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Can Choline accelerate Vit A Detoxification?
What made you decide to test Phosphatidylcholine as opposed to lecithin? Curious to hear your report!
@christian My second attempt at eating eggs was this past weekend, had two eggs for lunch. That night with my new girlfriend I had what I would call extreme libido issues, that we have not experienced since getting intimate over the past few months. To be honest I am not sure what the cause was, but the big dietary shift/change would be the eggs. So was it the VA or the detox caused... not sure.
I have mentioned that I had quite enormous VA intakes in the past, so I like you am still cautious of adding in a retinol source. So will stick with testing a 420mg PC supp every other day, and continue to follow member updates on eggs.
Might have the occasional single egg once in a while now, but not on date nights!!
The double-edged sword of reductionism!
Lecithin contains other phospholipids, and eggs contain even more compounds (including Vitamin A), so if choline is really the key ingredient in eggs that is helping people, and if I could use more of it, I should see some kind of effect from Phosphatidylcholine on my all-meat diet.
A good experiment would be to maintain an identical daily diet for a while, and try supplementing just Phosphatidylcholine for a week or two, then switching to lecithin while maintaining the same overall amount of Phosphatidylcholine, and then switching to eggs while maintaining the same overall amount of Phosphatidylcholine. That would help you decipher whether PC is causing the effects, or PC and other phospholipids (lecithin), or something about the eggs that's not just in lecithin (like the potential for ingesting Vitamin A to slow the elimination of stored Vitamin A and therefore lead to temporary symptom reduction).
I'm testing the lecithin theory myself, so far so good. I'm not eating any eggs, I eat occasional smoked salmon and that would be my major source of A. When I ate eggs I found at some point the benefits plateau, so I was adding butter but that was getting my vision worse and worse so this is why I'm trying lecithin alone.
I'm now having sometimes two pills and some days just one, depends on how much meat I manage to eat, my muscle strength is improving. Everyone is different, hormones seem to play big a role on the endogenous production of choline (estrogen), I can imagine a woman with lower estrogen levels might need more.
Also I don't have access to see the full text of this article but it would be great if someone could. We aren't rats though 🙂
"The highest level of free choline in rat livers was obtained from rats with a normal level of vit. A storage in their livers. Rat livers which contained an excessive amount or a deficient amount of vit. A had low concentrations of free choline."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3181/00379727-95-23295?journalCode=ebma
@jessica2
Haha, no, it would not surprise me that there is nothing indicating that choline stores vA in the liver, I was never on board with that idea. I also don't have any reason to suspect that choline from food would cause harm, and I don't have any reason to doubt its benefits. You all seem to be doing a fine job of combing the literature, I don't think I would add any more.
I am simply reminding people not to get too caught up in the research on individual nutrients due to the challenges of creating research experiments that simultaneously control for confounding variables while still maintaining applicability to reality (those two things are at odds with one another because control leads to simplicity, which is not an accurate representation of the complex biological world in which we live).
My graduate degree was in wildlife ecology, which is plagued by lack of control over variables because the research usually takes place in the field under natural (unpredictable and variable) conditions. Therefore, the results are always messy, and interpreting them correctly is challenging. However, I'm come to think that the lack of messiness in highly controlled experiments often only creates the illusion of getting more easily interpreted results, because even if you have high confidence regarding causality, you have very low confidence when extrapolating to real world (complex) conditions. I think it is much more useful to collect a shitload of data in a natural setting and run heavy statistical modeling to piece apart the contributions of the many variables than it is to work with highly controlled (and highly unrealistic) reductionist approaches. Unfortunately, reductionism is much easier to undertake than massive data collection efforts and number crunching.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on November 15, 2022, 2:15 pmThe double-edged sword of reductionism!
Lecithin contains other phospholipids, and eggs contain even more compounds (including Vitamin A), so if choline is really the key ingredient in eggs that is helping people, and if I could use more of it, I should see some kind of effect from Phosphatidylcholine on my all-meat diet.
