
Vitamin B1 deficiency at the heart of an environmental mystery - based2
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/42/10532
======
tcj_phx
Last week I watched a video about Vitamin B1. The term _Alcoholic Korsakoff
syndrome_ [0] was mentioned. This form of vitamin B1 deficiency is experienced
by some heavy drinkers.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_Korsakoff_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_Korsakoff_syndrome)

Age, alcoholism, chemotherapy, dialysis, extreme dieting, and genetic factors
also contribute to the development of this syndrome. The most important
treatment (aside from cessation of alcohol use) is some form of thiamine
(vitamin B1) supplementation - injection/IV/oral.

The causes section of that wikipedia entry says "Mercury poisoning can also
lead to Korsakoff's syndrome." Maybe mercury contamination is another factor
in the thiamine deficiencies observed in ocean wildlife.

Edit: added the clarification that thiamine and Vitamin B1 are synonymous.

~~~
jhoechtl
Maybe a consequence of the once habbit of adding lead to gas?

~~~
headShrinker
Coal burning power plants are the number one reason for oceanic mercury
contamination.

------
jboggan
I wonder if the insect die-offs that have been reported lately are linked to a
nutrient deficiency such as this.

It's amazing to think about the scarcity of various metabolites and how they
might become concentrated in different populations and species over long time
scales. I wonder if these phenomena are long scale oscillations that we are
just scientifically observant enough to begin noticing.

~~~
Laforet
It's quite possible. There is mounting evidence showing that higher
atomspheric CO2 leads to loss of protein and certain micronutrients in both
crops[0] and wild plants[1], and it wouldn't be a stretch to think the same
thing is happening to other secondary metabolites required by species up the
food web.

[0]:[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-global-
warmi...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-global-warming-make-
food-less-nutritious/)
[1]:[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092044)

~~~
sedachv
One very striking thing I noticed is how this nutrient density decrease
correlates with the observed obesity epidemic in mammals. There is a meta-
analysis that came out of David Allison's¹ lab that examined studies of
increasing rodent obesity:
[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11/19/rspb.2010.1890)

There is roughly a 1% decrease in nutrient density for every 6.25ppm increase
of CO₂ in the atmosphere. From 1945 to 1985 atmospheric CO₂ increased by about
35ppm, so there should be about a 5% decrease in nutrient density. According
to the meta-study, rats increased their calorie intake by roughly 6%.

¹ Caveat: Allison is a notorious "PR scientist" whose career has been made out
of helping the fast- and processed- food industries deflect any blame or
accountability for the health and safety of their "products." The hypothesis
of the paper is that the obesity epidemic is being caused by viruses and
pollutants (without offering any evidence), and has nothing to do with
McDonald's. This "viruses and pollutants" fairy tale can then be used as a
deflection in fast-food PR and expert testimony in class-action lawsuits and
government investigations.

~~~
pygy_
That meta-analysis only looked at animals living among humans.

Is there any evidence of wild animals living far from humans getting fat as
well?

If the latter are not affected, it would be reasonable to think that the
former are fat because they are exposed to human junk food.

Junk food itself is a natural consequence of a food sector that has to grow in
order to please its investors. Sell as much food as possible to whoever will
buy it.

It can't shove food down people's mouth, but it can produce food that's
deceptively tasty and manipulate our instincts.

~~~
sedachv
One of the studies in the meta-analysis was about rats in agricultural areas
("From 1948 to 1986, male rats trapped in the rural area gained 4.5 per cent
in body weight, while females gained 5.2 per cent, and the increases in the
odds of obesity were, respectively, 19 and 26 per cent"). They are not eating
junk food.

There is a paper from 2010 about obesity in marmots:
[https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/news.2010.366.h...](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/news.2010.366.html)

~~~
pygy_
I'm still unconvinced.

 _" Feral rats. Our sample consisted of 6115 (2886 males, 3229 females) wild
Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) that were captured in the central alleys of
high-density residential neighbourhoods using single-capture live traps, while
rural rat populations were sampled from parklands and agricultural areas in
areas surrounding the city [12,13], between the years 1948 and 2006."_

I can't cross-check the methodological validity since neither articles are
available online (the second one appears to be, but if you follow the links
you end up with a n unrelated 1975 article on beach voles :-). No info is
given on the distance between the traps and human habitations. Also, no idea
on how comparable the sample from 1949 is with the one from 1989. They were
not written by the same authors, and the 1989 authors don't cite the 1949
paper
([https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1484756086713821658...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14847560867138216588&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en)).

Had they compared rodent populations from places that the obesity epidemics
has yet to reach (read: poor countries), it would be more convincing.

For marmots, the proposed hypothesis was that the longer summers let them eat
more food and shortens the hibernation period during which they usually lose
weight.

If you want to know whether atmospheric CO2 has an impact on rodent weight,
you can devise a controlled experiment where they live in, and are fed with
plants grown in controlled atmospheres. No idea if such a study has been
performed.

