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Condensed Rehash of Wavy Gravy Responses to Common VA Forum Topics
Is VA just pure poison?
It’s actually very simple to answer this with a high degree of certainty without arguing the details of published research on VA. The answer lies in basic evolutionary principles.
Biological evolution results in the adaption of organisms to their environment in a manner that optimizes fitness. This happens through differential survival and reproduction. The genes and physiological traits of individuals that reproduce most successfully tend to persist through time, whereas the genes and traits associated with less successful reproduction tend to disappear.
If VA is nothing but a poison, you would expect organisms to evolve mechanisms of avoiding its absorption and enhancing its elimination because those that do should survive and reproduce at a higher rate, on average. That’s not what we see.
While there are various reasons why a single species may not evolve such adaptations (due to inherent physiological limitations and/or evolutionary trade-offs), you would not expect a taxonomically diverse set of species to:
(1) actively convert precursors (carotenoids) to retinoids
(2) absorb those retinoids through the intestines
(3) store those retinoids in large quantities
(4) conserve those retinoids for long periods of time
(5) continuously circulate those retinoids in the blood stream
(6) uptake those retinoids into cells, or
(7) have specialized carriers and enzymatic processes associated with those retinoids throughout the body, feedback mechanisms regulating their metabolism, and actively maintain storage amounts between upper and lower thresholds so as to avoid both toxicity and deficiency …
UNLESS those retinoids served a very important physiological purpose (e.g., enabled vision and contributed to cell differentiation). The fact that a taxonomically diverse set of species DO actively convert, absorb, store, conserve, circulate, uptake, and involve retinoids in routine physiological processes clearly indicates their utility in the bodies of animals. Even if that utility is very narrow (e.g., if all it did was enable a single aspect of vision), it is apparently so critical that a variety of species have evolved to store large quantities of it despite potential risk to themselves from excess (toxicity is clearly a very real threat).
To all those who want to dismiss this high level assessment of the issue as "just theory", evolutionary biology actually provides the most useful framework for approaching questions of "why" in biological systems. Read on to understand why your arguments from published "facts" and personal observation pale in comparison.
If VA isn’t pure poison and we do in fact need it, then why hasn’t Grant gone blind?
After 10 years of actively avoiding it, Grant still has VA regularly circulating in his blood. Hasn’t anybody noticed that no matter how hard he tries, Grant can’t get his serum levels below 0.1 umol/L, even when regularly donating blood? Despite his reportedly excellent health, Grant just can’t quite seem to get rid of that last little tiny itty bit of this “poison”. The most parsimonious reason is that his body is actively conserving VA because it is critical for vision, among other things.
Grant’s night vision problems from eating something as innocuous as onion powder suggest that he barely has enough VA to maintain that aspect of vision, thanks to small amounts of VA and critical amounts of zinc found in the meat he’s eating on a daily basis. I would wager that the vision problems would quickly return in the absence of that meat consumption. It’s likely Grant has not suffered more symptoms of deficiency because he’s an older man (not actively reproducing) living at high latitude (less sun exposure) eating minimal amounts of xenobiotic plant compounds on his “prison food” diet of meat, rice, and some beans.
The fact that VA is useful in small amounts does not preclude its being harmful in larger amounts.
It’s quite clear that excess VA can be extremely detrimental and that a large fraction of the population is taking in excessive amounts. Grant’s self-experiment is valuable in establishing a lower threshold of intake for maintaining good health in men of his age and genetics living in a northern environment. Optimal VA intake is going to be highly context dependent (sex, age, environment, lifestyle/diet), but clearly it is much less than we are all being advised to consume through mainstream guidance. Getting this message heard and accepted by a broader audience would be a lot easier if the people spreading the message did so with consistently sound scientific reasoning rather than “Vitamin A is a poison!” zealotry accompanied by obvious failures of logic (e.g., "I’ve proved Vitamin A is non-essential even though it’s still circulating in my blood every day").
Is VA solely responsible for autoimmune conditions and a wide variety of disease states?
The obvious answer is no, it is not the cause of autoimmunity and other diseases. Just look at people like Paul Saladino, who fixed his eczema on a diet very high in VA from liver and other organs. However, given all the damage that has been observed in association with the use of retinoid pharmaceuticals, it is equally obvious that excess VA can contribute to and exacerbate a wide variety of disease states, and in some instances it may indeed be the primary cause. Reality is complex, fight the temptation to make it black and white.
