Supplement details
Product Blend: 9 parts Vitamin B1 (Benfotiamine)
1 part Enhanced Absorption Complex (Uptake Blend)
Enhanced Absorption Complex (Uptake Blend):
Black Pepper Extract (10% Piperine)
Ginger Extract (5% Gingerols)
Cumin Extract (10:1)
Scientific Name: Benfotiamine (fat-soluble thiamine derivative)
Other Known Names: Milgamma, Benfogamma, Benforce, and Benneurothiamine, Thiamine analogue, Benfotiamine B1
What is it? Vitamin B1 – benfotiamine
Thiamine, vitamin B1, is a water-soluble vitamin, and being water-soluble is the whole reason benfotiamine exists. In the 1950s Japanese chemists worked out how to hang a benzoyl group and a phosphate on the thiamine molecule so it dissolves in fat instead of water; once inside the body the extra bits come off and you're left with ordinary thiamine.
So it's not a different vitamin, it's the same one delivered by a different route — a lab-made derivative of the natural molecule, and it turns back into the natural molecule once it's in. That's what "fat-soluble form of B1" means and it's the honest way to describe it.
Why the name. Thiamine is thio- for the sulphur atom in it, plus -amine, one of the few B vitamins that actually is an amine, which is what let Funk coin "vitamine" in the first place. Benfotiamine is just chemists' shorthand for the full name, S-benzoylthiamine O-monophosphate. B1 because it was the first of the B group to be separated.
How long people have used it. As food, forever, yeast, wholegrain, pork, pulses. As an idea, since the 1880s, and the story runs through three navies and a chicken coop. Kanehiro Takaki, a surgeon in the Japanese navy who'd trained at St Thomas's in London,
noticed in 1882-84 that sailors fed polished white rice fared far worse on long voyages than those given barley, meat and vegetables, and changed the fleet's rations on the strength of it - a decade before anyone knew why.
Christiaan Eijkman in Java in 1897 got the same result in chickens: white rice, ill; brown rice or rice bran, fine. His colleague Gerrit Grijns worked out in 1901 that it wasn't a poison in the white rice but something missing from it, the first clear statement of the deficiency idea, and the reason Eijkman shared the 1929 Nobel.
Casimir Funk pulled a crude extract from rice bran in 1912 and coined "vitamine". Jansen and Donath in Batavia got pure crystals in 1926. And Robert Williams, an American chemist born to missionaries in India, who did this in his spare time while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories.
He nailed the structure in 1934 and published a full synthesis in 1936, then put his patent royalties into a fund that paid to fortify rice and flour across Asia and the Americas. His brother Roger found B5. Some families.
Benfotiamine itself is Japanese and dates from the 1950s. Motonori Fujiwara at Kyoto found in 1951-54 that cooking thiamine with garlic produced a fat-soluble compound, allithiamine, which set chemists at Sankyo in Tokyo looking for a synthetic version that didn't smell of garlic;
benfotiamine was the result and was on sale in Japan by the early 1960s. Germany took it up in the 1990s and it's been widely sold there since.
Who used it. In Britain: everyone who's eaten white bread since 1940. In Japan and Germany, benfotiamine has been used for 60 years and 30 years, respectively.
Which part is used / Source: Lab-made compound
Bio-identical derivative of naturally occurring vitamin B1
Strength / Specifications: 98%, Benfotiamine form
What exactly do we get? Each daily dose (1 capsule) provides 283 mg Vitamin B1 (as Benfotiamine) plus 32 mg Enhanced Absorption Complex, supplied in vegetarian HPMC capsules.
