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Highlights From My Journey So Far (Ultra-low VA)
I'm about 10 months into a low vitamin A diet, with the last 5 or so months being ultra low.
Though I had some health issues, I was very slim, athletic and fit for about 15 years. On the surface I was a "poster-girl" for health and vitality until I took a sedentary job and began consuming a lot of fish and dairy in my diet. Hormonal imbalances and weight gain ensued, but when I moved back to Canada things took a turn for the worse.
As Grant has pointed out before, Canada forces its citizens to consume milk supplemented with vitamin A (the only way around this is to own a cow or goat or buy your milk across the border in the US). About 6-8 months consuming Canadian dairy, I developed seborrheic dermatitis on my eyebrows. Also known as "craddle cap", seb derm is said to be a form of eczema that targets scalp, face, and eyebrows.
For most people, seb derm has "flare ups" that come and go, but not in my case - it never went away. It has been a slow but steady decline ever since 2014. It is unsightly, but the worst part of it for me is the intense itching and dryness.
Hoping to spare my liver, I skipped the dermatologist's recommendation to treat symptoms with steroid drugs, but in my naivety I followed advice that was almost (or just) as bad. These "health experts" include (the usual suspects) Ray Peat and Morley Robbins, as well as Andrew Cutler, Dr. David Brownstein, Dr. Stasha Gominak, Dr. Darren Schmidt, and Donia Alawi. During this time I developed extremely severe anemia (exacerbated by milk kefir and reversed in one year by including beef in my diet), thick, orangey skin on my soles, large fibroids, a feeling of "pressure" on my liver, and a small nodule on my thyroid. I was 10-15 pounds overweight and experienced frequent injury when trying to exercise.
After asking God in prayer if I was doing something to make myself unwell, I came across what seemed to be the answer the very next day - Grant's books. Read them all, went cold-turkey, and the low vitamin A journey began.
On the positive side, I lost about 10 pounds without even trying. I eat 2-3 meals per day plus snacks and seconds if I feel like it. I don't portion-control. I'm able to exercise again without injury which helps me continue to lose weight. Too much exercise gives me insomnia.
Sadly, there is no improvement in my seb derm at this point. Some symptoms seemed to improve but came back - tinnitus, chelitis, metallic taste. I also started getting very dry mouth, especially after dinner.
The worst side-effect I can think of is acne - the worst acne I've had in my whole life. It was never an issue before. Since I started this diet, I began reacting to moderately low vitamin A foods with acne. This intensified greatly when trying ACV, which I no longer consume. I may have also switched from chicken to bison around this time.
If I eat a (peeled) apple or a fig or yellow potato, or anything supposedly on the lower end of beta-carotene/lutein/zeaxanthin, within 24-hours I will have the worst acne breakout on my face. It was only a year ago that I was eating apples almost every day and had clear skin. Now that I'm detoxing, my body is rejecting it. IDK what to do to avoid scarring. The conventional recommendation is vitamin A!
I also react unpleasantly to olive oil (though I haven't tried unrefined). My diet is much like Grant's, with the addition of oats and potatoes. I eat salt. No oil, no coffee, no supplements. In general I feel good on this diet. Removing egg whites improved my digestion.
Things are getting busy for me so IDK how often I can post here, but I hope to give updates and also post about some experiences and theories regarding copper toxicity and iodine (which gave me a goiter - gone with discontinued use). Copper was a potential culprit for some time, as a hair test showed it was off-the-charts high for me. After decades of eating organic food I discovered that it's often sprayed with copper sulfate. I'm no chemist but I can imagine this would lead to issues with copper over time.
Thanks for stopping by and reading this. I hope you find it helpful in some way!
I’m personally no longer in favour of ultra low vA diet. I think reducing vA is essential but I think having a nutrient dense diet while doing it is the best idea. Limited diets have unintended consequences. Mine turned out to be low in choline, an essential nutrient. Who knew? I think this has really messed me up. Choline required for cell membranes and the parasympathetic nervous system. Poor absorption results from poor cell membranes and then all nutrients become low. If the parasympathetic nervous system can’t work well it’s a disaster. If we aren’t in the parasympathetic state enough we can’t heal or detoxify. All things I think happened to me on the detox.
The time in my life I had acne was when I was living a lifestyle that I gave me leaky gut AND was eating a very limited diet. If you have leaky gut ANY foods eaten regularly will result in an allergic (acne) reaction. Another consequence of a limited diet is that you repeat the same foods. Rotation is better for this. I think zinc can help acne too. I’ve not had an issue since supplementing zinc. If a strong vA detox damages gut walls then the detox could have worsened leaky gut. I think a strong detox is damaging.
