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Eggs as part of Vitamin A reduction
Quote from Andrew B on January 18, 2023, 3:01 am@jiri You may be taking the TMG for some other purpose but I think it's the choline I would emphasise and not extra betaine. The quinoa would supply more than 100 mgs of betaine which so far I think is sufficient. It could be the detox hasnt kicked in yet as some time (weeks/months) is needed before that tends to happen. The teaspoon of lecithin I think might give you about 500 mgs of choline which should be plenty. I do think that eggs where tolerated are the best option because of the sphingomyelin, iodine, selenium, folate, B5 and protein.
@andrew-b and @jiri, I think you might be making the same mistake that I was making until recently about the choline content of sunflower lecithin. If you find me wrong here, please feel free to correct me. Firstly, I will mention that I have been doing the vA detox diet for just over 2 years and 9 months now, and I have been doing choline replenishment since the end of October. I have worked up to 2 teaspoons of sunflower lecithin and 4 eggs a day now, and after an initial detox 'dump', I am now seeing massive benefits. I plan to write this experience up in the Choline thread sometime, but for the moment back to the choline content of sunflower lecithin.
This is one of the products I have used:NOW Foods, Sunflower Lecithin, Pure Powder, 1 lb (454 g) (iherb.com)
You can see that the recommended dose is 1 1/3 tablespoons, and that contains (typically) 2500 mg of Phosphatidyl Choline. A tablespoon is 15 ml, so 1 1/3 tablespoons is 20 ml. A teaspoon is 5 ml, so typically it would contain 2500/4, or 625 mg of Phosphatidyl Choline. From this information, when I was taking 2 teaspoons/day, I thought I was taking a good dose of Choline, well over the RDA. I was wrong. Phosphatidyl choline has a choline content, it is not all choline. So I went looking for a figure.
This site: Choline | Linus Pauling Institute | Oregon State University gives a figure in the paragraph headed 'food sources'- 'Phosphatidyl choline, which contains about 13% choline by weight'. This is the most common figure I have found.
Chris MasterJohn's site The Choline Database | (chrismasterjohnphd.com) gives a figure of 15%. He also mentions that lecithin needs to be taken in tablespoon amounts to have an effect.
So a teaspoon of sunflower lecithin, which typically has 625 mg of Phosphatidyl choline, at 13% this equates to only 81 mg of choline. The RDA of choline for an adult male is 550 mg, so a teaspoon of sunflower lecithin only gives around 15% of the RDA. @jiri, I would suggest this is why you are not getting a detox reaction! To get the RDA of choline with sunflower lecithin you would have to take around 7 teaspoons/day. Then it gets expensive- you get through your 20 something quids worth of sunflower lecithin rather quickly. Compare to an egg, which apparently typically has 147 mg choline in the yolk. 4 eggs gives just over the RDA for choline, and they are a whole food. If you can tolerate the vA, lutein and sulphur in eggs, it seems to me that you get a lot more value for money replenishing choline with eggs than you do with sunflower lecithin.
@alastair Congratulations on your improvements. You are correct in everything you state and I had been using the same percentages. Phosphatidylcholine (PC) can be catabolised back to choline and phosphatidylcholine is also used with the bile salts to process bile. You could be right though that it would be better to get choline rather than PC certainly initially if the catabolism step is slow (technically not sure). Absorption and digestion might respond better to choline. I definitely recommend the eggs as the way to do this if tolerated because of the sphingomyelin, a little vitamin E and other nutrients.
@alastair hi I have the same lecithin. I am lost btw when you try to calculate how much choline is there for a serving. Just look at the lable. what it says. One serving is one third of a tablespoon. Which is 10g. It's not one AND third of a tablespoon.. So I don't know how you came up with 20ml? Anyway yo don't need to calculate this. You see that one serving is 10g and in one serving (10g) you have 2.5g of phosphatidlyl choline. So 13% from 2500mg is 325mg.. So you are somewhat off, but you are still right that I was taking too low dose. It's funny because I am taking also some minerals from now foods and I mixed servings for magnesium with this lecithin so I was thinking 5g serving of lecithin is plenty. But I would need to take not 5 but 20g to get 650mg of choline which is a good dose.. I would love to eat just eggs, but I feel like all that extra cholesterol is not good for me and I also don't have source of good quality eggs + they are more and more expensive here. So I think I will buy this sunflower lecithing https://fichema.cz/slunecnicovy-lecitin-e322/1419-lecitin-slunecnicovy-1-kg-8592861095032.html its much cheaper than the now brand and I will try to take 20g daily to get 650mg of choline per day and will see what happens..