So-called “Toxic Bile Theory” and enterohepatic circulation
Bile is comprised of numerous distinct components, including bile salts (bile acids conjugated with taurine or glycine), metabolic waste products (conjugated with glucuronic acid), and xenobiotic compounds (plant toxins, environmental toxins/pollutants, and pharmaceuticals, which are also conjugated with glucuronic acid).
Enterohepatic circulation is the process by which certain components of the bile return to the liver following their reabsorption in the intestines, typically in the small intestine.
Approximately 95% of bile acids/salts (not 95% of all components of bile, as is commonly misstated) undergo enterohepatic circulation via the ileum because they are a limited resource, are critical for absorption of dietary fats and fat-soluble vitamins, and can be harmful in large amounts in the colon. On the other hand, reabsorption of metabolic waste and xenobiotics found in bile is almost universally disadvantageous, which is why their reuptake is minimized through the process of glucuronidation.
Bile acids may pose a threat to the body when they are dysregulated (e.g., in cholestasis, reflux, or ileal malabsorption), but they are still critical to health. I see no evidence that reabsorption of bile acids results in the reabsorption of xenobiotic compounds or metabolic waste products; bile acids do not appear to bind to these substances. To the contrary, bile acids help to minimize the presence of undesirable bacteria in the intestines that do facilitate the reabsorption of xenobiotics and metabolic waste by way of deconjugation and the action of beta-glucuronidase enzymes. The literature describes enterohepatic circulation of xenobiotics and metabolic waste in sick humans undergoing treatment with pharmaceuticals, most likely due to compromised gut biomes. This is not to say it isn’t possible for unwanted substances to be reabsorbed in healthy intestines, but it is likely the exception rather than the rule. Evolutionarily speaking, if reabsorption of bile acids was detrimental, you would expect to find minimal rates of reabsorption in healthy humans and animals rather than the nearly complete reabsorption that actually occurs.
Garrett Smith’s so-called “Toxic Bile Theory” is one of many pseudoscientific fallacies his followers buy into (often literally). Binding bile acids lowers cholesterol levels, which is usually unnecessary and contraindicated because cholesterol is widely needed by the body for things like hormone production. Binding bile acids in itself doesn’t fix bile acid dysregulation. To fix bile acid dysregulation, you first need bile to flow through the liver and gallbladder properly, and then you need proper gut function. This is probably best accomplished by adopting a plant-free “lion” diet high in animal fat and devoid of offensive plant compounds, although in instances of true cholestasis additional therapeutic support may be needed.
As someone who, by all appearances, has suffered from both VA toxicity and bile acid diarrhea for the past 4 years, I can tell you first hand that binding bile with fiber and other natural binders tends to make things worse (for me), not better. I haven’t tried pharmaceutical binders like cholestyramine, but based on user reports it is trading one problem (diarrhea) for another (nausea, constipation, bloating, nutrient deficiencies, etc.).
The scientific method, interpreting published science, and limitations on extrapolation
I’m a professional biologist who’s published manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and served as a peer-reviewer for others’ manuscripts. Here are a few things I've learned about interpreting and using scientific publications that most people don't seem to grasp.
First and foremost, one cannot extrapolate the results of a study beyond the population in which that study was conducted. If the study was conducted on cells in vitro, the results do not necessarily apply to cells in an organism. If the study was conducted on rats, the results do not necessarily apply to humans. If the study was conducted on women, the results do not necessarily apply to men. If the study was conducted on 40-year-olds, the results do not necessarily apply to people of any other age. If the study was conducted on only 20 people, the results do not necessarily apply to the billions of other humans walking this planet. If the study was conducted on people in 2024, it does not necessarily apply to people living thousands of years ago. If it’s a self-experiment of one person, the results might seem interesting but cannot be extrapolated to anyone else.
Second, the particular methods of data collection and analysis are absolutely critical to understanding the validity and applicability of the results. Despite having conducted and published research, I do not possess the expert knowledge to properly judge the validity of experimental methods and statistical analyses in most peer-reviewed publications. Due to the nature of specialization in the sciences, no one scientist is capable of properly assessing the wide variety of published research findings that exist today. If career scientists don’t possess that ability, then in all likelihood neither do you or any of the “gurus” you may be following. By all means, hypothesize away and come up with your own ideas based on what you read, those ideas may turn out to be valuable to yourself and others; just understand that your attempts to validate those ideas scientifically by using published literature and personal observation is severely hindered by your lack of understanding of inferential statistics and its application to scientific methodology (there’s a reason biometricians exist and are depended on by a large number of research scientists).