This does not mean I don’t believe in the importance of reducing vA toxicity. I do. However, I really question the best way to do it. Going low vA - the way I did it at least - has damaged my health. I did not do the high meat version though. I did keep in variety but not enough I now think. Going from high vA intake to very low induced a very strong detox (showing how keen the body is to get rid!) but this often overwhelms the body’s ability to get rid of it and damage ensues. This will be different for everyone but this is my experience. This detox can be dangerous - beware.
Maybe we should all take note of the 62 year old man study. He detoxed from hypervitaminosis A while eating 4000IU of vA with high protein. Admittedly this was before glyphosate so his detox efficiency was likely better.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7198069/
@boxie-moxie what was your molybdenum on hair tests? It is probably a good idea for most people to take some molybdenum and also some vit C, selenium, iodine and zinc.. Especially females that can have issues with estrogen/copper..
I’d second what Jiri says. I did hair tests for the first few years of vA detox (2018-2021). My selenium, zinc and particularly molybdenum went very low. Even with daily supplementation they were on the low side. I don’t know what my iodine doing. Vitamin C is a tricky one as I have an oxalate forming issue, be wary if oxalates are an issue, don’t go over 250mg a day (I think that’s the advice in TLO group).
@jaj Hi Jenny! Wikipedia's entry is actually a good starting point for a conversation on nutrient dense foods. It provides a definition, international scoring systems, and criticisms. That last section highlights the shortcomings of this model: diminished importance of macronutrients including healthy ones we need, misleading ratings based on micro/macro ratios rather than actual units, and the potential for nutrient dense diets to ironically be nutrient deficient - even in micronutrients.
Evaluating a diet is complicated further by factors like bioavailability, contaminants, genetics, lifestyle, etc.
I don't think "limited diet" and "nutrient deficiency" are necessarily synonymous. Meat contains plenty of choline and zinc, so including it as a staple can be a way to avoid deficiency. When I was my most fit and healthy, my diet included 1-2 servings of organic beef per day.
Not including meat might also make it more challenging to get adequate protein, which Grant has pointed out plays an important role in detoxing (as it's needed to make RBP). In the study of the 62 (or 63) year-old man, he was getting 120g of protein per day. Since his pre-detox diet included beef in the form of desiccated beef liver, I'm assuming that he was not averse to getting his 120g/day protein consuming meat.
Before treatment the man's muscles had atrophied due to protein malnourishment, an example of the importance of this macronutrient and energy-dense foods. (And as an aside, sometimes modern sedentary lifestyles are the problem, as being active would consume a lot more of those "extra" calories.)
Strangely enough, the study said that while his liver had "massive vitamin A deposition" he had no other signs of vitamin A toxicity. Yet they were treating him with furosemide for edema - a symptom of chronic VA toxicity (see Grant's Poisoning for Profits, pg. 53).
The signs of toxicity they were looking for include "loss of hair, dry skin, pruritis, cheilosis, gingivitis, headache, anorexia, fatigue, muscle and bone pain, and an elevated serum concentration of vitamin A." Their explanation for the lack of symptoms was that protein deficiency "is known to impair the hepatic release of vitamin A" and "low vitamin A/RBP ratios suggest that mechanisms in addition to the low serum RBP may have impeded hepatic release of vitamin A".
Perhaps symptoms like edema manifest when there's not enough protein for the liver to release VA? And when he did start getting protein, my guess is that he didn't experience the typical symptoms because his body kept binding more and more VA?
... both serum vitamin A and the vitamin A/RBP ratio subsequently fell, and peripheral vitamin A toxicity never appeared.
It sounds like the VA level dropped because more of it was being bound up in RBP (resulting in a lower serum VA/RBP ratio). Could the strong detox you experienced be caused by having enough protein to get the detox going but not enough to lower your VA/RBP ratio?
BTW anyone looking for the full 1981 study can find it here: "Reversible Hepatotoxicity Associated with Hepatic Vitamin A Accumulation in a Protein-Deficient Patient". This is an interesting study, Jenny. Thanks for sharing it!
@boxie-moxie I'm grateful that you also found Grant's work as an answer to prayer. I had been praying for quite a while about my health. One day, I took a dose of cod liver oil, got an immediate headache, jumped down the rabbit hole... and found his name mentioned in a one-star Amazon review about the Root Cause Protocol. Thank God!
