Methylation and B Vitamins

***Before I start this post, I would like to apologize. Apparently my previous email (“The Wealth Effect in Assisted Living”) upset some people. It was not my intention to do so. I was just trying to say when people work really hard for you, be grateful. Regardless of your station in life, people who respond to help with vitriol and aggressiveness generally don’t have good things come their way long-term. It was not meant to be an attack on poor people. I’ve helped many people in my assisted living homes that were very poor. I have lost a lot of money on them. The vast majority of them were wonderful and I loved helping them. It was just a few that were never happy no matter what we did. In many cases they threatened myself and my caregivers either legally or physically. I was just trying to say this is not a good strategy for life in general. Again my apologies for not being more clear on this."***

I am working with A Mind for All Seasons (AMFAS) to help our assisted living residents with Dementia. They help guide me in the therapies and processes we do with our residents to help them heal.

When we have a new resident that will work with AMFAS, we have them go to Labcorp and have a lot of blood drawn. We want to see a lot of their biological markers to determine what we need to do.

From those markers, AMFAS provides us a roadmap of what we need to do to help our resident.

One test they perform is to look at someone’s methylation genetics. Before I started working with AMFAS, I had never heard of methylation. Since then I have learned a lot.

Methylation is a process in your body that transfers a ‘methyl group’ from one substance to another. A methyl group is one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms. When the body transfers these methyl groups, it affects how different molecules act.

The methyl group comes from a universal methyl donor known as SAMe (S-adenosylmethionine). The system that produces SAMe is reliant on one switch being turned on by a critical B-vitamin, 5-MTHF, also known as methylfolate.

Don’t worry. I did really badly in my college chemistry class. I won’t get more technical than that.

If you are putting enough folate in your body through diet or supplementation, the methylation process should work well.

When the methylation transfer process works well, it has a significant positive impact on many biochemical reactions in your body. It regulates processes such as:

• Neurotransmitter production

• Detoxification

• Estrogen metabolism

• Eye health

• Fat metabolism

• Liver Health

• Thyroid hormone regulation

Kind of important processes. Especially for cognitive health.

Methylation helps turn biological switches on and off to turn the gears and make your body work.

Unfortunately a large portion of the human population has a genetic mutation that makes it difficult for their bodies to create enough 5-MTHF.

That’s what AMFAS is testing during our initial blood work with our residents. They test to see if our resident has the genetic mutation.

There also seems to be an argument for just checking your homocysteine levels to see if you’re methylating correctly. Homocysteine is an inflammatory marker associated with both heart disease and cognitive disorders. AMFAS tests our residents for this as well.

If homocysteine is high, treat the same way as if you have the methylation mutation. If it is a normal level, you’re good to go. Both treatments recommend ramping up your intake of folic acid, especially methylfolate that has already been converted.

Adding other B-vitamins such as B6 and B12 help as well.

There are foods that contain folate such as:

• Liver

• Eggs

• Asparagus

• Broccoli

• Green, leafy vegetables

• Rice

Lifestyle factors also help with methylation:

• Regular exercise

• Avoiding alcohol

• Stop smoking

• Avoiding excessive coffee consumption

Basically eat well, and take care of yourself. That should help your body’s methylation processes. But it couldn’t hurt to get tested as well and fix any deficiencies.