Folic Acid, Biochemistry, Food, Disease AND YOU

Office sent me to do another talk on L-Methyl Folate yesterday. I love giving these talks as it ends up being a very practical guide as to how biochemistry permeates our day-to-day activity in very simple ways. It's for clinicians but as Medical Director for The Center, I am scheming with the practice manager on how we might have similar informational talks open for the patients/public.

FOOD - you know you gotta have some.

Folic Acid (along with B12) are important vitamins that occur in our diet (we make a little bit of folic acid in our bodies and get the rest from our food--not B12 which we get solely from our diet).

As most science-fiction shows are apt and ready to remind us we are 'Carbon-Based Lifeforms'. It turns out that we 'stitch' together our carbon units like strings of pearls and like rungs in complex 3-D ladders -- one carbon at a time, most of the time. This '1-carbon' metabolism is fueled by the food we eat--YES! you ARE what you eat!

Unlike other machine-examples made by man, we as AUTOPOIETIC (pronounced auto-po-yetik) machines. We: self-build, self-repair and make other copies of ourselves; with just the building blocks found in our food.

When you put gas in your car, no matter how clean it is and how much 'octane' and additives it has, your car's paint job doesn't get any better, or rust spots don't go away -- YOU ON THE OTHER HAND, will improve your skin's tone and the sheen in your hair and the energy in your stride and the swiftness of your thinking, depending on the 'fuel' you put in your 'gas tank'.

The processes of breakdown and buildup of materials in our bodies are summed up and called metabolism (catabolism for breakdown + anabolism for buildup).

And this brings us to Folic acid and B12. We use several important vitamins as co-factors (mortar and additives if you will) for the buildup and breakdown of our bodies and our components. These two substances in particular, add to what is called the Methyl pool (CH3).

(uh oh feel eyes glazing over already -- but wait...)

Back to stitching pearls and stuff... we use this CH3-thingy as one of several important sources for those carbon-pearls I mentioned above. Folic acid and B12 'grease' these gears and provide some of the 'teeth' in those gears and help metabolism move along.

Learn more about how L-Methyl Folate can help certain neurological disorders like depression here and Alzheimer's Disease here and neurological symptoms of diabetes here.