A New Role for Biotin
The vitamin biotin plays a major role in the synthesis of fatty acids and the metabolism of glucose—often called blood sugar. These processes are faulty in people with diabetes. Those two facts led several researchers across the country to investigate a connection between biotin and diabetes.
Studying tissue and blood samples of a group of insulin dependent diabetics, the scientists found the diabetics had far higher tissue levels of biotin than normal subjects, although their blood levels of that nutrient were about the same.
The significance? High levels of biotin in tissue are related to increased levels of blood sugars, or glucose, a serious factor in diabetes.
On the other hand, increased blood biotin levels caused blood sugars to drop—and that is exactly what happened when these diabetics took biotin daily for a week.
Therapeutic doses resulted in a hundredfold increase in the biotin levels of their blood, and glucose levels fell off significantly as well.
The researchers aren’t precisely sure why this happened, but they speculate that in diabetics, biotin may be abnormally bound and thus unavailable for use in the body (Annals of the New York Academy of Science, June 24, 1985).
Tags: health, Nutritional Healing