Eating a high-fat diet could make you
riboflavin-deficient. Here's how to make
sure that it doesn't.
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 high-fat diets
and riboflavin. So, there are two aspects
to this. The first is that fat does not
contain any riboflavin, so the more fat
you eat, the more you're displacing foods
that do have riboflavin. That doesn't
mean that you have to eat a low-fat diet
in order to get enough riboflavin.
It just means that to the extent that you
include more fat in your diet, you need
to be more careful that the rest of your
diet is high in riboflavin-rich foods
because someone eating a low-fat diet
could have a bunch of mediocre foods
that just all have a little bit of
riboflavin, and it all kind of adds up
to enough, but if those are the types of
foods you eat and then you displace half
of those foods with fat, you're pushing
out a lot of that riboflavin. It becomes
more important to take the other half of
your diet and really put very
riboflavin-rich foods into it. The other aspect to
this is you actually need more
riboflavin on a high-fat diet.
Now, there's not really good human studies on this.
There is at least one study where
they put people on a higher fat diet, and
it increased their riboflavin a little
bit kind of like you would expect, but
they didn't use very big differences in
the fat and carbohydrate ratio, and they
didn't show a very big effect. But what
we can say from how we know riboflavin
works in the body is you require almost
twice as much riboflavin to burn fat as
you do to burn carbohydrate. So when you
go on the high-fat diet, you're pushing
riboflavin out of the diet, and you're
also proportionally increasing your
need for riboflavin. To give a sense of
what the magnitude might be of the
effect of fat on the riboflavin
requirement, some back-of-the-envelope
calculations of mine suggest that if you
started at a diet that was 30% fat
and 60% carbohydrate, if you doubled the
fat and in doing so you took down the
carbohydrate in proportion to wind up at
60% fat 30% carbohydrate, that would
increase your riboflavin requirement by
about 25%. So if you are eating high-fat
diet, then I would look back at the
episode I did three episodes ago, I'll
link to it in the description of this
one, on the signs that you might need
more riboflavin and see if any of those
apply to you. And then we'll talk about
ways to working riboflavin-rich foods
two episodes from now.
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Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
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And I will see you in the next episode.