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Eggs as part of Vitamin A reduction
Quote from Chris on July 21, 2023, 7:13 pmQuote from ggenereux on July 21, 2023, 6:51 pmI don’t agree with that at all. Just because a compound is ubiquitous does not in any way imply that it has a nutritive role. For example, aluminium is ubiquitous and is found in many rivers and lakes. We all need to drink water, and aluminium is definitely not a nutrient.
The retinoids are ubiquitous because of the light absorbing function (and others) in plants.
This is a good point. Cadmium is found in the livers of wild game like moose and deer to such an extent that the Canadian government and that of the state of Maine warn people not to eat the livers of these animals.
Hey @chris-4,
Also, there's the little known detail that moose liver is extremely high in vA, apparently on par with that of polar bear liver.
Quote from Aleksey on July 21, 2023, 7:25 pmQuote from ggenereux on July 21, 2023, 6:51 pmIt’s just a matter of time before the bogus “it’s a vitamin” theory completely crumbles.
Unfortunately, I'm not too optimistic about this. I think the vA does play some physiological role, perhaps as one of the many weapons that the immune system may attempt to use against various pathogens, which might explain cold and flu symptoms when one catches a virus and vA is released from the liver. That said, vA is toxic (even in my hypothetical example it is used as a toxin against pathogens) and a healthy body generally tries to break down and excrete as much excess as possible. I think that both consuming too much vA and an impairment in vA metabolism can lead to acute or chronic toxicity. However, the medical community will probably try to hang onto any possibility of it having a function meaning it is essential. I just don't see them budging on this because they might be technically correct in a limited sense.
Oh yeah, I agree. There’s no way the medical establishment and governments will ever let this happen. They’d have to admit that they’ve been poisoning most of the human population for the last 50 years. Then, of course, vA is likely the primary driver behind the chronic disease and cancer epidemics. That of course is Pharma’s annual multi-trillion dollar cash cow.
Like the current colossal vaccine debacle, the medical establishment and governments will just double down on the propaganda, deny, lie, obfuscate, and cover-up all of it. They will never admit that they’ve screwed up. So, it’s going to be up to us to get the message out.
Man, this verbal jiu-jitsu of Grant is beautiful to watch, light on his feet, hard to hit. There must be something in his diet that allows for such clarity, ah wait, no? You're telling me he's deficient in vitamin A? Someone is scratching his head.
Quote from ggenereux on July 22, 2023, 5:16 amHey @chris-4,
Also, there's the little known detail that moose liver is extremely high in vA, apparently on par with that of polar bear liver.
Uff. I did not know this. I used to eat moose liver and deer liver. Thinking they were the most healthiest livers to eat out there. No wonder I got vitamin A poisoned 🙁
I stated, "No toxin I know of has the same ubiquitous presence in animal physiology." As in, an identified role in the functioning of some important biological process, such as vision and cell proliferation and differentiation with Vitamin A. Considering that aluminum does not, I still know of no toxin that fits that description.
Can you provide a reference that shows aluminum is consistently found in the bodies of a variety of vertebrates and, when it is found, that it is circulating outside the liver in meaningful amounts? A quick search suggests that aluminum is fairly ubiquitous in the environment, but not necessarily within the bodies of animals, or if it is, not actively circulating within those animals.
Secondary plant compounds are toxic to all animals (that is their evolved purpose) and they are fairly ubiquitous among plants, as are beta-carotene and other carotenoids, yet secondary plant compounds typically do not get stored in the livers of herbivores or actively circulated in their bodies because they have no role in the physiology of animals. On the other hand, beta-carotene is actively converted to retinol in animals, and retinol is then endogenously converted to retinaldehyde and retinoic acid throughout various tissues of the body. Are there known toxins with analogous metabolic processes outside of the liver? Not that I know of.
