Biotin and diabetes: will vitamin B7 help regulate blood glucose levels?
Patients suffering from diabetes need to have adequate control of their blood sugar level to avoid long-term irreversible health consequences. One way to help regulate blood sugar is to take biotin to help reduce sugar, but does it help?
In the modern world, there is a growing tendency to use supplements and other holistic treatments instead of resorting to pharmacies and the use of synthetic medications. Biotin is one of these supplements that has been touted as a supplement that has numerous potential effects on our body. One of the most obvious connections is the use of biotin for hair growth when you are looking for a treatment for hair loss. Another claim that has been related to biotin is its potential use as a sugar-reducing agent. Here, we will explore whether there really is a connection between biotin and diabetes.
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The connection between biotin and diabetes
Biotone, or vitamin B7, is an essential factor in a series of different reactions in the body. When considering what some of these reactions are, it makes sense that there is some kind of connection between biotin and diabetes. Biotin is an important cofactor in metabolic reactions that help process sugar and digest it, so if you take larger amounts of biotin, there must be at least a small decrease in your sugar levels. Let's end the speculation once and for all and put more science behind this claim.
In one investigation, the effect of biotin was observed in type 2 diabetic rats. In this study, 90 rats with diabetes were divided into 5 separate groups to determine the ideal concentration that biotin requires to have an effect on blood sugar levels. After a 2-month investigation, it was determined that the rats that were part of the high biotin study produced a statistically significant decrease in sugar levels after meals compared to the controls.
The mechanism behind why this happens is because biotin stimulates the expression of genes that degrade sugar. In simple terms, this means that the higher the biotin levels, the more enzymes responsible for digesting the sugar will be activated. Some of the most prominent enzymes that are created by biotin would be insulin, insulin receptors and glucokinase receptors. Biotin also stops the expression of genes in the liver responsible for creating higher levels of sugar. Studies also show that patients suffering from biotin deficiencies are also more likely to have problems processing sugar in a similar way to how patients with diabetes will experience it. Because of these mechanisms, it is believed that patients should benefit from taking biotin to help control hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia.
Is this really a potential therapy?
our investigation of biotin
Animal theories and studies are certainly promising, but we have seen this before in our investigation of biotin, where the effects of biotin are exaggerated when it comes to clinical effectiveness. Biotin for hair growth was only effective as a treatment for hair loss in patients who had already suffered a biotin deficiency. The same could be said for the treatment of brittle nails and the treatment of acne with biotin.
One unfortunate thing is that there is not much research on the effects of biotin in humans suffering from diabetes. In a recent study in patients in Iran suffering from type 1 diabetes, the effects of biotin on patients in the preclinical trial stage were analyzed. In this, 70 patients were divided into two groups and the blood sugar levels were controlled for a period of 3 months. In the study, participants in the biotin group improved their blood sugar levels from 9.84 to 8.88 after 3 months compared to those in the control group that went from 9.39 to 10.11 at the time of the last measurements. This showed that there was a statistically significant difference between those taking biotin compared to those who did not.
However, there are several problems with this investigation that can make it difficult to obtain precise conclusions. First, adequate glucose control should be close to 6.5 instead of such high numbers, so it is problematic that even after receiving medical guidance during the experiment, patients still have poor glycemic control. This suggests that the patients were not taking their medications properly. Another thing that is disturbing is that there was a big difference in the baseline of the patients who started the research. Patients must have values close to each other before beginning an intervention to show more promising conclusions. Therefore, even if the trends are impressive and show that biotin does seem to make a difference, the magnitude of the benefits could be much less dramatic if you did this research once again and may not even be significant.
All in all, there is some evidence that biotin has some benefit when it comes to regulating sugar levels. We have shown that there is a certain connection between biotin and diabetes, but until more clinical clues are designed more appropriately, it is impossible to say that biotin will reduce blood sugar levels without further investigation. There have been no studies on the benefits of biotin and type 2 diabetes, a disease much more common in the modern world, which leads me to believe that science has not yet discovered a statistically significant effect.