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Grant has NOT proven that vitamin A is non-essential
What Grant has done is incredible.
He has proven that vitamin A is not required for survival anywhere near the amount suggested by mainstream sources.
He has also potentially identified an issue in chronic toxicity. Although personally to me the ideas around this still seem unclear.
However…
He has not proven that it is entirely non-essential.
Factors to consider
1. He is well nourished
2. He gets preformed (animal, final form) vitamin a in his diet every day through the consumption of beef and bison muscle meat which has a small amount of retinol.
3. He still has vitamin a in his serum and that will likely never change as long as he consumes meat.
The RDA for adult men is ~ 3000 IUs. For the last 10 years I've been down around 3 IUs.
So called vitamin A is claimed to be essential and critical for both eye health and stem cell differentiation (the very fundamental process needed for tissue maintenance).
Now after 10 years of officially being in a state of “severe deficiency” of the said vitamin, my eye health is perfect. My skin health is perfect, and like the best it’s been in my adult life. Most importantly, I have absolutely zero signs and symptoms of so-called vA deficiency.
And you want to claim it’s somehow because I'm still getting some micro-trace of the RDA?
Let’s do the math on it: 3/3000 = 0.001%, Or off by a 1000 fold. In science when you are wrong by a 1000 fold it is the same as being completely wrong.
What you are basically claiming, is oh, no now that there’s new evidence let’s move the goal posts on the criticality by a factor of 1000. I’m sorry, I find that position completely ridiculous.
"Carotenoids harvest light energy" says the google machine
Interesting that VA might be (or IS, I suppose that IS fact) used in eyes. Perhaps in the same way that carotenes are involved in photo-synthesis, (I added the hyphen there) perhaps the eyes use the VA's to convert the light that is seen into electric impulses that the brain can turn into a picture?
Perhaps the process of vision is somewhat like photo-synthesis. (what a great word, by the way, what I'm trying to explain is right there in the word)
So, if we could invent a planet without VA, our eyes might just not be able to see. However, I assume that the daily need for more is quite small.
A necessary micro-nutrient, perhaps. This might help explain why the body doesn't outright toss it out in a stronger, faster way. Or why foods with it can have an intriguing flavor. (buttery?)
@lil-chick Margo's experiment seemed to suggest that reintroducing vitamin A foods resolved her night vision issues. And it looked like she may have earned her low serum retinol value by taking a lot of wheat bran. And she did try taurine and selenium to try to resolve the night vision other ways. Margo's Log - Page 2 - Discussion | Ideas, Concepts, and Observations (ggenereux.blog)
Quote from Andrew B on August 19, 2024, 6:28 am@lil-chick Margo's experiment seemed to suggest that reintroducing vitamin A foods resolved her night vision issues. And it looked like she may have earned her low serum retinol value by taking a lot of wheat bran. And she did try taurine and selenium to try to resolve the night vision other ways. Margo's Log - Page 2 - Discussion | Ideas, Concepts, and Observations (ggenereux.blog)
Maybe it was because she stopped wheat bran? "In common wheat flour (low in carotenoids), the bran/gem fraction had 4-fold more lutein, 12-fold more zeaxanthin, and 2-fold more β-cryptoxanthin than the endosperm fractions " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3705341/#:~:text=In%20common%20wheat%20flour%20(low,the%20endosperm%20fractions%20%5B37%5D.
Lutein is claimed to be good for the eyes. But I disagree.
@janelle525 yes, it's possible. Margo also stopped the zinc supplements and Bryan who has had night vision issues also may have taken too much zinc. Sometimes too much zinc doesnt help night vision. Zinc at high doses can destroy retinal cells according to the study mentioned here. Retinal cells not reacting to light correctly is one possible reason for night vision issues. Is Zinc Good For Your Eyes? | Prevention
Quote from Andrew B on August 19, 2024, 7:05 am@janelle525 yes, it's possible. Margo also stopped the zinc supplements and Bryan who has had night vision issues also may have taken too much zinc. Sometimes too much zinc doesnt help night vision. Zinc at high doses can destroy retinal cells according to the study mentioned here. Retinal cells not reacting to light correctly is one possible reason for night vision issues. Is Zinc Good For Your Eyes? | Prevention
Yes I was wondering about that, but I didn't look it up, thank-you that actually makes more sense than the wheat bran. She was taking a LOT of zinc.
I was reading about how the photo sensors in the eyes work, and it appears that they need to be replaced constantly, which I suppose makes sense. Light is harsh. It's not like you create rods and cones as a baby and there you go. So the body might have an on-going, albeit small, need for VA and a desire to store-up a backlog of VA.
I also started wondering if the skin has some sort of mechanism like photo-synthesis to make vitamin D. It turns out that instead of being somewhat like plants, that system works more like MUSHROOMs. D3 comes from animals and D2 comes from mushrooms. So that is pretty neat and makes me wonder about genes in the world and how they get re-used by this or that life form.
The pineal gland is another thing I thought about when it comes to photo receptors in the body and I read that it works off of light reflected from the retina.
My husband absolutely lives for sweet corn and my diet has been corn-heavy lately and I feel I'm experiencing more dry-eye and perhaps it is because of the zeaxanthins, i remember people complaining about lutein etc and their eyes over time here on Grant's site. I try to only eat white corn but I bet it still has lots.