Can you provide a reference for the original data on Vitamin A in moose liver? I haven't come across it yet, and until I do, I am left wondering what the sample size was and what the living conditions were for the moose sampled. Were they living in captivity and provided with some kind of man-made rations? Was this a single wild moose that had unusually elevated levels? And importantly, was this moose in poor health? Are the polar bears or any other animals harboring vast amounts of Vitamin A in poor health? That doesn't seem to be the case. Polar bears live in one of the most extreme environments on the planet and also store one of the highest levels of Vitamin A of any animal on the planet...how does your toxin theory stack up against that factoid?
I would also like to see a list of the publications you believe to indicate that there is no such thing as Vitamin A deficiency. I can't really comment on that until I've looked at the studies carefully.
Yes, his "verbal jiu-jitsu" is so impressive he seems to have danced right past some of my points without answering them:
"You still have measurable amounts circulating in your blood after 9 years of avoiding it, and yet you describe being in excellent health. In fact, you described being in good health years ago when you had more measurable Vitamin A in circulation. In light of the basic tenets of adaptive evolution, I would argue there must be a good reason (a benefit) for continuing to circulate that Vitamin A when your liver surely has the capacity to contain whatever small amount you are consuming in addition to what remains in your body. It seems clear to me that the body prioritizes the storage of toxins in sites of minimal reactivity when it cannot eliminate them directly…if Vitamin A is a toxin, why does your body continue to actively circulate it when it most likely has the capacity to contain it?"
"Furthermore, the scientific literature has identified a complex metabolism of Vitamin A throughout the body with specific transport agents and receptors, which cannot be said for arsenic and POPs." This would apply to aluminum as well.
Quote from sand on July 20, 2023, 11:54 pmBeautifully and precisely written @wavygravygadzooks, as always! I too am grateful for Grant allowing all voices to be heard, and thanks to you for having the courage to speak up as well, even though you know it will not be popular!
@wavygravygadzooks I’m wondering if you’d allow me to post an attempt at some logical reasoning of what is a vitamin, and strike it down with force if I’m wrong?
If we were to start from scratch, where no vitamins were defined yet, way back, that is; it would be reasonable to expect that there were a bunch of substances that were vital to the human body in different degrees. Some of these substances could be needed in large amounts, and some in very miniscule amounts. We would name all of these substances «critical substances» (or whatever»). Now, we want to find as many of these critical substances as possible. The ones we are able to find, we’ll call vitamins. Because of limitations in measurement and how we can design experiments on humans, when we are searching for vitamins, we must define some threshold related to amount of some critical substance needed. So the term vitamin is not separable from this threshold. We admit that the vitamins we find is only a subset of the critical substances.
So, let’s say that we see that the experiment design of some vitamin we found (way back) were very flawed, we can decategorize it as a vitamin, but we can never claim it is not a critical substance. My point is, that we need to acknowledge that linked to e.g. VA, we have these limitations on measurement and experiment design, and that you and @ggenereux2014‘s views are unifiable, if we separate between these two concepts of vitamins and critical substances!
I don't see a difference between "critical substance" and "vitamin" in your thought experiment. Either we have identified a role for a critical substance/vitamin in the body or we have not. If we have not identified a role, we cannot conclude that it is a critical substance/vitamin. However, we cannot completely rule out the possibility it has a role that we simply have not yet identified. One reason we might not be able to identify a role is that we lack the ability to detect the presence, or "threshold" amount as you say, of a critical substance/vitamin within a biological process.
The greater the prevalence and association of a compound with essential bodily processes, the greater the likelihood it is a critical substance/vitamin. This is part of the logic behind retinol being a vitamin...it is found throughout the body in association with essential bodily processes even when there is very little stored in the body. Scientific experiments appear to have elucidated some of the mechanisms of the vitamin. Is every conclusion in every study perfectly accurate? Surely not. Are some of the studies so flawed as to be junk? Quite possibly. Are there a sufficient number of independent experiments that collectively indicate at least one necessary role of Vitamin A in the body? I personally believe there are and that its role in vision is the most robust.