~~~
sedachv
It just occurred to me that even for domestic animals, the "fast food"
hypothesis cannot be true. There is now an obesity epidemic among horses:
[https://www.paulickreport.com/horse-care-category/obesity-
ep...](https://www.paulickreport.com/horse-care-category/obesity-epidemic-in-
equines-worldwide/) No one is feeding their horses human junk food.

~~~
pygy_
No, but the perverse market forces that gave us human junk food also apply to
pet food.

~~~
sedachv
There is no horse "pet food." Horses are fed hay.

~~~
pygy_
If only...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_nutrition#Types_of_feed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_nutrition#Types_of_feed)

------
ggm
Vegemite, rich source of Vitamin B. said to have been made from the yeast
remaining after brewing. Thus the old wives tale that if a beer-drunk eats
vegemite toast, they avoid the problems of thiamine deficient diet.

( _I don 't think we can fix this problem in nature by feeding zoo plankton
vegemite btw_)

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
The irony being that for a long time beer was loaded with unfiltered yeasts,
which made it far more nutritious. The advent of spirits and filtered beers,
especially as it tended to arrive alongside whiter breads, was not good for
the health of the poor. You see similar things occur for different reasons
across different nations and at different times when key dietary staples
change, or are lost. Pellagra in the US from over-reliance on corn, Beriberi
in Japan from eating too much white rice and too little protein, and so on.
The history of monoculture agriculture and emerging food science is a history
of starvation, malnutrition, and gross misunderstandings of epidemiology.

Fortunately we’d never make the same mistakes today! Heh...

------
PavlikPaja
The widespread use of fertilizers could be the case. The thing is, we possibly
don't know all the necessary nutrients, and causing an imbalance as the
result, where some elements are supplied in excess and others are missing. The
myopia and obesity epidemics could also be the result - countries that use
lanthanides in fertilizers show lower levels of obesity, minimal rates of
mental illness, slower aging and higher IQ, regardless of wealth.

Iron toxicity is also a problem in many places, as the excess iron replaces
other metals, especially manganese. Many diseases associated with aging are
actually caused by this excess and may have nothing to do with aging at all.
Many people are mentally retarded because of irresponsible attempts to
increase intake despite inadequate research. (Iron increases the number of D2
and D1 dopamine receptors in the brain, which makes them psychotic, people who
don't suffer from this are told to have "high functioning autism". The
supposedly neuroptypical people are people who suffer from thought insertions
- they can see you're lying, mean something else than what you say etc. and
apparently accept it as perfectly normal that each of them interprets the same
situation differently. They also hear voices and call it their inner
monologue.)

These replacements are the reason why the deficiencies are hard to notice -
the protein will usually accept some other metal when the appropriate metal
ion is not found, so that the protein may be known to bind to e.g. calcium,
when a rare earth element would be preferable.

~~~
taneq
Are you seriously proposing that having an inner monologue is a side effect of
psychosis caused by excessive dietary iron? O.o

~~~
PavlikPaja
I'm indeed seriously proposing that the majority, the so called " neurotypical
people" are in fact psychotic and autistic people are those who remained
healthy. Inner speech is never mentioned in ancient literature. The voices and
thought insertions become so deeply internalized when it strikes so early that
the person completely believes this is actually how people communicate with
them. It is to some degree influenced by actual events and people can always
rationalize when it fails.

The majority of people outside the US/Europe seems to be autistic, that is,
not psychotic. Many autistic people found out they are normal in Asia.

~~~
feanaro
How would this hypothesis explain the fact that people with low-functioning
autism are maladapted to the environment, in the sense that they would have
low chances of surviving a few thousand years ago?

It seems to me that it is nearly impossible that this form would be naturally
selected, unless current levels of dietary iron were always common and are
therefore not excessive to begin with.

~~~
PavlikPaja
There has been selection towards autism and low functioning autism may even be
something else. Anyway, large part of it will be because of growing up among
"normal" people. Maybe that (low functioning) autistic people would have no
trouble using a langauge, it just wouldn't be the same as our languages. You
can see it even with high functioning autism who sound odd (as, among possibly
other things, tone is heard with the word, while as far as I understand it,
neurotypical people hear tone as something completely separate)

------
csmeder
As some one who doesn’t eat fortified foods this brings up questions. Is the
balance of vegetables and meat I’m eating lacking in vitamin B1 or other key
vitamins? Looking up the top sources of B1 the only one that is a staple of
mine is beef (100% grass fed).

~~~
newnewpdro
Eat more mushrooms. I do a mushroom-heavy soup about once a week, usually
lentils with an entire package of crimini mushrooms sliced up.

Keeping a variety of unsalted tree nuts and seeds nearby to conveniently snack
on is good as well.

Edit:

For B12 in particular, it appears Shiitake and Lion's Mane mushrooms are best.
They're not competitive with animal B12 sources, but every bit helps and
mushrooms don't add much in the way of calories to a diet.

