How do I add thiamine (B1) to diet rapidly, but naturally?

March 19, 2023 7:32 PM

Someone in my family needs to add thiamine (B1) to their diet very quickly or they will be in serious medical danger. They also are a medical skeptic and are unlikely to take vitamins or medicine. What foods can I start cooking or ask for them to cook that contain thiamine? What snacks or fancy gift foods can I casually bring to their house that are high in thiamine?
posted by corb to Health & Fitness (14 answers total)

Nutritional yeast is fortified with B vitamins, but it’s challenging to casually sneak that in unless someone is already open to it. You can make great vegan mac and cheese with it, though.

Maybe you could bake a dessert, like brownies, using fortified protein powder.
posted by Comet Bug at 7:40 PM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

It looks like breakfast cereals are fortified with it including at the high end Rice Krispies so I’d make a platter of rice krispy squares (or invite to breakfast often:)).
posted by warriorqueen at 8:01 PM on March 19, 2023

Pork is high in thiamine. Pork tenderloin is the cut that is the highest in thiamine (about 1 mg per 2.5 oz.).
posted by SageTrail at 8:06 PM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's a fact sheet from the NIH, updated last month. It includes a list of food sources plus proportion of the daily value (recommended intake) in each food (fortified cereal FTW).
posted by lulu68 at 8:37 PM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

The chart from NIH has a list of the usual foods that are high in Thiamin. The top 10 listed are:

* fortified breakfast cereal
* enriched egg noodles
* bone-in pork chop
* cooked trout
* boiled black beans
* enriched plain english muffins
* cooked blue mussels
* cooked bluefin tuna
* whole wheat macaroni
* acorn squash

(GMTA, Lulu!)
posted by kschang at 8:41 PM on March 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

From the NIH page,

The World Health Organization recommends daily oral doses of 10 mg thiamin for a week, followed by 3–5 mg/daily for at least 6 weeks, to treat mild thiamin deficiency [23]. The recommended treatment for severe deficiency consists of 25–30 mg intravenously in infants and 50–100 mg in adults, then 10 mg daily administered intramuscularly for approximately one week, followed by 3–5 mg/day oral thiamin for at least 6 weeks.

I assume that's what you mean by a lot of thiamine quickly.

Morningstar has high thiamine-added products. To the extent that, unlike most individual foods with no B1 added, daily Morningstar products in reasonable quantities would do the trick. Any chance you can convince your relative to enjoy some fake bacon, veggie sausages, or bean burgers?
posted by aniola at 9:10 PM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

For the nutritional yeast, it’s really great on popcorn.
posted by Pretty Good Talker at 9:15 PM on March 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

As for non vitamin-added foods, foods per this listicle, (which might be worth double-checking), you could:

- bake with wheat germ and ground flax seeds and hemp seeds and black beans
- shovel fistfuls of sunflower seeds in if not a picky eater, endless homemade crackers made from sunflower seeds if a picky eater
posted by aniola at 9:25 PM on March 19, 2023

You can put nutritional yeast in homemade salad dressing.
posted by aniola at 9:26 PM on March 19, 2023

I think you could easily hide nutritional yeast in a traditional Mac & cheese or other cheese sauce. Or a Chex mix, etc.
posted by stoneandstar at 9:27 PM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

You could also crumble a B1 tablet into the food I guess.
posted by Kosmob0t at 2:47 AM on March 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

You could also crumble a B1 tablet into the food I guess.

I’d urge caution with this. You know that horrible “stinky vitamin smell” you get when you open a bottle of multivitamins or walk into some natural foods stores? That’s from thiamine. I can’t imagine you’d be able to hide the smell or the taste.

I’d go with the fortified cereals. Maybe look up recipes that incorporate them in muffins or snack mixes to maximize the amount eaten.
posted by corey flood at 7:04 AM on March 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can totally hide nutritional yeast in many savory foods! Here are some of the foods in which I regularly use it:
- soup, especially cheesy soup like cheddar broccoli or potato
- breading (like on chicken / tofu / eggplant parmesan)
- pasta sauce
posted by beyond_pink at 10:29 AM on March 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Registered dietitian here! Great suggestions above re: the NIH list, that's my go-to reference for these kinds of questions. If there's one food that works really well (like fortified breakfast cereal, my personal faves are Cheerios or frosted mini wheats...), don't be afraid to lean on it for a while.

I'm also a big fan of working with the medical team to get at the root cause of the insufficiency/deficiency, to see if there's any way to help prevent this from happening in the future (YMMV of course). See if their medical team/dietitian on their team if possible can also give you an idea of the amount to aim for. That said, it's generally difficult to overdo it with dietary thiamine intake.
posted by OhHaieThere at 5:50 PM on March 20, 2023 [1 favorite]