I also react poorly to apple cider vinegar and raw apples. However, cooked apples seem to be great for me. If I eat a raw apple, my face gets itchy and I have terrible GI symptoms. So I chop up the apples and cook them in ghee with maple syrup, a bit of Ceylon cinnamon, and Celtic sea salt (all organic except the salt). I don't know if this would work for you. Also, I'm not ultra-low vitamin A in that I do eat ghee, lettuce, celery, etc. But never anything orange, which seems to be the worst trigger for me. My personal goal is to keep diversity in my diet and do a slow, sustainable detox.
I didn't know that organic crops are sprayed with copper sulfate. Um. Wow. So... Conventional is better?!??
Have you tried applying any minerals topically? I've been playing with transdermal zinc, molybdenum, selenium, magnesium, and potassium... small doses. Not sure if it's doing much, but I do believe our soils may be deficient.
To me, skin problems may indicate a system taxed by heavy metals. On Episode 62 of Love Your Liver (which my Berkey-copper-filtration comment was deleted from), Garrett Smith discusses detoxing heavy metals with appropriate doses of his recommended minerals. He is against chelation therapy because it causes the loss of beneficial minerals. His theory in practice has a positive testimony of a young child clearing up lead poisoning, slowly but faster than expected.
It is an interesting hypothesis, which of course I look at all the more skeptically, given his erasure of outside opinions. Nonetheless, it may be helpful advice. He often talks about fish having a high amount of heavy metals. You mentioned eating a lot of fish for a time, so that's why I'm bringing it up. Also the metallic taste you experience. Did your hair test show anything else out of range?
Have you had any recent bloodwork, i.e. CBC, allergy testing? Do you avoid gluten, peanuts, etc.? Have you done an elimination diet?
Quote from Angela on October 15, 2022, 1:53 pm@jaj Hi Jenny! Wikipedia's entry is actually a good starting point for a conversation on nutrient dense foods. It provides a definition, international scoring systems, and criticisms. That last section highlights the shortcomings of this model: diminished importance of macronutrients including healthy ones we need, misleading ratings based on micro/macro ratios rather than actual units, and the potential for nutrient dense diets to ironically be nutrient deficient - even in micronutrients.
Evaluating a diet is complicated further by factors like bioavailability, contaminants, genetics, lifestyle, etc.
I don't think "limited diet" and "nutrient deficiency" are necessarily synonymous. Meat contains plenty of choline and zinc, so including it as a staple can be a way to avoid deficiency. When I was my most fit and healthy, my diet included 1-2 servings of organic beef per day.
Not including meat might also make it more challenging to get adequate protein, which Grant has pointed out plays an important role in detoxing (as it's needed to make RBP). In the study of the 62 (or 63) year-old man, he was getting 120g of protein per day. Since his pre-detox diet included beef in the form of desiccated beef liver, I'm assuming that he was not averse to getting his 120g/day protein consuming meat.
Before treatment the man's muscles had atrophied due to protein malnourishment, an example of the importance of this macronutrient and energy-dense foods. (And as an aside, sometimes modern sedentary lifestyles are the problem, as being active would consume a lot more of those "extra" calories.)
Strangely enough, the study said that while his liver had "massive vitamin A deposition" he had no other signs of vitamin A toxicity. Yet they were treating him with furosemide for edema - a symptom of chronic VA toxicity (see Grant's Poisoning for Profits, pg. 53).
The signs of toxicity they were looking for include "loss of hair, dry skin, pruritis, cheilosis, gingivitis, headache, anorexia, fatigue, muscle and bone pain, and an elevated serum concentration of vitamin A." Their explanation for the lack of symptoms was that protein deficiency "is known to impair the hepatic release of vitamin A" and "low vitamin A/RBP ratios suggest that mechanisms in addition to the low serum RBP may have impeded hepatic release of vitamin A".
Perhaps symptoms like edema manifest when there's not enough protein for the liver to release VA? And when he did start getting protein, my guess is that he didn't experience the typical symptoms because his body kept binding more and more VA?
... both serum vitamin A and the vitamin A/RBP ratio subsequently fell, and peripheral vitamin A toxicity never appeared.
It sounds like the VA level dropped because more of it was being bound up in RBP (resulting in a lower serum VA/RBP ratio). Could the strong detox you experienced be caused by having enough protein to get the detox going but not enough to lower your VA/RBP ratio?
BTW anyone looking for the full 1981 study can find it here: "Reversible Hepatotoxicity Associated with Hepatic Vitamin A Accumulation in a Protein-Deficient Patient". This is an interesting study, Jenny. Thanks for sharing it!
Some good points. I do appologise for hijacking your thread, the subject is interesting. I have for a long time been interested in the consequences of starvation and the calorie fixation of the western world. The minnesota starvation experiment especially. They were given a more or less plant based low calorie diet mimicing foods that were available during the war, definately not enough protein but also what seemed to be low A and low most other stuff as well.
