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Do the Nicoya long-lived people eat a lot of vitamin A?
I'm currently reading Dan Buettner's book "Blue Zones in Practice," and I noticed that when he describes the Nicoya long-lived people, he mentions that they eat a lot of corn, papaya, mango, and pumpkin. Additionally, the chart shows that Nicoa residents consume a significant amount of dairy products (26% of their diet by weight). What are your thoughts on this matter?
I see some interesting things about their diet. One of them is a combo of what was called the 3 sisters here in America. You grow corn, beans and squash together and it makes a nice garden in which one plant helps the other. The corn becomes a structure for the beans and the beans fix nitrogen, the squash becomes a ground cover for the other plants, saving water and keeping weeds down. I've done it lots of times. Of course, we have seen that beans help detox by clearing bile. A nice form of gardening maybe means they don't have to use bad chemicals (agricultural chemicals have sometimes been seen as part of VA overload issues)
I also see that they eat lard and pork, both of which I think are important missing things in modern diets. Pork is high in B1, lard can be high in D (if the pigs get out) also it has cholesterol (which appears to be important for good bile). Lard isn't a junk fat.
Another aspect is they have a lot of fiber in their diet in general, beyond beans (which helps clean bile?).
I remember an arctic diet in which it was supposed that the people (especially the women) would become VA overloaded in a specific season, but that the next season they would detox from it, and it was cyclic. I wonder if that has helped the Nicoya. Mangos aren't going to be there all year round, for instance.
Sunshine and exercise are also very important. Some of the auto-immune diseases, for instance multiple sclerosis, have been shown to affect people more in northern areas.
And, of course, there could have been a genetic bottle neck here in which if you couldn't handle the high VA, you didn't reproduce!
My ancestors went through 2 genetic bottlenecks (or more) and were pretty inbred LOL. (under 500 people in the community) It makes me wonder if I come from those who were able to survive on whatever was fed on the boats to the new world (which could take months) (hardtack for instance: flour, water, salt), and in early Nova Scotia settlements. They say that dairy actually was a very big part of whether people survived or not. (because those animals turned grass etc into food daily). I sometimes wonder if my body is very good at recycling and re-using hard-to-get nutrients (able to survive on crackers!).
I also sometimes think about generational vitamin A overload. Looking at her history, it appears to me that possibly my mother ended up vitamin A overloaded because of early formula recipes? If your mom is overloaded, are you going to start out life on the wrong foot with everything? And does it come down through the generations unless someone really fixes the problem?
A final thought is that they are modifying farm animal diets here in the US and other places, and they all have vitamin A supplements in the feeds. Perhaps that is not done there.
Weston Price saw lots of bad changes happen around the 1930's.
I just thought of one more thing: it appears that volcanic soil has something important for longevity. It is very new soil. Long ago I posted about the guy who went home to die "and forgot". I will try to find the pointer. He had terminal cancer in New York and went back to his volcanic Greek island and got well. He would have had some of the other things we've just discussed: sunshine, exercise, fiber, lard, pork, lower chemical agriculture and he would have returned to the diet his DNA was made for.
It is very obvious that most groups of people around the world living natural life eating natural diet have decent vit A intake(for sure more than RDA in most cases) and they do really well..
I think if you are born as healthy child to healthy parents and you keep living healthy life style in healthy natural environment eating natural diet. You will have zero issues with vit A from whole food natural diet.. You see this pattern everywhere and all the time..
If that was not the case you would see for example Weston Price writing about "toxin A" that was ruining all those native groups of people. I think it was the opposite. For example kids from Switzerland eating large % of their diet from high quality dairy had the best physical health. Best bone, jaw structure, best teeth..
Again why? healthy people, living in incredible healthy and clean environment, plenty of vit D, K2 to balance vit A.. Nothing what could mess with vit A metabolism etc..
Like I really respect Grant and his work. He saved my life basically, but I wonder what is his explanation for this.. If it's just toxin that gets stored over time more and more and eventually it kills you by some chronic disease.. I think we would see that in case of those native people, but we don't.. We see that mostly in people who always had some issues, who are already really unbalanced, who have all kinds of deficiencies that help to vit A just accumulate and not be properly metabolized or balanced with stuff like zinc, vit D,K2, protein, no exposure to stuff like glyphosate etc..
Maybe it is a false idea that Vitamin A overload always kills you. I'm sure often times it just makes life painful.
The discussion of Weston Price that has come up on Danil's log reminds me that Price noted that things seemed to have changed here in the US about 1930... At that time some pretty big changes came about. And he saw that whatever it was about that food... could also affect those who had it shipped to them overseas.
An interesting article that was in the Wapf journal was about wild deer in the US... who were suddenly seeing bite issues.
And long ago I posted about monkeys in a zoo in Asia who were all obese. This isn't something that is just affecting humans in these areas.
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