Third, replication is everything in science. If the outcomes of a study have not been replicated multiple times, they are really only a short step above conjecture. The reason is that, statistically speaking, it is likely based on chance alone to get an outcome from one study that is not replicable in identical studies (fun illustration of this - https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant). Furthermore, authors tend to do just about anything to get published, which often means abandoning strict a priori hypothesis testing and instead performing unplanned statistical tests and data manipulation until they find a “significant” result, which likely only exists in that particular data set by chance. Due to lack of funding and interest, replication studies are rare. This has led to the melee of contradictory findings and conclusions that enable any incautious person to proclaim just about anything about nutrition and have a study to “prove” it (it doesn’t prove anything except their ignorance).
Fourth, the process of peer-review and selectivity by journal editors is highly subject to the whims of egos, grudges, politics, personal taste, and just about every other weakness of the human psyche. A lot of good research doesn’t see the light of day, and a lot of poor studies get way more attention than they deserve.
Distinguishing detox pains (progress) from further wrongdoings (regress)
Based on my experience, the process of getting stored excesses of VA out of the body has the potential to worsen symptoms before there is general improvement. It can be very difficult to distinguish between (1) the largely unavoidable pains of eliminating harmful substances versus (2) mistakenly making yourself worse by choosing the wrong diet/lifestyle. In the same vein, it can be difficult to distinguish between (1) alleviation of symptoms due to actual resolution of the underlying condition versus (2) alleviation of symptoms due to postponing dealing with the underlying condition. This is why it is important to occasionally make temporary changes to your diet to see whether there is a sudden response to adding or removing foods/supplements. For example, if you think eggs are helping you, make sure you stop consuming them every now and then to check for responses by the body.
Intuitive eating
If people want to try to use their instincts to decide what is appropriate to eat, they need to eat individual food items (i.e., a single ingredient) one at a time. To eat “instinctively” means to ignore cultural teachings, and it is culture that has us combining otherwise unpalatable foods to make them more palatable.
Let your body decide how tasty pure starches like rice, potato, and wheat are by eating them in isolation (they aren’t tasty because we didn’t evolve to seek out starch). Plant leaves are almost universally bitter and it’s obvious the body doesn’t want that. Cultivated fruit is appealing in small amounts but is not satiating, and wild fruit often has bitter elements that make you stop eating it in short order unless you’re starving. Cooked plants that contain simple sugars (sucrose, glucose, fructose) will appeal similar to fruit depending on bitterness and fiber content. The only food that is truly satiating is protein and fat, which is most naturally abundant, accessible, and assimilable as meat and animal fat, and it’s obvious why this is so if you have an appropriate understanding of human evolution and physiology.
Evolutionary history generally is the best guide for selecting types and quantities of foods that are compatible with human health. This points toward a base of animal meat and fat with minimal additions of plant foods (prepared using traditional methods, according to specialized cultural knowledge, and ideally tailored to your genetics). The more novel a food is to the human body, the more reason there is to expect it to cause harm due to incompatibility.
It's interesting posts like this that show the importance of the forum.
I think one of the things that keep people away from the idea of VA reduction is plain old fear. The world would benefit so much by people just realizing that *more is NOT more* when it comes to VA.
If they just stop the supplementation of feeds, and foods like milk, and the taking of cod liver oil we will have less disease.
But this would need a sea change in THOUGHTS.
I've sometimes wondered if the way animals cope with the influx of poisons (of which VA is but one) is by reproducing a new "clean" offspring... rather than living longer.
Karen Hurd said this, and she wouldn't say it if she didn't find it in a textbook because that's where she learned what she needed to know to save her daughter from pesticide poisoning.
"If you have gallbladder disease see all those hormones are cleared through the gallbladder and so if you're not clearing them then they keep recycling and then what most people don't understand about how gallbladder disease works is that it changes the pH as you keep recycling these things and the pH changes and when you change the pH, pH is just a negative log of hydrogen ions and when you start to change that then you have more concentration of hydrogen ions and those hydrogen ions they actually will change the physical state of your bile so your bile is a liquid but if you keep pumping it full and the pH changes and it changes with all those hormones and that's where they're going through then your bile will start to solidify it gets really sludgy little grains of sand start to form and then eventually it rolls into these balls and we call them stones and all that is just the bile that's become too hydrogenated. I mean it's just way too many hydrogen items ions in there and so what we had to do is take the soluble fiber because that is going to cause new bile to be released that is not full of that has a different pH and then that is what actually dissolves those stones, those stones go away and at the same time you are throwing away all these excess hormones that were the reason that the stones formed so all that goes away too. "
So your explanation doesn't take any of that into account.