A good experiment would be to maintain an identical daily diet for a while, and try supplementing just Phosphatidylcholine for a week or two, then switching to lecithin while maintaining the same overall amount of Phosphatidylcholine, and then switching to eggs while maintaining the same overall amount of Phosphatidylcholine. That would help you decipher whether PC is causing the effects, or PC and other phospholipids (lecithin), or something about the eggs that's not just in lecithin (like the potential for ingesting Vitamin A to slow the elimination of stored Vitamin A and therefore lead to temporary symptom reduction).
My experience has been a little weird so far: Today is my third day eating eggs for lunch. I slept through the night from yesterday to this morning which is really an improvement for me, but throughout the day I've felt a little off: tense, slightly aggressive, but on the positive more in my head. I also feel colder than usual. Maybe it's a little early to judge. I've ordered some lecithin, and as soon as it arrives, I'll test it. With Phosphatidylcholine it seems hard to get it in bulk, and all the supplements on iHerb have additional excipients which I try to avoid. Have you found some Phosphatidylcholine which hasn't any nasty stuff in it?
@jessica2
When I'm suggesting that the Vitamin A in eggs or any other source might temporarily make someone feel better, I am only talking about people who already have excessive amounts of Vitamin A stored outside of the liver in peripheral tissues. If someone is not releasing stored Vitamin A from peripheral tissues, then it seems like they do not experience symptoms of Vitamin A toxicity unless they have an acute form of toxicity from insanely high consumption of it in an isolated incident or very short time-frame (e.g. an Inuit person eating a polar bear liver, or someone taking very high supplemental doses).
If someone has acute toxicity from a massive dose, then obviously consuming more Vitamin A is not going to make them feel better because they already have a ton of it circulating in the blood. And if someone who does not have excess Vitamin A in the liver, blood, or peripheral tissues consumes Vitamin A, I would also not expect them to feel any difference from Vitamin A consumption (unless they were severely deficient).
But if someone has chronic Vitamin A toxicity where they have excess Vitamin A stored in peripheral tissues, and the constant release of those excesses into the bloodstream on a low Vitamin diet for the purpose of elimination is what causes toxicity symptoms in these people, then theoretically if they were to start consuming Vitamin A it would send a signal to their body to stop releasing it from storage because that incoming Vitamin A would be elevating the blood levels to much higher (more toxic) amounts that the liver isn't capable of storing/removing. So long as the amount of Vitamin A intake is just enough to stop Vitamin A from coming out of peripheral storage, but not so much as to cause a large build-up in the blood (e.g. eating just a few eggs rather than a dozen of them), I would think that you would get temporary symptom reduction.
It's the same line of reasoning as someone who has oxalate toxicity consuming oxalates in order to temporarily reduce symptoms, and from what I've heard Sally Norton say in the dozen or more interviews I've watched with her, the effect of oxalate consumption does seem to be a pretty consistent and reliable way to temporarily mitigate symptoms.
Another way to test whether the eggs are actually doing what you think they are doing would be to eat more than just a few in a day...eat like 8-12 of them, something closer to the whole RDA of Vitamin A, and see if you still feel better or if it makes things worse. It's far from a perfect experiment, less ideal than the others I proposed, but if you felt worse eating more eggs that would seem to indicate that it's the Vitamin A in the eggs that slowed detox and you've now consumed so much that you've elevated your blood levels to toxic amounts again. But, obviously, it's impossible to separate the effects of choline and Vitamin A when you're consuming them together, which is why I proposed the other experiments using supplemental choline.
I looked at the ingredients in a number of PC supplements trying to find the "purest" one. I really wanted the Pure Encapsulations product that was derived from sunflower seeds and had little else in it, but it's sold out everywhere. I chose the Thorne one because it had the fewest added ingredients and I trust Thorne more than most other companies, but it is derived from soy. NOW often makes very pure powders that I've bought in the past, they offer pure lecithin powder but not pure PC powder.
@jessica2
Suit yourself. Just know that chronic toxicities tend to be relatively silent accumulations, and it's possible to see improvements in one part of the body while another part suffers.