But again, I am most swayed by the evolutionary concept that if a substance is found among a large variety of life forms who do not appear to be uniformly harmed by natural quantities of that substance, there must be some adaptive purpose for that substance being in the body. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying would probably consider Vitamin A metabolism and functionality to be a highly conserved biological process through a diversity of animal lineages, indicating an adaptive utility for Vitamin A. If we had not yet identified that utility, they would probably invoke the concept of Chesterton's fence, which says that we should not dismiss the possible importance of something that likely exists for a reason simply because we have not yet identified that reason (they talk about this concept a lot with regard to modern medicine, such as the belief that we can safely remove a person's appendix with no ramifications simply because medicine has not yet recognized a function for it in the body...natural selection acts strongly to rid organisms of meaningless costs, so if an organ like the appendix is conserved through time, it must have a utility that justifies the cost of maintaining that tissue).
I don’t doubt that moose liver is very rich in VA, but I highly doubt it reaches the ridiculous levels of polar bear liver.
Deffs going to need a source on that.
If a decade of negligible VA consumption combined with extremely low serum VA (to the point where it’s barely measurable) does not result in VA deficiency, then how does one become deficient in VA?
I would guess symptoms of deficiency usually result from a lack of animal foods in the diet, sometimes due more to deficiency of essential amino acids than retinol or beta-carotene. It does seem like it can take a long time though, probably a lot longer in people with a history of notable Vitamin A intake whose liver might conserve its reserves more and more as levels decline (e.g., Grant).
RE: As in, an identified role in the functioning of some important biological process, such as vision and cell proliferation and differentiation with Vitamin A.
Sure, that’s what’s claimed for vitamin A, but we now know that it’s not true.
There is absolutely no way vision and cell proliferation and differentiation are dependent on vitamin A. We’ve now proven it with our many n=1 experiments. No one has lost their vision, and no one has had their cells stop differentiating resulting in their skin and other organs disintegrating. And, you can’t go arbitrarily moving the goalposts, effectively fabricating excuses out of thin air, claiming, no, no, people don’t need big RDA doses, they just need micro trace amounts of the said vitamin. Please show me one study backing up that new claim.
Anyways, this is the great thing about science, we get to learn new things and overturn crusty old invalid theories. But, I feel that there’s no amount of evidence or logic that’ll change your mind on it. So, I really don’t have the time to debate this again.
RE: Considering that aluminum does not, I still know of no toxin that fits that description.
Of course, I was just using aluminium as an example of another ubiquitous potential toxin. Countering your claim that just because a substance is ubiquitous in our food that it must somehow be good for us. I’m not sure how much aluminium bioaccumulates. Personally have no particular concern or interest in aluminium.
RE: Are there known toxins with analogous metabolic processes outside of the liver? Not that I know of.
Sure, Poison ivy (urushiol) is a very common example with about 50 million cases / year in America.
RE: Moose liver (~3x beef liver)
https://www.fitbit.com/foods/Moose+Liver+Braised/19693
Moose are quite different in their feeding than deer and elk. Deer and elk like to feed off of grasses, and bark, etc. Whereas, moose like to feed in swamps and bogs.
Polar bears, which are really a white fur version of the grizzly bear, accumulate a huge amount of vA in their fat and liver because they feed on seals. Seals are very fat too and feed on the arctic fish. With polar bears being at the top of their food chain it is just the bioaccumulation that causes huge amounts to be eventually stored in their liver. But, they have adapted to live with it. Sadly, I think many humans are now adapting to their vA overload in much the same way by getting very fat too.
Here’s another bit of trivia regarding polar bears you might find interesting. I worked in the Canadian Arctic in the early 1980’s. When a polar bear dies (often shot for their fur) the ravens will pick the carcass clean down to the bone. But, they’ll leave the liver untouched.
RE: list of the publications you believe to indicate that there is no such thing as Vitamin A deficiency
They are listed in my blog post on casein. Actually, there are 7 of them.
https://ggenereux.blog/2020/06/15/the-early-rat-studies-and-casein/