Riboflavin, or vitamin B2, is the ultimate
fat-burning nutrient. This is how to know
if you need more of it.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com.
And this is Chris Masterjohn Lite, where
the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about signs that you could
need more riboflavin. The first sign that
you need more riboflavin is an iron
deficiency anemia that doesn't respond
well to iron. In other words, your serum
iron levels are low, your complete blood
count looks like you have anemia, and you
keep putting iron supplements into your
body, or you keep putting iron-rich foods
into your body, your iron doesn't go
anywhere, your anemia doesn't go anywhere. It could
be that you have an underlying poor
riboflavin status, and you don't have
enough riboflavin to help you utilize
the iron properly. The second sign you might see is
elevated homocysteine. You could see
elevated homocysteine because of an
underlying poor riboflavin status
regardless of your genetics, but you are
especially likely to see this if you
have low MTHFR activity. MTHFR is an
enzyme that uses folate to make methylfolate.
And methylfolate helps you clear
homocysteine. But the MTHFR enzyme
depends on riboflavin, and
people with low MTHFR activity have low
MTHFR activity because their enzyme
happens to need more riboflavin than the
average person's enzyme in order to make
it work properly. So if your riboflavin
status is very poor, you might have
elevated homocysteine regardless of your
genetics, but if your
riboflavin status is just mediocre and
kind of in the middle, you might not see
the elevated homocysteine if you don't
have low MTHFR activity, and if you do
have low MTHFR activity, that's where you
might see the elevated homocysteine even
on mediocre riboflavin status. Some other
things that you might see are cataracts,
high blood pressure, oxidative stress,
which could manifest as wear and tear on
your tissues and what seems to be faster
aging than you would expect, migraines,
fatigue, exercise intolerance. In pregnancy,
preeclampsia might largely be driven by
poor riboflavin status. Finally, because
we use almost twice as much riboflavin
to burn fat for fuel as we do when we
burn carbohydrate for fuel, then a
general sense of better health and
well-being on a low-fat diet or a
general sense of poor health and
well-being when on a high-fat diet could
be signs that you need more riboflavin.
When riboflavin deficiency gets really
bad, it causes a characteristic set of
signs that constitute the textbook
appearance or manifestation of classical
riboflavin deficiency. If it gets that
bad, you would expect to see some of the
following things: a red, crusty, greasy
inflamed skin that would occur on the
outer edges of your mouth, cracks and
fissures at the corners of your mouth.
You'd see the inflammation on the outer
edges of your nose, your eyelids, your
smile lines, and your genitals. You would
get redness, bleeding, and swelling in
your tongue and all inside your mouth.
You could get hypersensitivity to touch
and to pain and to heat in your hands
and feet. You could get conjunctivitis,
and you could get a specific
manifestation of anemia that even though
iron deficiency anemia can be a problem,
with riboflavin deficiency, you can also
get a much more specific riboflavin
deficiency anemia where the red blood
cell levels are low and yet the
hemoglobin and the red blood cell size
is normal. If any of these things from
the signs of more common suboptimal
status or to the signs of the severe
classical deficiency, if any of those
things apply to you, then it'll be
especially important to check out the
next few episodes because there I'll be
talking about all the different things
that we can do to optimize our
riboflavin status.
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Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.