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Blog post about VitA 'diet' failure
I'm curious if anyone has seen this blog below? I'd love honest feedback. I'm less than a month into this. When I had my serum A measured it was way high and I don't think it's right, so for the time being I'm on the detox diet. But is eating absolutely no A reasonable long-term? I know Grant does it. I've not had health issues as extreme as his were and I wonder if some have gone back to allowing a certain amount in the diet in order to have a well rounded diet.
Thanks.
Why We Stopped the Vitamin A Detox Diet…and Why Healing Diets Fail
I think she was one of those people who adopted the diet early with Dr Smith (end of 2018) & was 100% into it...& then 100% out of it. The original protocol she was following was nowhere near as good as the current one (Dr Smith work) & the understanding of what can go wrong not nearly as good then.
I was an early adopter but kept a very open mind & didn’t rush in 100%. I, however, have closely followed the science & am more & more convinced about the validity of this diet. This is a long way of saying that I personally wouldn’t take too much notice of this person. The diet can run into trouble due to detox going too quickly, nutrient deficiencies developing, elimination not running smoothly etc etc but none of these factors mean that reducing vA in the body is a bad idea.
Yeah, that was my sense reading it. Dr. Smith has people do blood and hair testing to find out where their deficiencies may be, that's what I did with him which I think is smart.
Hi @chris-4
Thanks for sharing that blog post. It’s strange that I’ve not seen it before.
I think Mary’s experience is very similar to what many other people are seeing.
It is important to acknowledge and share these results. They are just as important as are any success stories.
RE: But is eating absolutely no A reasonable long-term?
Eating absolutely no vA is incredibly difficult. And I don’t think people need to go to absolutely no vA. It’s just too restrictive. I’m only continuing to attempt it in order to prove a scientific point.
I don’t know what the best long-term approach is. Just going low on vA seems reasonable if you have a healthy liver.
Using diet alone is also proving to be incredibly slow and difficult for many people to safely draw down their stored vA levels.
Grant
I think that ensuring the channels of elimination are working well before starting the low vA diet is essential. Also binders are key to safely removing toxicity imo. Just doing low vA may work for some (as it did for Grant) but I personally ran into trouble with this (& I was never very low vA just lower vA). Looking back my digestion was slow, I wasn’t drinking enough, I wasn’t moving enough, I wasn’t breathing correctly etc etc. Getting the elimination basics right should ensure a smoother journey during the detox. No point encouraging vA out of storage if you can’t get it out of the body efficiently. This just leads to accumulation in the body & a worsening of symptoms (personal experience).
I think it’s a shame that Mary left the project at a time when understanding of the ‘detox setback cycle’ was developing. I’m sure she’s not feeding her family too much orange food as I know she saw remarkable improvements at the beginning of the diet. I’m sure she could have solved her setback if she’d stuck around but people have to do what they consider best for their families & doing something that is out of step with their society is not easy.
I saw that article when i was first figuring out if i wanted to try this approach to health recovery. I had fortunately already learned in Dr. Garrett Smith’s (paid) forum (the outer circle) that the first year was a bit rocky and new recommendations had been discovered by Dr. Smith that help. The people who participate and had been involved from the beginning helped to explain this.
i also see this woman as a depleted mother. I was also like that after having 2 pregnancies and breastfeeding. I have done many other health improvements that worked for me before coming to this. I am afraid that severely depleted people who are also sometimes very zealous (or “OCD” to use the term loosely), may need more support than just the prescribed diet and simple minerals. We are all kind of rogue cowboys here, having to try to be experts in something we are not trained to be— figuring out what our individual bodies need without years of clinical experience. Some health problems are worse than others. Some people, i believe, need more guidance than just the basic “low A diet”. Some people may need other health supports until they have detoxed “enough” A. Until enough A is out, so goes the working theory, the tissues may not be able to heal. Detoxing process is likely not a straight line: there are ups and downs—“dumping “ occurs and this is something to be dealt with and minimized.
