Best Health And Wellness Info

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Despite all that you’ve heard about high cholesterol being the vilain in heart disease and circulatory disorders, it a very minor player in comparison to a substance called homocysteine.  Homocysteine is a compound produced as a normal part of protein metabolism and it is highly toxic and damaging to several tissues in the body, particularly the walls of blood vessels.  The damage to blood vessel walls creates rough areas for atherosclerotic plaques to adhere to.  Without this damage, the arterial walls remain nice and smooth and resistant to plaqueing. 

If that’s the case, why isn’t “modern medicine” working to find a drug to combat homocysteine?  Well, that’s because nature already created a very effective cure for high homocysteine.  What it comes down to is that drug companies have medications they can sell to lower cholesterol.  Although a few have made baby steps towards producing a homocysteine-lowering drug, the naturally-occurring cure is so effective and so cheap, there’s really no point in developing a drug.  And let’s face it, most people’s awareness of cholesterol comes from advertising for cholesterol lowering medication.  Since there’s no drug to market for homocysteine, there’s no advertising and little awareness about elevated homocysteine.

In most people with generally healthy diets, homocysteine is quickly converted into  a harmless amino acid, methionine.  The primary factor in whether one develops high homocysteine levels is the amount of B vitamins they consume, especially B6.

As I just said, most people with reasonably good diets do not have problems with homocysteine.  It is primarily a problem in people with poor diets who do not use any kind of nutritional supplementation.  In a few cases though, homocysteine can become a problem even for those who supplement. 

You see, not just any old kind of Vitamin B6 is needed to convert the damaging homocysteine into the harmless methionine.  It requires an activated form of B6 called pyridoxal-5-phosphate.  Most vitamin supplements supply B6 in the form of pyridoxine.  That’s fine in most cases, because the body can usually convert pyridoxine to pyridoxal-5-phosphate.  In some individuals though, the enzyme needed for the conversion is lacking, and those people can’t produce pyridoxal-5-phosphate and their homocysteine levels can become quite high.  Those individuals MUST supplement with the activated pyridoxal-5-phosphate form of B6 to lower their homocysteine and avoid the health problems it brings.

How do you know if you have high homocysteine?  There are various tests that are used, and you can probably get your family doctor to run a blood test to check for it an have it covered under insurance if you have it.  For most people, I simply err on the side of caution and recommend that they make sure they are using a supplement that has at least some pyridoxal-5-phosphate.

Not many supplements contain the pyridoxal-5-phosphate form of B6, so it may take a little searching to find one that has it, particularly if you are trying to be as efficient as possible by using a multivitamin and mineral supplement.  I use a couple of different products in my office, both of which are from doctors-only nutrition suppliers.  For a multivitamin and mineral I use Nutri-Spec’s Oxygenic B.  For those just needing additional homocysteine-lowering, I usually prescribe Nutriwest’s Homocysteine Redux. 

Share This