Have you ever felt like your gut issues, like SIBO, IBS, or GERD, just won’t go away, no matter what you try? It’s a frustrating cycle, especially when you’ve gone through rounds of treatments only to find the problems creeping back. Many approaches focus on getting rid of bad bacteria, but sometimes, that’s not the whole story. What if the real problem is something deeper, something that controls how your gut works in the first place? This article explores how a simple vitamin deficiency might be the missing piece of the puzzle for your stubborn gut problems, based on the insights of nutritionist Elliot Overton.
💡The Hidden Link: Thiamine Deficiency and Gut Health
It turns out, a mild lack of vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, can cause symptoms that look a lot like SIBO, IBS, GERD, and other gut issues. This deficiency is more common than you might think. Things like eating a lot of refined foods, drinking too much alcohol, coffee, or tea, taking certain medications, dealing with long-term infections, or even just having a high metabolism can all lead to low thiamine levels. Plus, if you’ve had gut problems for a while, your body might not be absorbing nutrients well, making the problem worse.
✔️Key Takeaways
- Thiamine deficiency can mimic symptoms of SIBO, IBS, and GERD.
- Common causes include diet, lifestyle, medications, and chronic health issues.
- The vagus nerve, which relies on thiamine, is crucial for gut function.
- Thiamine deficiency can lead to low stomach acid, poor enzyme production, and slow gut movement.
- Specific forms of thiamine, like TTFD, may be especially helpful for gut motility.
📌How Your Gut Protects Itself (and What Goes Wrong)
Your digestive system has a bunch of ways to keep things running smoothly and prevent bacterial overgrowth. If any of these systems aren’t working right, you become more open to problems like SIBO.
- Stomach Acid: A strong acid in your stomach kills off most bad microbes before they can get into your small intestine. If your stomach acid is low, or if you’re taking acid-reducing drugs, those microbes can sneak through and cause trouble.
- Pancreatic Enzymes: Your pancreas makes enzymes that break down food so your body can absorb nutrients. It also releases substances that help keep your gut bacteria balanced. A healthy pancreas is also important for moving food through your intestines.
- Bile Flow: Your liver makes bile, which is stored in your gallbladder and then released into your intestine. Bile helps digest fats and also has strong microbe-fighting properties.
- Peristalsis (Gut Movement): This is the rhythmic squeezing motion that pushes food and waste through your digestive tract. It’s a super important way your gut cleans itself out. Many times, SIBO is really a problem with this movement.
✨The Vagus Nerve: Your Gut’s Master Controller
Here’s the big secret: all those gut functions I just talked about are controlled by your nervous system, specifically the vagus nerve. This nerve connects your brain directly to your gut. It tells your stomach to make acid and empty at the right time, signals your pancreas to release enzymes, tells your intestines to contract, and even helps calm down inflammation in your gut and keep your gut lining strong.
The vagus nerve does all this using a chemical messenger called acetylcholine. If your vagus nerve isn’t communicating well, sometimes called poor vagal tone, your whole digestive system can slow down. This has been seen in people with SIBO and other gut conditions. In fact, some research has shown that stimulating the vagus nerve can help improve SIBO.
These brain areas that control your nervous system need a lot of energy, and that means they need a lot of micronutrients to make that energy. If these areas don’t get enough energy, they can send out wrong signals to the rest of your body, including your gut organs. And guess what? The same brain areas that control your nervous system are often the first ones affected by a lack of thiamine.
📌Thiamine Deficiency: A Deeper Look at the Symptoms
When you don’t have enough thiamine, it can mess with your body in a lot of ways, especially your nervous system. You might have heard of conditions like Wernicke encephalopathy, which affects the brain, or different types of beriberi that affect nerves or the heart. But there’s also something called gastrointestinal beriberi, which directly affects the nervous system in your gut. This lesser-known condition can cause symptoms like:
- Nausea
- Slow stomach emptying (gastroparesis)
- Gut pain and bloating
- Constipation or diarrhea
- Serious nutrient malabsorption
➡️ How Thiamine Deficiency Wrecks Your Gut
Thiamine deficiency can really mess up your gut health through several pathways:
- Acetylcholine Problems: Remember how the vagus nerve uses acetylcholine to talk to your gut organs? And how acetylcholine is needed for your intestines to contract? Well, thiamine is essential for making and using acetylcholine. So, if you’re low on thiamine, your acetylcholine levels can drop a lot.
- Stomach Issues: Thiamine deficiency can weaken the muscles that control your stomach’s openings. Stomach acid production slows way down, and your stomach might not empty properly. This often leads to bloating in the upper belly, reflux, slow stomach emptying, and sometimes even undigested food in your poop.
- Pancreatic and Bile Problems: The production of digestive enzymes from your pancreas can drop significantly. One study even showed that enzymes on the surface of your intestine were reduced by up to 66 percent! Plus, your gallbladder might not release bile as it should. This means your body struggles to break down food and get nutrients from what you eat. People with these issues often rely on supplements like hydrochloric acid, digestive enzymes, or bile salts.
🌱Is It SIBO, GERD, IBS, or Just Thiamine?
So, the big question is: are your chronic gut problems like SIBO, GERD, or IBS actually caused by a thiamine deficiency in some people? This deficiency can lead to all the classic gut complaints:
- Poor bile flow
- Low stomach acid
- Low digestive enzymes
- Malabsorption
- Slow intestinal movement
- Chronic constipation and diarrhea
- And because of its effects on the vagus nerve and other systems, even a leaky gut and gut inflammation over time.
While this isn’t the answer for everyone, I’ve seen it help a lot of people. There’s definitely a group of people for whom this applies.
🚀Addressing Thiamine Deficiency
If you think thiamine deficiency might be playing a role in your gut issues, the next step is figuring out the best way to address it. While any form of thiamine can probably help a real deficiency in most people, there’s one form that stands out, especially for gut movement. This form can also get into your brain and nervous system really well. It’s called thiamine tetrahydrofurfuryl disulfide, or TTFD for short.
TTFD was first studied in Japan and has been shown to directly make the smooth muscles in your intestines contract more strongly. Another study found that TTFD also helped the nerves in your gut improve movement. One case report even showed that severe slow stomach emptying and constipation got better in just a few weeks with TTFD.
For most people, a good starting dose is 50 or 100 milligrams per day, gradually increasing to between 200 and 500 milligrams per day, depending on what you need. It’s also important to remember that thiamine works best with other nutrients, so make sure you’re getting those too.
If antibiotics and other treatments haven’t fixed your gut problems, and you think this might apply to you, it’s worth giving thiamine a try. Generally, thiamine is very safe and can be really effective for some people.