Where Has MineralMan Been?

[highplainsdem]

58. A good vitamin B complex with additional choline and inositol, which are two of the B vitamins usually

undersupplied and often completely omitted in most multivitamin and B-complex formulas.

This is going.to be long. Please bear with me - and PLEASE keep in mind that anyone taking any supplement should always get their doctor's okay, and check with both doctor and pharmacist about any possible drug interactions.

And please keep in mind this is just my family's personal experience, though my mom's doctors knew what she was taking and approved and made sure hospitals were told to give her the usual supplements.

I first learned about nutrition from nutritionist Adelle Davis's books, which I first found in health food stores in NYC in the 1970s. Davis's advice on vitamin A for skin problems quickly cleared up skin problems I'd had for years, her advice on high-protein breakfasts got rid of the brain fog I'd had almost every morning, and that was the first year I never caught a cold (probably the vitamin C). I've taken supplements for years - just the basic vitamins and minerals.

My mother had a congenital malformation of the urinary tract, megaureter, that was causing her kidneys to fail in her 40s. She'd been told she would need surgery on both kidneys, but the first surgery had left a huge incision that healed so badly that she refused to have the second. That first surgery hadn't been enough to help, though, and by the time I discovered those books, my mom was in pain every day but still refusing to consider the second kidney surgery.

Davis had written about what she considered the proper ratio of B vitamins. She recommended relatively low amounts of the cheaper B vitamins that were often included in large amounts in multivitamins. And she recommended relatively large amounts of choline and inositol, which as I said are usually in short supply or omitted in both multivitamins and B-complex formulas. Choline in particular was important for kidneys.

Millions of her books had been sold by the 1970s, and she was highly enough respected that a major vitamin company then, Plus brand, marketed an Adelle Davis-approved B formula, 49/49A.

Huh. There's actually one on sale on eBay - https://www.ebay.com/itm/185741993506 - and while I'd advise against anyone buying 50-year-old vitamins and those certainly wouldn't be safe to take, that bottle might look familiar to DUers who shopped in health food stores then. I was hoping to find a photo of the ingredient label so I wouldn't have to type up the info on the ratio of B vitamins she recommended. No such luck.

Anyway, those vitamins helped my mom almost instantly. The pain from her kidneys was gone within a couple of days, and never returned unless she decided to stop taking the vitamins, when it would gradually return and she'd go back on the vitamins and the pain would go away again.

The vitamins kept her kidneys functioning so well despite the remaining megaureter that 40 years later an experienced nephrologist misdiagnosed a scan and believed that megaureter was a large kidney cyst, and the treatment was to drain it. They couldn't figure out why they couldn't completely drain it. And puncturing the ureter caused urine to leak into her abdomen, which led to her needing an ambulance to go back to the hospital that night in shock. Fortunately she recovered and was able to go home the next day. When I asked her GP how in hell the nephrologist could have made that mistake, he said it was unusual enough for her kidneys to be functioning well at her age that no one would have.suspected what looked like a cyst was a megaureter. That wasn't an adequate excuse IMO but I didn't look for a lawyer. I did tell the nephrologist at Mom's followup appointment about the vitamins she took that had kept her kidneys healthy. He was NOT interested in hearing about vitamins.

Plus brand vitamins went out of business in the 1980s. After that my mom had to make do with a B complex that was too low in choline/inositol but she took with an additional choline/inositol supplement.

The proportions of B vitamins Davis recommended, from Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit - also the.amounts in that Plus formula:

If your tablet supplies 2 milligrams of vitamin B1, it should also contain equal amounts, or 2 milligrams, of vitamins B2, B6, and folic acid; approximately 20 times more niacin amide, pantothenic acid, and PABA than B1, or 40 milligrams of each; 500 times more inositol and choline, or 1,000 milligrams of each of these two. I know of no studies of the amount of biotin required. Only 1 to 3 micrograms of.vitamin B12 appear to be needed daily.

There still isn't an RDA for biotin, but there's a recommended adequate intake of 30 mcg for adults. RDA for B12 is 2.4 mcg. I know Plus 49/49A had both but can't recall how much.

Anyway, good luck finding ANY B-complex formula that gets close to that.

For a while after Plus went out of business I could find a B complex containing brewer's rice that was fairly close, and Mom took that with additinal choline/inositol, but then I couldn't find that either.

She finally ended up taking Now brand B-50 tablets, which I'd cut in two, and Now brand choline/inositol capsules, and she'd take half a B-50 and 1 choline/inositol capsule with both breakfast and dinner. I would have preferred to have the exact amounts Davis recommended, but Mom would never have taken all the different tiny fragments of tablets I'd have ended up with if I'd bought tablets of all the different B vitamins and cut them into tiny pieces.

And those Now vitamins kept her kidneys healthy. In total, B vitamins kept her kidneys healthy from 1971 to 2018, when she was 96. They also helped my dad when he had kidney failure about 20 years ago.