Cells Not Well: Vitamin Deficiency in Nature

An even more silent spring ahead?

Fifteen investigated regions from the northern hemisphere. From Widespread episodic thiamine deficiency in Northern Hemisphere wildlife Nature 2016

So what else of far-reaching importance to our children’s and Planet Earth's future have I been totally ignorant of?

I had no idea this ongoing global mystery and crisis has been underway, likely, for decades; and that it could be the Achille's heel that brings Earth's food webs into full-blown irreversible dysfunction. Not kidding. We need way more information now.

And it all has to do with a vitamin--which I'm guessing some of you Boomers see in your mind in the shape of Fred Flintstone. Am I right? Rethink vitamins as essential to life as oxygen or water. Cells can't do what they are supposed to do (reproduce, conduct impulses, grow, recycle waste, create energy) without their Fred Flintstones.

So here's the story as I've come to understand it, with pull-quotes from only one main source of the bunch I've found, read and annotated. If you know a student who needs a research project for home-school, offer them this one. It will NOT be a mere exercise and could lead to more widespread understanding of how our world works--or doesn't.

Thiamine is a B-vitamin essential to normal cell function across the Animal Kingdom. There is less of it in both marine and terrestrial food chains. This is likely due to human-caused additions to or changes in the global environment. I'm thinking BPA, PFAS, plastics, oil and gas toxics. We just don't know.

This is (and possibly for some while has been) resulting in widespread lethal and sublethal and previously under-described or unappreciated disordered function in animal tissues across the northern hemisphere. Consider the following excerpts from just one research article in Nature from 2016. Summation bullets are mine, quotes from the article.

• The lack of this key vitamin impacts a wide variety of cellular functions:

  • Describing thiamine's role in the production of ATP, NADH and other critical cellular metabolic chemicals, it makes the point that "such alterations compromise the integrity of tissues and organs, and their malfunction results in systemic disorders affecting central functions of life, such as growth, reproduction, immune defense, behavior, nerve function, sensory functions, learning, and memory."

  • #ff NOTE that thiamine (also thiamin) is a water-soluble vitamin, not stored in fat, so needed on an ongoing basis to sustain health.

• The problem is not new, not local and not trivial

  • "This investigation demonstrated severe thiamine deficiency in six out of seven studied aquatic species present in the Northern Hemisphere: blue mussel, common eider, European eel, American eel, Atlantic salmon, and sea trout."

  • "By investigating a large geographic area, by extending the focus from lethal to sublethal thiamine deficiency, and by linking biochemical alterations to secondary effects, we were able to demonstrate that the problem of thiamine deficiency is much more widespread and severe than previously reported."

• Here and elsewhere there is mounting evidence that this very widespread vitamin deficiency is likely a long-term contributing factor (along with climate change and habitat loss) to "the Sixth Great Extinction" causing drastic losses of global biodiversity.

  • "From 1970 to 2010/2012, population sizes of both terrestrial and marine vertebrate species dropped by half, and from 1950 to 2010, the global seabird population declined overall by ca 70%. We suggest that thiamine deficiency may be a significant contributor to this fatal process, and that the cause must be searched for at the chemical and biochemical levels."

  • "Many wildlife populations are declining at rates higher than can be explained by known threats to biodiversity. Recently, thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency has emerged as a possible contributing cause."

  • "Despite the fact that biodiversity loss may well be the most important global threat to sustainability, relatively few scientists have attempted to estimate the relative importance of the different factors contributing to this serious problem"

  • "Many wildlife populations are declining at rates higher than can be explained by known threats to biodiversity. Recently, thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency has emerged as a possible contributing cause."

• The point is also made that chronic low thiamine levels are not necessary to cause life-long problems. Episodic deficiencies can lead to life-long problems, and perhaps have already had a cumulative, unrecognized impact for decades on things like eel and salmon migration, sea bird egg production and land animal behavior, disease, mortality and ecosystem disruption.

SO the important questions to ask here, as for any truth claim:

• Are we really seeing a global-level crisis in cellular biochemistry?

• And if YES, so what?

#ff Finding the possible cause to the disappearance of plants and animals at a rate a thousand times faster than “ordinary” extinction seems worthy of global cooperation of immediate urgency, well in excess of some of the other ways our governments are spending vast sums of money.

So what’ll it be? Guns or Vitamins?

Something new-ish here: a page with additional topically-relevant links by way of my OneTab browser extension. Thiamine Deficiency in the Environment ~ Links gathered by F First. Might be that I will continue to add links here and do a more scholarly treatment in future—though I don’t know how that would play in Peoria.