Biotin’s Health Benefits: Way Beyond Hair and Nails

Read Time: 4 Minutes

Most people who take biotin take it for their hair and nails.

Yet biotin does much more than this:

• Biotin deficiency causes moodiness, cloudy thinking, and fatigue in some people; in others, it causes hair loss, difficulty concentrating, and stomach problems; in yet others it causes hand tremors, muscle pain, and trouble breathing; and in some people it even makes them need to wear glasses. All of these are reversible with biotin supplementation. Yes, I literally mean one person had to wear glasses when biotin deficient and was able to get rid of them when he went back on biotin.

• Biotin deficiency can also cause candida-infected red, itchy, scaly skin, and “unusual body odor.”

• Finally, biotin deficiency can massively increase serum cholesterol.

• Biotin has reversed the loss of taste that occurred in one case due to lipoic acid supplementation (which interferes with biotin transport) and in another case as a side effect of surgery.

• Biotin has allowed type 1 diabetics to go off insulin and maintain nearly normal blood sugar, and dramatically improved neuromuscular problems in type 1 diabetics.

• Half of mothers become spontaneously biotin-deficient during pregnancy, and correcting this likely prevents birth defects.

On the other hand, massive biotin doses can make human multiple sclerosis patients more likely to relapse, shown at least twice, and they cause infertility in rats and birth defects in rabbits. Humans taking huge biotin doses for genetic defects do fine with pregnancy, whether on 10-20 milligrams or 100 milligrams, but they are special cases who need the high doses.

Smoking, the anti-convulsant valproate, and egg whites that are not thoroughly cooked by boiling for 4-8 minutes can all induce biotin deficiency.

There is no RDA for biotin. Officials have instead set an “adequate intake” by looking at the average intake among American infants and adjusting it upward by bodyweight for adults. This is set at 30 micrograms per day.

This replaced an older recommendation of 300 micrograms per day, which was based on 150-300 micrograms per day being needed to correct severe deficiency.

The biotin requirement increases as a function of protein intake. By my calculations, the following rule of thumb applies:

• Get at least 150 micrograms of biotin per day, which will allow an intake of non-collagen protein up to 100 grams.

• For each additional 50 grams of non-collagen protein, get an additional 35 micrograms of biotin.

• This puts most people in the range of 150-300 micrograms of biotin.

• To do this with food, make the base of your diet rich in grass-fed animal products, a diversity of fermented foods, and a large volume of fresh produce. Then, add one egg yolk equivalent for every 25 grams non-collagen protein in your diet.

• Each egg yolk equivalent can be any of the following: one raw or cooked egg yolk with the white thrown in the trash; one whole egg boiled for at least four minutes; 1.5 fried eggs; 3.5 poached eggs; 8 grams of natto; 9 grams of chicken liver; or 36 grams of beef liver.

• Pregnant and lactating women should multiply these values by 1.7. Children should adjust downward based on protein intake.

Doses used for diabetes are between 5 and 16 milligrams per day and those used for reversing loss of taste are 10-20 milligrams per day.

It is not possible to know if such high doses were necessary in these studies. A loading dose of 10 milligrams per day can fix a deficiency much faster than a maintenance dose of 150-300 micrograms per day, so such high doses may help when used temporarily but may not be the best for most people in the long term.

Nevertheless, I estimate that one in thirty people need biotin at multi-milligram doses.

The easiest way for you to tell if you are one of them is to start with a regular dose for a few weeks, and move slowly upward to a multi-milligram dose only if needed. If you benefit from the multi-milligram dose, you can occasionally try cutting back on it, and if you start to lose the benefits, keep the high dose.

Doses of biotin higher than one milligram should be taken several hours away from food and away from supplements of vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid or pantethine) and lipoic acid, so as to not interfere with the absorption of these nutrients.

Biotin can overburden the mitochondrial respiratory chain for those who have impairments in it, leading to a wide variety of potential problems, especially cognitive and neuromuscular problems. The easiest way to tell if biotin is doing this is to test waking morning lactate using a NovaBiomedical Lactate Plus. If biotin causes any rise in lactate that lasts more than a few days, especially over 1.0 mmol/L, and definitely over 1.5 mmol/L, this is a sign the dose is too high and might lead to adverse effects. I explained this in more detail here.

Once again, here’s the biotin rule of thumb that applies to most people:

Make the base of your diet rich in grass-fed animal products, a diversity of fermented foods, and a large volume of fresh produce. Then, add one egg yolk equivalent for every 25 grams non-collagen protein in your diet.

Low doses of biotin can be obtained from Life Extension 600 micrograms, which is a capsule that can be easily emptied into smaller doses, or Solgar 300 micrograms. Higher doses can be obtained from Jarrow 5 milligrams, which is a cost-effective option, or Pure Encapsulations 8 milligrams, which is a brand that seems anecdotally to have the least likelihood of adverse response to low-level contaminants.

All my short-and-sweet nutrient recommendations are in the Cliff Notes, free to Masterpass members here.

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