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Gari / Bigpoppa
My husband's eyes (irises) and mine have turned bright blue recently! I used to have one blue eye and one greenish one.
The new blue is peculiar, it is the same for both of us, a kind of light sapphire, cornflower blue. And very transparent and cristal-like.
We have been on the diet for just over 6 months.
I wonder if different blood groups get different problems. All my siblings and their children as well as I are 0 negative and badly hit by this VA stuff.
Ok good to know so it's likely that our serum retinol actually fluctuates in accordance with the severity of detox. This is what I suspected.
Wow, nice benefits. In the first six weeks of the low VA diet my body was so exhausted, but in a good way, I got so much sleep during that time. I had some extreme stuff happen like weird nerve stuff in my arm and I had an eyelid twitching for a week straight!
I've had a mild sore throat come and go without any cold or flu symptoms associated with it. I still get a hoarse voice at times but my voice is much less hoarse overall and I'm much more resistant to losing my voice since going low VA.
Three times last year and once this year I've had what seems like food poisoning but it seems VA connected. It happens when I'm in a detox already then I come down with nausea and the symptoms of stomach flu or food poisoning. I feel properly sick and can't eat. Forcing myself to vomit brings up bile and I immediately feel way better after I throw up the bile. I don't have enough evidence to say it is caused by VA toxicity but it is very suspicious how often I've had it. Once I recover I'm then out of that current detox cycle. Nausea, vomiting, headache (permanent headache while this happens) are all symptoms of acute Hypervitaminosis A.
In fact Hepatitis, Coronavirus, Influenza, Measles, Mumps etc etc are all significantly milder in children. Mawson has convincingly shown that most of the symptoms of flu are likely caused by temporary Hypervitaminosis A so it is likely that illness severity from all these virues is mostly to do with VA stores.
I'm pretty sure rice bran oil is high in PUFA and a bad choice to fry with. If your culture does not use lard or beef fat you've still got refined palm oil, coconut oil and olive oil as good options to cook with.
There will probably be plenty of people that disagree with me but I like refined palm oil. Yes it is a highly refined product and the raw product is high in carotenoids but the refined product contains zero carotenoids, it has a fairly neutral flavour and is a stable oil to fry with. Failing that light olive oil is available everywhere. I happily buy foods that contain refined palm oil and I cook with light olive oil.
People can buy red palm oil now in health food stores for a premium, pretty much the worst oil one could possibly use whereas cheap refined palm oil is fine. Strange world...
Very nice to read the benefits of this process !
Yes I agree about the flu and severity from all viruses is mostly to do with VA stores .
@naveen What about peanut oil? When I lived in Rajasthan 40 years ago all cooking was done in peanut oil and it was fabulous! Also people looked much healthier than people from Punjab who had more ghee available. I had noticed this because in my family they used to cook with peanut oil, refined from Africa, and it was way less tasty. Of course the Rajasthani oil was local. Maybe worth having a look at the retinoids content.
I want to chime in about the diets that normally include ghee! I do have an example in my life of someone from that zone.
Now, of course, I would tend to believe that you must be of these genetics for this diet to work for you.
The young man I know well is extremely healthy with straight strong jaw and teeth. He tells me that each child was given one egg per day. Lentils were eaten daily. Meat every other day. White rice. Trad breads, but also store breads. Lots of spices.
Now, interestingly enough, I suspect that things have caught up to one of his parents, who I met. We had similar problems with chronic headaches... and were swapping ideas.
Is this because the agriculture there is starting to adopt our ways (roundup? corn?)
When his parents were visiting they expressed their love for our corn and how they were eating corn daily. We do grow the best sweet corn here, in New England! But my young friend told me that corn is a fave for them even at home.
As for butter, I think (unless you were royal) (worldwide) butter was made from the milk you bought. In other words, it was a tiny little treat and not an entire food group.
I fall in the category of believing that carotenes are a very bad thing for me. I can totally see how perhaps some genetics might have adapted to them more. Not mine though!
Grant wrote about villages in China who ate loads of sweet potato and paid a high price health -wise, going blind and being crippled...there was a BBC video about the mobile units that come in and do mass eye surgeries...
I've totally lost my baking mojo because I relied so heavily on butter. I think the replacement might be lard, (for me, as a genetic European) but have to get some good quality lard in to experiment.
Tim, I'm sad you've had what I call "food attacks" but I'm glad you are starting to think they are detox related. I'm an expert on them, unfortunately.
@lil-chick
95% of the diet of some PNG tribes is sweet potato! And they don't have too many problems AFAIK. I think they usually eat it without fat which will drastically reduce carotenoid absorption. I'm more shocked they don't get bad kidney stones from it, it's so high in oxalic acid.
I agree about butter. In the past most of the population didn't eat that much. Lard was more common. Even most italians used more lard than olive oil until fairly recently. Ayurveda praises ghee but when I've seen the amounts called for in ayurvedic recipes they are tiny!
I think Tacitus wrote about the germanic tribes using a lot of butter. One has to be careful with that data though. He might have just been witness to them putting on a special spread for him rather than it being a normal thing.