Vitamin B1 helps your body turn the food you eat into energy you can use (1). Keeping up consistent energy levels can help minimize that midday tiredness that seems to hit right in the middle of the workday. This vitamin is also known as thiamine, and it’s available in several common foods. You can get it from rice, navy beans, green peas, pork chops, and salmon. We include thiamine in Future Proof for its role in helping the food you eat fuel your body. 

Thiamine can be absorbed directly into the blood and once it’s in our blood, it can go freely throughout our circulatory system to wherever it’s needed. Thiamine is used by all of the tissues in your body. Therefore it’s important to make sure we regularly resupply our body with this vitamin.

Complex chemical processes depend on thiamine

In our bodies, thiamine is an essential component for converting food into energy (2). We can group nutrients from food into three categories: fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are an energy source. Thiamine is essential to the processes of converting carbohydrates into usable energy in our body.

Benefits for the brain

In the human brain, there are all sorts of pathways for sharing information. To prevent certain pathways from becoming overwhelmed, the brain uses chemical inhibitors. One of these inhibitors is called “gamma-aminobutyric acid,” or GABA, and plays a role in everything from our motor skills, to our anxiety levels. Thiamine is used to produce GABA, which can help our brains focus and prevent delirium (3 + 4).

110% of the daily dose

The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of thiamine for adults varies between men and women (4). For men, it’s 1.2 milligrams (mg). For women, it’s 1.1 mg, (though it may be recommended for pregnant women to increase their intake to 1.4 mg/day). In Future Proof, we include 1.3 mg, which is 110 percent of your daily dose.

Thiamine (Vitamin B1), is considered to be quite safe. It’s widely available in foods we eat and consuming extra is unlikely to do harm to the body.

Disclaimer: It’s always a good idea to talk to your doctor before you take any type of supplement. And if you experience any negative side effects when you are taking one, contact a healthcare expert immediately.

References

1. Thiamin Fact Sheet for Health Professionals - Retrieved from National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements
2. Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) - Retrieved from National Center for Biotechnology Information
3. Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) - Retrieved from National Center for Biotechnology Information
4. Thiamine Deficiency and Delirium - Retrieved from National Center for Biotechnology Information