Health Benefits of Niacin

I have taken niacin before, and it helped me; so I ordered another bottle from Amazon to see if it will help this time. The arthritis has stiffened up in my knees and back this winter, probably from eating more of the inflammatory foods, and less of the anti-inflammatory ones. My heart does not seem to be doing as good as it was last fall either, aklthough the a-fib is still gone (Praise the Lord !)
Anyway, the niacin actually opens up your blood vessels so that your body (and brain) get more oxygen, and can carry toxins out of the body.
It lowers cholesterol, helps lower blood pressure, lessens arthritis pain, and is supposed to be good for heart disease.
It also helps the skin, and if you are sun-senstive, it is often a lack of niacin, according to the article i was reading.
Even though I just started on it yesterday, I already feel like my circulation to my feet is better, and my knees not as stiffened up. For the first time in months, my feet don't hurt this morning !

http://www.drdavidwilliams.com/niacin-benefits

 

I think that i am feeling the difference from the niacin already ! My feet are SO much better. Bobby and I went to the store for groceries today, and my knees bent to get in and out of the car, plus I was walking around the store and my feet do NOT hurt ! For the last couple of years, they have felt like they were burned on the bottom, and the skin feels like it was too tight to move easily.
Even when they weren't badly swollen, they have felt like this, and it was sometimes hard to walk anywhere, and even to fall asleep at night.
I started out with 100mg of niacin morning and night. The first day, I had the niacin flush; so I know it was flushing out toxins. Today, I took two this morning, and will take 2 more this afternoon, and if they seem to do well, then 2 more at bedtime.
Next bottle that I buy, I should be able to get the 250mg, and then finally, the 500mg. That is what we should take, according to what i am reading; but I know from experience that niacin is something that you start low and then sneak up the dose. If you start out with 500mg, you are apt to be squirming, itching and burning for an hour while it flushes out the toxins. (not fun at all ! ! )
The article that I posted said up to 1500mg per day was a good theraputic dose.

 

It apprears that niacin is also excellent for depression. While I was reading more about the health benefits of niacin, I stumbled upon this article written about using niacin for depression.
This woman was not just a little depressed; she was seriously BAD depressed ! ! The doctors had tried her on a whole slew of the (expensive?) anti-depressant drugs, all to no avail.
Besides depression she was also an alcoholic and a drug addict. (Alcohol and smoking both will deplete your niacin that you do happen to get in your diet.)
She had gotten to the point where she was suicidal,and her marriage was falling apart. She said that she had watched a documentary called "Food Matters", and the doctor who made the documentary recommended niacin for depression; so she decided to try it.
According to her story, around three days later, she was feeling like a whole new person, and the depression was gone, and has stayed gone.
I thought that this was a very interesting article, and am going to next watch the documentary, and also wanted to share this with everyone here.

http://starkravingflab.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-personal-experience-with-niacin-and.html

 

One of the things that niacin is supposed to do is help with your cholesterol levels, and also with blood pressure, since it opens up the veins and capillaries and cleans out the accumulated toxins, so the blood can actually get through the tiniest capillaries. (this toxin-cleaning procedure is what causes the "niacin flush" and is why you need to use only the kind that says it may cause flushing, and NOT the flush-free or time-release kind)
When I went to the doctor for the results of my lab tests; the doctor told me that my cholesterol was great, and my blood pressure was something like 116/72 or somewhere close to that. I believe that part of that has got to be the niacin cleaning out the veins and arteries.

Now, I am also taking the kelp for more iodine and minerals so I can get my thyroid back on track. Often, the main source that people have for iodine is to use iodized salt, and then we are told that we should not use salt, especially as we get older. So it is no wonder that a large part of our whole nation is deficient in iodine. Giving a synthetic hormone for hypothyroidism might help the situation; but it does nothing to rectify the underlying issue.
When an illness is something we can correct with a diet change, then it makes no sense to me to just keep treating the illness rather than doing what is needed to cure the cause of the problem.

 

I just ordered some niacin powder from Amazon. I have kind of let it go by the wayside for some time now, but when they did the chemical stress test and the heart catheter to see if I might have gotten any clogging in my arteries since the last one (which was around 2013), it showed no clogging , which is great; but it did show that the arteries around the main arteries had shrunken some.
My heart doctor said that this might be at least part of the reason I get short of breath faster, even when the heart is working right. He gave me a prescription to try and see if that helps to open those arteries, but when he told me about that issue, it reminded me of niacin, which opens blood vessels.
I had some niacin tablets which were 100 mg, and have been taking those twice a day, but wanted to build up to a higher therapeutic dose of niacin, and not just the RDA amount necessary to prevent pellagra.
(Just as an aside, one of the symptoms of pellagra is dementia, confusion, and memory problems ; and doctors say that sometimes what is determined to be Alzheimer’s can actually be a severe niacin shortage.)

My feet had been getting that neuropathy again, where they prickle and burn and hurt to walk; and the niacin also helped that before, and for the last few days, I have not had any problems with that either.
I know that @Lon Tanner , and several others here have mentioned having the peripheral neuropathy, so possibly niacin would help others here, too ?

This morning, I added some of the niacin powder to my green smoothie (along with extra vitamin C powder), And I feel just a tiny bit of flush. I only added part of the scoop (1000 mg), so I probably had about 250 mg. When you take it with some food, the flushing does not hit you all at once like it does if you take it on an empty stomach.

 

Another important B-Complex vitamin is thiamine. We have probably all heard of beriberi, but dismissed it as one of those old time diseases that no longer exist.
Well, it turns out that (just like iodine and some of the other important nutrients) most people are deficient in thiamine. I have been reading about the importance of getting enough thiamine, and how it can help not only our heart, but also the digestive system.

I have been taking a B-Complex vitamin, as well as the niacin and biotin; but I could see that thiamine was not included in any of those; so I ordered a bottle from amazon.
Then I found that adding nutritional yeast along with the thiamine is also important; so I ordered a bottle of the yeast flakes, too. They are supposed to give you energy, and some people said they could not sleep well if they took it at night, so i am taking mine in the morning with some V-8 juice.

If you think that you are low on energy, have heart or digestive issues, here is a short video that will give you an introduction into the importance of thiamine.