Hi, first of all Happy NY to you all. As I've written already, I'm struggling with digestive issues (e.g. once I got bad stomach pain after injection) whilst so many other symptoms have spectacularly improved after 6 months of SI once/week. I know people with PA have low stomach acid, which causes the B12d. There is no way I can stop the shots but now try to do every 10/11 days. I never got my hopes up about improved digestion with B12shots, but I am worried when stomach/digestion gets worse as the problems originate from there..? One person on another forum mention that if you overdo it with the B12 shots this can "feed bad bacteria in the gut". I am at a loss here as there so little scientifically known about digestive issues/malabsorption (which I was diagnosed with but still figuring out the root cause -I'm already gluten free and antihistamines give me some relief).
Thanks as always for your input!
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Heidiv
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I’ve never heard of B12 feeding bad bacteria in the gut. However, low stomach acid can cause partly undigested proteins to pass into the gut which could cause a rise in bad bacteria.
My digestive issues never go away but were significantly improved by taking a good quality probiotic. I also now take betaine HCL with meals containing protein (others take lime juice) and this helps.
I’v never heard that b12 feed gut bacteria. But people with b12 deficiencies often have gut issues so may be an unresolved issue. I take a probiotic and it helps
Have you tried going dairy free as well as gluten free. The casein protein in milk whey is similar to gluten.
Also try adding acid foods to every meal to support digestion.
I get a soft poo about 6 hours after B12 injection. The severity of this symptom (i.e. the softer and larger the poo) I use as an indication of how deficient I was before the injection.
This symptom has pretty much stopped with injections on Mondays and Thursdays. I split my weekly cyano in half.
These “after injection” symptoms are very counterintuitive but use a logbook and assess a severity score. The worse they are means the more deficient your body had become before the injection and you may need more frequent injections.
When the body get depleted of B12, a backlog of metabolism builds up. When the body gets B12, metabolism in every cell kicks into high gear and floods the blood stream with metabolic byproducts mainly CO2 and water. The kidneys get rid of most of the excess water but the gut doesn’t seem to get rid of as much water in the stool so everything is softer. I’ve had blowouts in the early days. Now, it’s just a normal but large poo.
I add mild salsa to everything to support digestion.
One of the sessions at this years PAS conference was on how B12 affects the microbiome in the gut ... some research that is going on trying to identify why some people need higher levels of B12 post injections. I have to confess that I didn't really understand what the link was between what was going on in the gut and needing more frequent injections because I would have though that the gut should be irrelevant at that point.
You will need to be a member of the PAS (different from being signed up to this forum) to access the sessions
the session was called Our microbiome and its link with treatment for Pernicious Anaemia
the research is following up on a correlation between people who need higher levels of B12 post injections and indicators of bacterial gut content (in the large intestine rather than the small intestine which is where B12 absorption from food really occurs).
The session covered the fact that there are 4 analogues of B12 that can be used but there are a much larger number of different variants on the cobalamin molecule. Some of which are produced and others are consumed by bacteria in the gut ... and levels of cobalamin in the gut/B12 in the gut affect the ratios of these bacteria.
Its very early days of research in this area - think there has been more on the effect of iron on the relative numbers of different types of bacteria in the gut.
I also think this sounds dubious. As an ex microbiologist, whenever I read research papers about the microbiome that describe bacteria as “good” or “bad” I pretty much write them off as being written by someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
It’s not as black and white as that most of the time especially when you are talking about populations that can be composed of literally thousands of different strains that could all interact with each other with synergies as yet unknown.
Most of the research on gut biome to date doesn’t get down to the species level, let alone the strain due to the methodology used. In fact 90% of the studies I have read only describe family or genus level at best.
To give you an illustration, E. coli which is found in the gut has 200 different strains that we have identified so far...only a very small proportion of these can cause harm. However because we hear of food poisoning events in the news...it’s classed by some as a “bad’ bacteria at the species level?
It’s an exciting and interesting area of research but at the moment we don’t even know what healthy looks like (or how many versions of healthy there are which could be 100’s) so how some researchers can claim that we do is beyond me.
There is however a lot of bogus stuff on the internet around gut health...gluten intolerance, leaky gut, bad bacteria, etc. Most of this has no solid evidence base, but rather is more of a public opinion thing.
Probiotics for instance have had all their healthy gut claims prohibited on packaging by EU legislation since 2011 due to lack of evidence (since we don’t know what a healthy gut looks like microbiologically). That doesn’t stop people claiming on the unregulated internet that they do great things.
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