I am not recommending or pushing this with friends and family. Because its not(yet?) for those who aren’t a bit intrepid... willing to spend time learning, staying informed, able to stay the course, willing to adopt consistency of habits. Until we who are running our own experiments have gotten a bit further with this, and until there is a printed book that tells people how to do this safely, I would hesitate to recommend this to friends and family (beyond the basics of stopping dairy and pork and A supplements). Dr. Smith’s first recommendation is to eat only organic food. If someone cannot manage that, how could we expect them to manage the project of running the detox and the other recommendations for 2 years?
@rachel-2 I totally agree. I think it’s still work in progress & not for everyone at the moment. I think that some people need to make changes gently & diving in 110% is not a good idea. VA detox can cause nutrient depletion in some & this needs to be thought about.
I think my realisation about elimination channels has been a huge step forward for me personally (from Dr Smith but also other research). I’ve been reading/listening to all sorts of people talking about detox & drainage/elimination. Karen Hurd’s work has been hugely interesting for me. For others this may not be so important as they have good processes in place already, however, I think it is crucial to think about this before starting any detox. If your drainage/elimination is poor then fix it first - I think it will save suffering.
I’ve said to family & friends that I’m doing this detox & when/if I’m completely recovered I shall write it up. Then I can send to anyone who is interested. I do suggest people look into increasing soluble fibre & avoiding too many sweet potatoes etc & stopping CLO, particularly if they are prediabetic or showing other signs of vA toxicity - which many of my friends do. I think they tend to ignore me anyway 🤣 One friend has admitted she’d been eating loads of orange veg instead of other carbs to help reverse her prediabetes - but she’s now been diagnosed with full diabetes & wonders if I’m right. Anyway, I agree that the vA detox has individual factors that need consideration & not everyone finds it an easy path.
Hi @chris-4,
I'm approaching 2 years eating low vA, I've read a lot of relevant studies in that time. I've also normalized liver enzymes and cholesterol in that time, healed seb derm and have increased my overall wellbeing.
Vitamin A is indeed a vitamin, it was first utilized by bacteria in order to convert light into energy, it then became used in vision and lastly in higher forms of life retinoic acid became used as a hormone. It's the retinoic acid hormonal aspect that make excess vitamin A really toxic.
If you have high serum vA you'll feel worse short term following a low vA diet but only improve your health long term. You probably won't get much help from blood or hair testing while depleting vA, it's likely you will still have high serum vA after a couple of years on a low vA diet, testing serum levels has been a waste of time and money for me. I'm critical about Garrett Smith, a lot of what he says is plain wrong.
It's important to follow a balanced diet and not make a fetish of it while depleting vA, depleting vA is a long term process. The article you posted mentioned nutritional deficiencies which is a valid point and which is guaranteed on any restrictive diet including the diet many here unwisely follow. Some people may have carotenoid sensitivities but aside from that the benefit of a low vA diet is to normalize retinol stores in the liver. There is plenty of scientific evidence to show that low vA stores are associated with poorer health outcomes so there is no benefit from making oneself deficient. Having said that it is incredibly difficult for an adult that has high liver retinol stores to induce deficiency, many cases of VAD in third world countries are not likely caused by actual lack of vA, they have more to do with zinc and other nutrient deficiencies interfering with vA utilization in the body.
The author of the article also discusses children on a low vA diet. It's a bad idea to have children on a restrictive low vA diet.
There is a lot of dogmatism in the low vA community and my posts often get a frosty response here but I'm just telling it as I understand it.
Garret's diet has plenty of carotenoids and it's probably a waste of time unless you can detox them faster than you consume them, which I think a lot of people can't do.
@chris-4 I would say in general for people you need to go on low A diet like under 500iu a day for 6 months to 2 years(depending on the level of saturation. If you followed some Weston Price, Paleo diet eating high retinol foods for years or even decades + was taking vit A supplements etc.. it will take for sure at least 2 years to lower vit A in your liver enough) and after that just keep in mind that it is probably not a good idea to regularly drink carrot juice, eat liver, eat 10 whole eggs a day or take vit A supplements etc.. There is simply plenty in regular healthy diet..