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Grant's May 2022 Update
@are , I'd like to add on that subject that I have met different doctors, some dismissed the idea that accutane could have caused any harm, some believed it very well. Saying that I have been following low A diet to cure accutane side effects (to get prescription for vit A levels testing) though seemed to worry doctor somewhat, wasn't met with criticism. There's no point to try to convince a close-minded doctor, rather (if possible) it would be better to switch to one more open-minded. Anyway, (at least where I live) city doctors just follow already established protocols, maybe doctors involved in research can have freedom to try new things.
Hi Grant, when you were having vision problems did you ever try a vitamin C supplement before removing onions from your diet? I ask because recently I've had foggy vision (not night blindness) that cleared up quite quickly after a single dose of vitamin C.
@are, ok I see. Maybe the forum could have benefited by having a section "Non related to vitamin A topics" , or you could refer him to only "Progress reports" section? Even if he's a great guy, if he's skeptical / not interested for his own health, I doubt he well read this entire forum.
All we need to see is how the viruses are isolated - and most of even slightly intelligent people would realise that we have been hoodwinked. The laboratory brew they create to “isolate” the virus would put any witch to shame. With the monkey kidney cells, embryonic cells, several antibiotics, dyes, poisons, etc. is it a hairbreadth short of spider legs and bat’s wings (and I am not sure about the bat’s wings…). Then the computer models complete the sloppy job of the virologist/alchemists in white coats that we were told to trust implicitly.
To confuse matters, there are people who think that HIV is not a real virus but that pathogenic viruses more generally do exist.
The broad topic of challenging accepted truths is science is interesting. Harold Hillman and Gilbert Ling were two 20th century biologists who argued, with evidence, that a lot of the accepted truths about biology were completely inaccurate. I am not personally qualified to say who is right and who is wrong in the field of biology, but I am also not willing to defer to say a vote by a large group biologists as a way of determining the truth.
I think the problem is that science is now 'government sanctioned' or not sanctioned. The same holds true for the cosmological sciences. Government money is spent chasing one paradigm and alternate ones are not funded. We're talking about virology here, but an equal discussion could be had about an alternate cosmology called Plasma Cosmology, or an adjunct theory to that called Electric Universe theory. It posits that electricity is the central force in the universe, not gravity. But all funds are spent on the Standard Model. But the Standard Model rests on some incredible absurdities. In order to make it work they have to invent an ad-hoc variable of more than 95% of matter in the universe that no one can detect (dark matter, dark energy) to make gravity work as the central governing force. It's pretty ridiculous, but it's the one funded and taken as fact.
Ebola? Norovirus? I'm still waiting for an alternative explanation. So far I just see a bunch of handwaving.
I'm guessing none of you has ever attended a scientific conference, or been part of an advanced education program in the sciences, or conducted scientific research... If you have, I marvel at how you wound up with your current opinions. If you haven't, then your opinions are obviously those of a spectator who has no direct experience with such a system.
As someone who was made to attend church as a child, and who has also been working in the academic sciences for 15 years, I can tell you that there are some marked differences in their purpose and approach. Science is the antithesis of faith. Science does require making assumptions in order to construct logical arguments, but those assumptions are supposed to be clearly defined at the outset, and their validity is always open to debate. Scientific "fact" is always open to scrutiny and debate. Organized religion is inherently dogmatic and closed to debate. Stephen J. Gould had a lot to say on the matter if anyone wants to read more on the subject.
Grant and anyone else here is welcome to critique the existing scientific paradigms. It is not the questioning of the paradigms that is a problem. The problem is the inappropriate weighing of evidence and the clinging to hypotheses that are clearly wrong based on the available evidence. There is nothing wrong with generating (or is it Genereuxing?) a hypothesis that Vitamin A is pure poison based on one's personal experience with it, but when your hypothetical model lacks explanatory and predictive power that the dominant paradigm offers, you either have to show new compelling evidence in opposition to the dominant paradigm, or accept that your hypothetical model does not explain reality as well as the existing paradigm. The more you cling to a model that has poor explanatory and predictive power, particularly in light of parsimony, the more dogmatic and less scientific you are being.
I still don't understand why people think Grant's diet is novel and how he is going to prove anything with it. Aren't there many people around the world who have already been eating basically just meat, rice, and beans (or something similar, like potatoes instead of rice/beans)? We know they survive on those diets, but we also know those diets are not devoid of Vitamin A. If they are not devoid of Vitamin A, then you can't prove that Vitamin A is not essential by eating them. What don't people here understand about that? If Grant isn't measuring the Vitamin A content of his food, and if he's not measuring the Vitamin A content of his liver, blood, fat, and other tissues, then he's really not showing us anything that we don't already know.
I formed my opinion about HIV by doing a ton of research and reading into the science said to prove its existence. I only have suspicions about other viruses and won't make specific claims about them, but I will venture to say I think HIV doesn't exist. It behooved me to do a deep dive because I'm gay and have been expected to test religiously for this using a completely flawed antibody testing schema and then potentially 'treated' with highly toxic drugs based on its premise. A lot of gay men were outright killed by AZT in the 1980s and so my skepticism is warranted. In fact HIV was said to exist and be responsible for a kind of plague, at a government press conference in 1984, before the papers had been released for review by the scientific community. This virus became a government policy before it was properly vetted.
If you really want to take a deep dive into how 'HIV' was supposedly discovered, this paper with its 383 references breaks everything down. The antibody tests, the proteins, the genetic material, all of it.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on May 13, 2022, 11:51 amI still don't understand why people think Grant's diet is novel and how he is going to prove anything with it. Aren't there many people around the world who have already been eating basically just meat, rice, and beans (or something similar, like potatoes instead of rice/beans)? We know they survive on those diets, but we also know those diets are not devoid of Vitamin A. If they are not devoid of Vitamin A, then you can't prove that Vitamin A is not essential by eating them. What don't people here understand about that? If Grant isn't measuring the Vitamin A content of his food, and if he's not measuring the Vitamin A content of his liver, blood, fat, and other tissues, then he's really not showing us anything that we don't already know.
Grant's diet showed us a template on how to address a set of health problems that seem associated with previous vitamin A intake. In this sense, the outcome being qualitatively measured is Grant's perception of his own health. I agree that the mechanism of how the diet is working for Grant is unclear.