Vitamin B5 is often called the good mood vitamin. We think: how apt! Discover here exactly what vitamin B5 does – it has a lot to do with stress management, thought processes and energy supply.
B5 and our brain
Who hasn’t experienced it? A long meeting, after which your head is spinning... and not only because of the stuffy, airless atmosphere in the room. It may actually be due to a lack of vitamin B5. Time to take a closer look. Vitamin B5, also known as pantothenic acid, is another vitamin from the B complex. B5 is essential, which means you have to take in with your food. It’s best to do this daily, because the body is not able to store it and eliminates a high amount via the urine.
Vitamin B5 is especially important for your brain. Since the 1990s, it has been proven to play a part in the synthesis, the connecting of the neurotransmitters in the brain. Your brain needs these neurotransmitters to send signals between nerve cells. Our memory performance and other functions are dependent on vitamin B5. If there is too little of it, not only does it detract from our thought processes, but we may also suffer from headaches.
Stress-busting B5
When we’re stressed, the body needs to generate more energy. Whether fight or flight - the body arms itself. For this purpose, it ramps up fat and sugar metabolism. At the same time, nerve metabolism is also accelerated – in short, everything is activated to enable us to react quickly and run away in an emergency. Vitamin B5 is involved in the necessary reactions. It is synthesized by the mitochondria in our cells into coenzyme A, which plays an important role in a series of metabolic processes. The more of it available, the faster these processes can proceed – and in the case of stress, the hallmark of coenzyme A is “more brings more”. Since it is derived from vitamin B5, a high level of B5 can help the body with stress-busting.
Full speed ahead! Power through B5
Vitamin B5 helps to reduce fatigue. It plays a decisive role in metabolism, for example, in converting fat and sugar into energy. These two nutrients are the main components of the food we eat and supply our cells with energy. B5 helps to transport nutrients to the cells, more precisely into the mitochondria, where they are used to produce energy. If you imagine the body as a commercial enterprise, vitamin B5 is the logistics company that transports fats to the mitochondria, the power stations of the cells. Hardly surprising, then, that B5 plays a major role in reducing fatigue and tiredness.