As you say the elimination of retinoids is associated with some unpleasant symptoms. Maybe the nature' strategy of storing them instead of eliminating comes from that, it's a tradeoff ? Humans consuming typical diet and living shorter lives were not supposed to generally exceed their storage capacity?
We might also consider that retinoids could be used by body for some secondary purposes, like fighting infections (measles, malaria), rather than for critical ones.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 7:14 amKaren Hurd said this, and she wouldn't say it if she didn't find it in a textbook because that's where she learned what she needed to know to save her daughter from pesticide poisoning.
"If you have gallbladder disease see all those hormones are cleared through the gallbladder and so if you're not clearing them then they keep recycling and then what most people don't understand about how gallbladder disease works is that it changes the pH as you keep recycling these things and the pH changes and when you change the pH, pH is just a negative log of hydrogen ions and when you start to change that then you have more concentration of hydrogen ions and those hydrogen ions they actually will change the physical state of your bile so your bile is a liquid but if you keep pumping it full and the pH changes and it changes with all those hormones and that's where they're going through then your bile will start to solidify it gets really sludgy little grains of sand start to form and then eventually it rolls into these balls and we call them stones and all that is just the bile that's become too hydrogenated. I mean it's just way too many hydrogen items ions in there and so what we had to do is take the soluble fiber because that is going to cause new bile to be released that is not full of that has a different pH and then that is what actually dissolves those stones, those stones go away and at the same time you are throwing away all these excess hormones that were the reason that the stones formed so all that goes away too. "
So your explanation doesn't take any of that into account.
I think what I've written probably does account for whatever it is Hurd is trying to say there.
If we accept the assumption that hormones are being recycled at a high rate, and that recycling is leading to a change in biliary pH (I doubt Hurd has any direct proof of this), why are the hormones being recycled in the first place? This doesn't appear to happen in a good number of both men and women on fiber-free diets, so we can deduce that fiber should not be necessary for clearing hormones in the average person.
We know that compromised intestines are more likely to allow unwanted molecules into the bloodstream, and that some bacteria have the potential to deconjugate glucuronidated hormones in the intestines via beta-glucuronidase and thereby enable reabsorption of those hormones. Anecdotally, we know that a plant-free diet is associated with resolution of intestinal problems by reducing inflammation, reducing presence of bacteria in the small intestine, and promoting integrity of the intestinal lining. Plant-free diets are also anecdotally associated with resolution of a wide variety of disease states.
Put 2 and 2 together: in some people, plant consumption is leading to compromised intestines by various routes and possibly promoting reabsorption of hormones and other metabolic waste in the intestines.
So why do some people improve on a diet high in fiber? To me, it appears that the binding power of a bunch of fiber eaten at very short intervals does in fact have the potential to enhance the clearance of biliary waste, possibly by overwhelming bacterial action in the intestine through sheer volume/bulk. This is like using a sledge hammer to drive a 2" construction nail though...it's unnecessary, has the potential for causing more harm in the process, and simply does not work in a lot of circumstances. It is an inelegant, ass-backwards solution.
I would love to know how many people on Hurd's protocol have tried a diet of skeletal muscle meat and fat from ruminants. I don't doubt there's somebody out there it wouldn't work for, but I would bet it's a very small proportion. Same for Garrett Smith's followers...some of them come to him from eating a carnivore diet, but every account I've heard was of a carnivore diet that included liver, dairy, or eggs, and these people seem to then jump straight on the fiber bandwagon without having first tried a ruminant muscle meat diet.
You are making a big assumption that Hurd has made an appropriate interpretation of sound scientific evidence, but from what I've heard out of Hurd's mouth, this is not at all a safe assumption. I find her to be about as credible as Smith, which is to say not credible at all, owing to repeatedly misconstruing relatively basic and reasonably well established concepts of human physiology.
well this is obviously not the place to debate karen hurd as this is shutting down soon. Are you on the ray peat forum? I talk about her there.