The symtoms of the starved subjects were pretty much what most dieting women experience (food fixation, poor mental health to mention a few). The refeed is what interests me the most, their extreme hunger which took years to resolve and they all craved very calorie dense foods like pastries and chocolate and a lot of it. The first gaining weight and then it coming off again narurally. They found that giving micronutrients were pointless unless adequate caloric needs were met.
We are born with hunger and satiation cues controlled by hormones leptin and ghrelin. If obesity is a form of toxicity, starvation could be as well. If deficient in micronutrients needed for the liver to do its job, as well as protein, or even calories overall, extreme hunger makes sense. But it is a complex topic, as DNA damage (caused by generations of toxicity?) could very well play a role as well. I keep thinking about so many fitness girls, anorexia sufferers and myself for that matter, with years of too much exercise, too little food/too "healthy" food and constantly battling hunger. But also those who start off with having 5 lbs to lose, crash diet, become very hungry, eat all of it back and some, and repeat that circle, ending up overweight. I think of the refeeds many has been through with extreme hunger, letting go and eating to satiation, gaining weitht, losing it again unconsciously, coning off not only chronic hunger and cravings but also many other ailments such as digestion issues, hair fall, anxiety, depression, dry skin, ocd and whatnot (based on testimonals I have read on different forums online) - all symptoms of toxicity but also starvation. Stephanie Buttermore has presented some studies backing up going "all in". The oedema always follow, and always go away. Those that stick to "healthy" eating never seem to recover. Those who follow cravings, allowing processed foods, seems to recover. Processed foods are calorie dense and can be nutrient void. Processed foods also include pizza and burgers (choline, zinc, vitaminer, protein...). In the states, from what I remember as an exchange student back in the year 2000, EVERYTHING had A in it. Cookies too.
I do wonder how the subjects in the minnesota starvation experiment would have faired If they had been eating adequate protein during the 6 month semi-starvation period. But looking at the bodybuilding and fitness industry, probably not that much better as they also, while lifting weights, for the most part eat very low calories although high protein. However probably not poisoning thenselves with green smoothies and liver. @jiri did you ever do any VLC cut like old school 1200 calories a day sort of cut, and how did you fare?
I was thinking about starting a separate thread for further discussion, if there is an interest for it. Again, I am sorry for spamming your progress thread.
Edit: some sort of point I was trying to make, it is probably a lot easier becoming toxic with high or low calories if the protein need is not met. Especially if one has a high toxic load stored and begin exercising more with eating too little ignoring food cravings (as in cravings for energy). More calories also equals more protein and more micronutrients overall, and energy for the repair work.
@liz in bodybuidling I never counted calories. When I was on diet to burn fat I was eating high protein, very low fat like under 10% of calories and carb cycling. That works really good for most people. The only negative is that you get hungry like crazy.. I would "damage" and lower my metabolism during that time, but after that I would start "bulking" again so eating as much food as possible to gain new muscles.. I don't know what you trying to say. That when you slow down your metabolism with low calorie diet you can't detox properly? If that is the case I agree for sure. When your metabolism slows down everything slows down.. I think Ray Peat is right about this. THat for good health you need to have good high metabolism, BUT you can't force it with taking thyroid hormones etc.. That is dangerous. You just have to use plenty of good calories so the body doesn't have a reason to slow down metabolism. Basically eat more, move more is much better for keep moving everything detoxing as well..
@jiri Thanks for replying 🙂 I think my point is, being starved for an extended period of time, in one form or another, whether controlled or not, can cause problems, just as in the minnesota starvation study. But my question, although rather vague, was if you experienced similar issues like in the minnesota starvation study with extreme hunger and obsession with food, and/pr mental issues and lethargy? Or even metabolic ones like having to go extremely low on calories in order to keep losing weight? And in refeed mode, if you gained a lot of weigh very quickly and above your starting weight, never feeling satiated, and also experiencing oedema especially in the adbominal area. I remember your issues started after accutane, but if they had started previously due to overload of A foods, it would have been interesting to hear if you experienxed any "detox" issues due to too much A being dumped too fast during your cut(s), but that might also depend on how low you went and for how long, considering you did get adequate protein.
I just had a thought-rant that's all 😂. After having my brain being more or less in complete dementia-mode for years it feels good to be able to use it a little without being completely worn out by it 🤣
I just think there are many factors involved in the whole "detox" thing not underestimating getting adequate calories in. The western world started starving themselves and stopped eating intuitively after ww2 when some doctor came up with BMI and told half the American population they were fat, basically...