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But now when I think about it what about all that extra PUFA fat from 20g of lecithin? Also can it be already oxidized since it's processed into powder? Also this PUFA fats should come with vit E that is in sunflower seeds, but I assume that in lecithine is none. So I don't know if it's a good idea to take high dose lecithin hm..
The way I see it is if you are doing Vitamin A reduction then you will hopefully be reducing cardiovascular risk considerably. Your gut health eventually should be good too. Therefore, even a short term effort with 1-4 eggs a day in order to replenish choline will be unlikely to have long term effects for the worse from dietary cholesterol. From my experiment things started healing quicker with 3-4 eggs as opposed to 1-2 eggs a day. I eat more pancakes and more food in summer. I'm eating 2-3 eggs a day at times in winter now because of slight egg supply issues in UK. You can reduce the eggs to zero and the digestion benefits I got from extra eggs still remain which is fairly convincing that the eggs replenished something like choline or sphingomyelin. Eggs have about 1.5 grams of lecithin so I'm not overdoing that like I might do with a supplement. And there's a slight amount of Vitamin E in eggs. The extra cholesterol is fairly minor compared to someone eating 700-900 grams of meat per day. My vascular health only seems to have improved with the eggs.
Forgot to add in this thread that I've been using sunflower seeds blended in 'milk' which allows me to consume about 20 grams a day in drinks. Sunflower seeds have lecithin, Vitamin E, B1, choline and betaine in good amounts. A synergistically beneficial food also.
@michael2 The Institute of Medicine Dietary Reference Intake Panel defined the human requirement for choline according to the amount of dietary intake needed to prevent liver dysfunction (ie, elevated serum transaminase concentrations). It's quite a low bar. Those with assumed high Vitamin A toxicity, poor health and lower serum retinol are more likely I suspect to have seriously low choline at the start. The body also cannibalises itself to get choline when diet isnt enough. As many increase beef with good choline at the start then much more choline is probably being provided during the Vitamin A reduction to enable detox. Some people probably still dont get enough choline to replenish levels. Some digestive systems dont fully repair eg reacting to certain fibres or remain at one bowel movement a day or less.
When we heal things more choline and phospholipids are being used. The continuing removal of Vitamin A from the liver will use up choline and phospholipids. The healing of the fatty liver cells will use up choline. Choline is being used up all the time. I think what happens with some people is the body eventually stops removing vitamin A in the bile due to low phosphatidylcholine and the serum retinol number goes low and not everything is healthy or fixed. Hence numerous reasons why choline intake and replenishment might not be enough.
Quote from Andrew B on January 23, 2023, 6:19 am@michael2 The Institute of Medicine Dietary Reference Intake Panel defined the human requirement for choline according to the amount of dietary intake needed to prevent liver dysfunction (ie, elevated serum transaminase concentrations). It's quite a low bar. Those with assumed high Vitamin A toxicity, poor health and lower serum retinol are more likely I suspect to have seriously low choline at the start. The body also cannibalises itself to get choline when diet isnt enough. As many increase beef with good choline at the start then much more choline is probably being provided during the Vitamin A reduction to enable detox. Some people probably still dont get enough choline to replenish levels. Some digestive systems dont fully repair eg reacting to certain fibres or remain at one bowel movement a day or less.
When we heal things more choline and phospholipids are being used. The continuing removal of Vitamin A from the liver will use up choline and phospholipids. The healing of the fatty liver cells will use up choline. Choline is being used up all the time. I think what happens with some people is the body eventually stops removing vitamin A in the bile due to low phosphatidylcholine and the serum retinol number goes low and not everything is healthy or fixed. Hence numerous reasons why choline intake and replenishment might not be enough.
Good morning Andrew! Again thank you for taking your time to right back so comprehensibly. I didnt know that choline was used on the way of putting vA out. I thought it only funneled vA into the liver and that was the reason it got penalized as merely a damage control leverage to slow detox but not a stepping stone for vA to be excreted, or stepping up detox. Am I understanding your view correctly?