I just need to know why then someone who is dying of liver failure can come back to life after taking soluble fiber everyday? It IS possible the body gets overwhelmed and the only way back is to absorb the toxic crap. She also helped people have children over and over by adding soluble fiber and limiting stimulants perfumes and such. Excess hormones cause PCOS and infertility. Mainstream medicine says use an anti-estrogen... but maybe there's a better way? And no I don't recommend every human on the planet to be carnivore, I think we'd run out of beef REAL quick. Our costco is running out of organic ground beef by Saturday every week. Have to go when they put it out.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 2:26 pmwell this is obviously not the place to debate karen hurd as this is shutting down soon. Are you on the ray peat forum? I talk about her there.
I just need to know why then someone who is dying of liver failure can come back to life after taking soluble fiber everyday? It IS possible the body gets overwhelmed and the only way back is to absorb the toxic crap. She also helped people have children over and over by adding soluble fiber and limiting stimulants perfumes and such.
As I said in my last post, it seems quite possible that a certain protocol that includes fiber is going to lead to improved health in some people, but there's a lot of reasons to believe that is not at all the best way of going about achieving that outcome.
As far as everyone switching to a carnivore diet, obviously the current infrastructure could not handle it, but nobody can really say what is possible in the future with enough intention. This is actually the laziest argument against widespread carnivory...look at all the things our species has done that nobody could have fathomed a hundred or thousand years ago. If people valued the food they put in their bodies as much as they valued their dumb phones, farmers might get paid the money and respect they deserve for feeding the masses, providing incentive for more people to become farmers. As someone who's been attempting to do small-scale rabbit ranching, my respect for ranchers has grown immensely, and my dependence on them for high quality food is staring me in the face every time I see the bottom of my chest freezer appear from beneath my mounds of meat.
Huge black pill to swallow seeing people welcoming back and engaging this bad actor.
Is VA solely responsible for autoimmune conditions and a wide variety of disease states?
The obvious answer is no, it is not the cause of autoimmunity and other diseases. Just look at people like Paul Saladino, who fixed his eczema on a diet very high in VA from liver and other organs.
You wrote a lot of grandiose verbiage about science like usual yet like usual you show little concern for a high standard of evidence when it suits you.
Internet influencers should be assumed to be actors, frauds and deceivers because they normally are. One should never involve them in arguments about important health topics. We don't even have evidence that Saladino follows the diet he espouses.
Vitamin A, when consumed and stored in excess, is absolutely a cause of autoimmunity. I know that due to understanding the physiological chain of events that take place in Hypervitaminosis A.
Like @jiri has pointed out what is far more guaranteed about Saladino than the diet he consumes is that he is outside surfing each day depleting his vitamin A. Anyone that has spent time in a subtropical location swimming in the sea each day will tell you how amazing they felt. He's living the life grifting off of people like you that buy his special tallow.
Intuitive eating
If people want to try to use their instincts to decide what is appropriate to eat, they need to eat individual food items (i.e., a single ingredient) one at a time.
Wrong. If a species has been combining food groups together and cooking them for tens and likely hundreds of thousands of years and has adapted to that diet then that food is their natural diet. It is totally appropriate to instinctually select meals made from many ingredients.
To eat “instinctively” means to ignore cultural teachings, and it is culture that has us combining otherwise unpalatable foods to make them more palatable.
Wrong. Stop misleading people with your poison.
Firstly cooked starch is palatable. More palatable than the tallow you are eating.
Humans mix meat and starch together because it tastes good. It tastes good because it supplies both glucose from starch and protein from meat and it is optimal to obtain both together.
Let your body decide how tasty pure starches like rice, potato, and wheat are by eating them in isolation (they aren’t tasty because we didn’t evolve to seek out starch).
If one forced to eat only meat is given the opportunity to eat a meal of just rice or potato they will probably select that as long as they aren't brainwashed by carnitardism. Regardless, starch alone is far more palatable than fat alone.
I really shouldn't bother responding to you considering our embattled history, but I'll state what should be obvious here. I, you, and everyone else here is forced to put some level of trust in information that comes to us from other people. You could argue forever about why you should trust different sources, but ultimately there is no consistently definitive way to irrefutably prove that one source is always more reliable than another. The closest you could get to an objective assessment of that is probably videotaping everything that everybody does and making that available to everyone, but even then you'd have to place trust in whoever was doing the videotaping and distributing if it wasn't you doing it. I trust who I trust, you trust who you trust, both our trusts are constantly changing, neither of our trusts will ever be infallible.
Your argument is self-defeating. Your self-inflated ego has some major leaks in it. Your armchair command center is looking tattered.
So long Timmy, I won't waste my time writing any more responses to you, although there might be some pictorial fun if you persist in your griping.