B vitamins and see if that can help them with chronic fatigue? I'd say firstly, they might want to look at the citric acid cycle charts first.

which might look very overwhelming and complicated at the very beginning. But if that chart is labeled with the B vitamins and magnesium, et cetera, it will sort of show you a roadmap where if you were to sort of cross each of those vitamins off the list, it will improve your energy production.

And you can kind of see by experimenting, by taking a little bit more of say vitamin B1, thiamine, a little bit more magnesium and accessible forms such as magnesium malate. And then you could just go through that chart and then it takes you all the way down to what's called the mitochondrial respiratory chain, where you finish off with maybe taking and consuming a little bit more CoQ10,

And that should bring you much of the way there. Besides that, I would just recommend people to do a nutritional panel that's pretty comprehensive because there are certain vitamins that people will really assume are what they're missing, such as vitamin C, where it's much more likely potentially in today's environment, they might be deficient in vitamin A. Are you a fan of getting the vitamins from your food sources or do you like supplementation? Yes, you always want to get them from food if you can.

mostly because they're synergistic effects that seem to work with both the other vitamins and minerals and fats as you absorb them, as well as some of the compounds they come with, such as bioflavonoids, polyphenols, and fiber. So what are some other things besides the B vitamins that have been generally helpful for you in your journey to overcome gut health? Because

Ray Pete talks a lot about endotoxin, and it sounds like that's where you're getting at here with these polysaccharides. Is that what it is? Yes, lipopolysaccharides. So really, really interesting compound that sounds super abstract and boring.

Uh, but it's, it's a real key to avoid a chronic health issues is to avoid and minimize the amount of LPS lipopolysaccharides that goes in your blood and that you're sort of having in your microbiome in general. A lot of folks in the Ray Peet community have talked about antibiotics like doxycycline and azithromycin. Have those been effective for you for dealing with endotoxin and overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine?

I've not personally used them, and the reason why is because most antibiotics today are gram-positive selective more so than they're gram-negative selective. So let me break that down what that means. So we have two different types of bacteria generally that are classified by the type of cell wall that they have. Now, gram-positive bacteria have a thin cell wall that are easy to kill using antibiotics.

Gram-negative bacteria, however, have a thick cell wall that are much more difficult to penetrate. And so most antibiotics today are not very good at killing the gram-negative bacteria. Gram-negative bacteria are what produce the LPS, the lipopolysaccharide that causes a lot of health issues and is also called endotoxin. Is there something that's more effective at killing those?

There's a really interesting new peptide that was discovered by a researcher over at the University of Pennsylvania. His name is Cesar de la Fuentes. And his research group and lab over at the University of Pennsylvania basically looked at frogs' proteome, which is basically what sort of proteins the DNA within the frogs will produce.

And he discovered that there was a really interesting antimicrobial peptide that by using some computational analysis, they were able to make slight tweaks to that only seems to kill the bad type of bacteria by class, which is the gram negative bacteria. So it's a very interesting compound. And I'm really excited to see what's going to come from this in the future.

Wow. Well, let's land the plane here. What are some things you're looking forward to and what are some ways to achieve success in this area of chronic fatigue overall for folks? Because there's a lot of people in our audience that deal with this every day and they just accept this as their normal as they get older. But it doesn't have to be that way, apparently. Sure. So first and foremost, I would say that people want to get a comprehensive nutrition panel to see what they're deficient in.

There are a lot of things that you kind of can't guesstimate your way into solving. If you have a severe deficiency in molybdenum, a micronutrient and mineral, if you have a deficiency in boron, vitamin E, vitamin A, a lot of these things are just not easy to guess or to think of off the top of your head. And it's better for you if you have product fatigue syndrome to find out what the answer is instead of trying to guess and figure it out for yourself.

by going to a nutritional or healthcare store and they're just picking items off the shelf. I don't recommend that. I know that's something that I wish I did sooner is just get that blood test or that urine test to figure out. What tests do you recommend for overall nutrient panel? Do you have any ones that you recommend online that people could try? Yes. So Vibrant Health and Genova both have really good comprehensive nutrition panels. I would recommend either of those.

What was that? Either of those? Okay. Anything else you'd like to leave us with? Basically, I think the only thing I could say is if you really care about your gut health and you want to follow on to a program where you work with other people, you can go to 15daygutreset.com where I will be taking people through a 15-day program where they'll be able to talk with other people and take easy action items every day to improve their gut health.

Are you a big fan of sugar and high carbohydrate diets? Definitely high carbohydrates, but not a huge fan of sugar. Now, there is some big differences between sugar types, but people still might want to do carbs over sugar just because it can selectively feed specific types of bacteria more so than you might want.

So you're talking about starches. You prefer to eat starches or grains or. Yes. Yes. So like sushi rice and stuff and wheat and all that. You said sushi rice. Yes. Sushi rice is great. Now, a lot of people in the bioenergetic community are always talking negatively about grains, about, you know, how they have different problems with endotoxin. But in your case, you're saying they're more effective for you rather than sugar.

They're definitely effective. It seems so inscrutable. I don't think anybody will ever figure it out. Yeah. The human body is too complex. These infinite, you know, infinite debates. You look at all the science papers and one group tells you don't ever touch starches. The other one says, oh, that's the better one than sugars.

Yeah. So starches and carbs can be great for you so long as you have the sufficient number or amount of B vitamins and the minerals you need to process them and work with them. But there are environmental toxins that come with that exposure. So for instance, if you were going to be eating lots of wheat, you then would bring in glyphosate, which is definitely negative. So what do you recommend for healthy carb sources?

Healthy carbs can be hard. I'd say either sushi rice, so long as those people are getting enough vitamin B1. Why sushi rice? Do you mean the way they put vinegar with it or the actual grain of rice? No, sushi rice is really low in a protein called amylose. Okay. And amylose can be really hard on people with the most sensitive digestion. So that's why I personally use sushi rice is because it's really low in amylose.

Otherwise, if you used a more resistant starch, you might have difficulty digesting. Now, not everyone has that issue. In fact, most people are probably totally fine with a higher amylose content starch. But if you have a very sensitive gut, I would recommend you a low amylose starch. And what sugars do you feel to be most conducive for increasing gut problems or not helping gut health?

So sugars, do you think should people be careful about with this? Xylitol is definitely one. It's very effective at killing off bacteria in the oral microbiome, but it seems to work selectively killing off some of the more beneficial microbiome and bacteria in the gut.

So I wouldn't recommend people to consume a lot of that. Zorbitol is another, mannitol. There are a number of artificial sugars that are really useful in very specific circumstances, but overall are just generally bad for your gut because they act like weak antimicrobials and antibiotics. And you don't want to use

weak forms of either of those. You want to use them very selectively. What about fruit juice or table sugar, cane sugar, honey, milk sugar? I'd say dextrose is probably your best bet amongst all those. There's definitely some... What are the best sources for dextrose for people? Honestly, just use the powder. You can buy it off of Amazon and it's pretty easy to mix into things. If you're going to consume it, I would just recommend you consume it slowly.

just because you don't want to spike your sugar and insulin. Are you a fan of orange juice like rapide and milk sugar and that kind of thing? I am, but people who have sensitive stomachs might get some negative effects just if there's pulp in it or some people don't tolerate it quite as well as you might hope. Well, thanks again for coming on and where can people join you for your gut health journey?

Sure. So they can join at the 15 day gut health reset.com. So that's 15 day gut health reset.com. And 15 is the number 15. Thank you for your time, Christian. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you, David.

Bye.