Personally I consume canned wild, unsalted sardines in water fairly regularly
for Omega-3s and B12 specifically. They're small and have a short lifespan,
which is desirable for a variety of reasons with seafood. i.e. Low on the food
chain, and less time spent in a potentially toxic environment accumulating
nasties like mercury. Sardines are considered a sustainable superfood by many.
It's way better nutritionally than tuna, you eat the whole fish, even the
bones.

~~~
bbrian
> They're not competitive with animal B12 sources,

Interestingly, the B12 people get from animals is probably from supplements
they were given.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/the_b12_in_me...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/the_b12_in_meat_is_from_supplements_given_to_the/dtlj7vz/?context=8&depth=9)

~~~
newnewpdro
I didn't know that.

A similarly surprising fact is the Omega-3 fatty acid actually comes from
algae the fish eat. As a result there are vegan-friendly algae-derived
supplements as an alternative to the popular fish oil ones.

On a brief vegetarian experiment I used a methylcobalamin sublingual B12
supplement, but it had strange and totally unique side effects. After a week
of daily use, and this was consistently reproducible, my neck would become
very stiff and painful to turn. I don't know why, but it didn't take much of a
leap for me to connect this stuff diffusing into my system from under my
tongue and the surrounding neck tissue being effected. I find it preferable to
just eat sardines regularly.

------
mratzloff
The three most relevant passages, in my opinion:

 _“We found that thiamine deficiency is much more widespread and severe than
previously thought,” Balk says. Given its scope, he suggests that a pervasive
thiamine deficiency could be at least partly responsible for global wildlife
population declines. Over a 60-year period up to 2010, for example, worldwide
seabird populations declined by approximately 70%, and globally, species are
being lost 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction (9, 10). “He
has seen a thiamine deficiency in several differ phyla now,” says Fitzsimons
of Balk. “One wonders what is going on. It’s a larger issue than we first
suspected.”_

...

 _Balk fears that a single pervasive factor, such as an atmospheric pollutant,
may be depleting the environment of thiamine at its sources, including
phytoplankton and bacteria, affecting the entire food chain. To see how far
the problem reaches, he is now looking at upstream terrestrial wildlife such
as elk (Alces alces). Balk is also investigating whether any of several
pollutants might interfere with the oxidation, hydrolysis, or synthesis of
thiamine._

...

 _Sañudo-Wilhelmy has measured very low levels of B vitamins, including
thiamine, in coastal waters around California. Other researchers have
estimated similar scarcities in some areas of the open ocean (16). Warming
waters due to climate change could explain the seawater vitamin scarcity, he
says. Warmer temperatures speed bacterial growth, making the microbes consume
more B vitamins than they produce—gobbling up the vitamins before the
phytoplankton can take their share._

All are couched with the fact that more research is necessary into the cause
or causes.

~~~
pasta
Indeed we need more research.

For example a lot of coral is dying and most researchers suggest this is due
to rising temperatures. But now some new research suggests that coral can
handle the change in temperature but they die because they eat to much plastic
particles.

Both can be true but the fact is we should be more carefull about our world
because we just know too little about how all systems work together.

~~~
pvaldes
Is an interesting hypothesis...

Dunno... Incorrect temperature kills a lot of captive corals, even at small
variations. Is a diverse group and some are harder to kill than other. On the
other hand, Cnidarians taste their food and reject often small stones and sand
grains. Probably many types of plastic particles (if not all) would be just
taken by a small peeble and ignorated. Cnidarians loose interest quickly when
you touch its tentacles with an inert matherial.

------
DoctorOetker
an invasive species of fish that is rich in thiaminase -> thiamin (vitamine
B1) is broken down by thiaminase -> predators like birds normally source B1
from fish -> B1 deficiency

The perverse effect is that the invasive species has an advantage in that its
predator suffers, so plausibly the birds will prefer their usual food if
possible, which increases the concentration of the invasive fish...

~~~
the8472
that explanation only applies to the great lakes, not to the birds at the
baltic.

~~~
DoctorOetker
sure, I didn't intend the summary of the mechanism as a sweeping clarification
at all.

even within just the Great Lakes, this does not mean the invasive fish were
necessarily the cause, in turn they may have been the result, perhaps the
native fish were more dependent on thiamine than the invasive fish, and the
thiamine deficiency maybe present at a lower level still say due to perhaps a
change in whatever food is available to fish like plankton, plants, etc

but it does suggest a relatively cheap test for those studying the other
populations: try administering B1 or other nutrients since substantial
improvement by essential nutrients is hard to explain by a more complicated
poisoning mechanism. I.e. if for some other species a similarly significant
effect is observed in controlled correlation to some vitamin, then it's
probably more significant than poisoning, i.e. we can't cure poisoning by
administering vitamins. One could think that by feeding them in a new
environment the animals were unknowingly spared from continuing poisoning, but
that does not explain why the control group died (unless they claim Balk & co
intentionally poisoned the control group of course)

------
pvaldes
>fish eggs micro-injected with thiamin survived

Hum, this does not look right

I don't have information about the authors experience as fish pathologists,
but I would expect to see a mention to Myxobolus cerebralis somewhere if you
have young salmonidae with erratic swimming.

