Vitamin B9 - Folate
Folate (vitamin B9) is a key B vitamin that is essential for making DNA, for repairing DNA, for detoxification, for making red blood cells, for mental health, for histamine metabolism, for muscle growth, and for prevention of neural tube defects. Not getting enough can lead to depression and obsessive thinking (deficiency is quite common in depression), recurrent allergies, or unexplained cardiovascular disease. Good sources of folate are liver, legumes (preferably sprouted), and leafy greens. The RDA for folate is 400 mcg DFE per day; there is some concern that doses over 1000 mcg DFE per day can cause problems. You need just the right amount!
Vitamin B2 - Riboflavin
Riboflavin—vitamin B2—is a critical vitamin for overall health, supporting metabolism (especially fat metabolism), iron metabolism, eye health, and methylation while preventing oxidative stress. It’s present in a varied diet, with good sources including greens, seeds and nuts, eggs, and lean meats and fish. It can be taken supplementally and is usually part of a multivitamin. There’s no known toxicity of high doses, though most supplements have way more than the RDA (sometimes more than 100 times). The RDA is 1.1 to 1.3 mg; many people may need more than that by 2x or 5x. The best way to know if you need riboflavin is to test for it!
MTHFR. Do you have it? And is it affecting your health?
MTHFR is a gene that gets a lot of press. It can be very relevant for many people, and may be linked to symptoms like fatigue, depression, blood clots, OCD, poor memory, insomnia, and heart disease.1 But it also sometimes gets unfair blame. So what does it do? And does it matter for you?
What is nutrigenomics?
Nutrigenomics examines the interactions between nutrition and genetics. Specifically, if focuses on how subtle individual genetic variations caused by a single change in the coding sequence of a gene (a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP) influence a person’s response to different nutrients, and how those nutrients influence gene expression and function. Nutrigenomics seeks to understand how the food we eat interacts with our genes to create health or to influence susceptibility to disease.