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How does A leave the body?
Quote from YH on January 18, 2019, 12:57 pmI think it very difficult for Vitamin A to leave the body. Its half life is 200-300, and the body also recycles Vitamin A via bile. Additionally, the amount of Vitamin A consumed serves as a signal for body on how to regulate/regenerate skin, cells, etc. Depleting yourself of Vitamin A is very difficult to do even if you go on a low Vitamin A diet for a few months.
This is kind of what I was thinking. The recycling of it makes it hard. Tho since it’s in so many foods, we have to have evolved some way to manage it besides just storing it.
Grant did it and some here too. It's obviously doable but like everything takes time. People expecting to heal everything in 3 months when they are in their 50s...more likely going to take much longer.
That being said, maybe it is possible to do it faster via supplementation. Bodybuilders do a lot of damage to their liver and still recover. There is so many unexplored supplements that could help: choline and inositol, tudca and then the ones discussed here Taurine, vitamin E, selenium ect.
Quote from Guest on January 18, 2019, 9:16 pmGrant did it and some here too. It's obviously doable but like everything takes time. People expecting to heal everything in 3 months when they are in their 50s...more likely going to take much longer.
That being said, maybe it is possible to do it faster via supplementation. Bodybuilders do a lot of damage to their liver and still recover. There is so many unexplored supplements that could help: choline and inositol, tudca and then the ones discussed here Taurine, vitamin E, selenium ect.
When I first heard of this diet and the recovery time of detoxing the A, I thought that 6 months was not long at all. I am the poster above that hasn't had improvement doing the diet for almost 4 months. Others like Grant had significant improvement within a month with getting rid of his fatigue ( I am a bit younger than Grant who was in his 50s when he started the diet / fatigue is my one of my biggest problems) so my point is that there may a lot of variation and some of that variation might depend on more than just age. There isn't all that much data on detox and recovery, and low vA diets seem to vary from person to person so there doesn't seem to be a best diet so far. Supplements *could* help but they are a crap shoot. I would not call everything on your list of supplements as unexplored - Dr Smith and others have written about some of them for helping with vA toxicity and Dr. Smith has some of them on his treatment plans for his clients.
From Grant book:
2014 August
August 8, start researching eczema.
August 9, start my experiment.
August 12-15, early results.
2014 August-2015 May
The long road to recovery. It has not been exactly a linear and
direct recovery. There have been some road bumps and setbacks.
But, overall, everything has slowly moved back to normal."
Thaat's 10 month recovery. And in his recent updates he has had other issues heal after years. I agree it's all individual but grant didn't heal everything in few months.
I am well aware of most of Dr Smith supplement advice from his forum but there are ones that are intersting because they are used a lot by bodybuilders
I found this about TUDCA:
Ursodeoxycholic acid restores anabolic liver
Mexican doctors managed to repair a bodybuilder's damaged using the bile acid ursodeoxycholic acid, UDCA for short. UDCA is a cholesterol regulator that humans manufacture in small quantities in the body. Doctors and supplements
manufacturers use a synthetic version of the substance. The full name for UDCA is 3alpha,7beta dihydroxy 5alpha cholan 24-oic acid. [Structure below]
The 29-year-old bodybuilder had been suffering from stomach pain for two months. Two weeks before he went to the doctor he also developed jaundice and itching. He had lost fourteen kilograms.
The doctors discovered that his liver was in a bad way. The steroids the bodybuilder had been taking had given him cholestasis, a condition in which the ducts in the liver become inflamed and therefore cannot remove bile to the duodenum. Bile removes cholesterol from the body.
Before becoming ill, the bodybuilder had taken a three-month course of 25 mg of proviron per day, 40 mg of andriol per day, 30 mg of deca per day, 50 mg of oxymetholone per day and 800 mg of testosterone per day. [It?s there in black and white ? Ed.]
The doctors got the bodybuilder to stop taking the steroids and gave him a daily 15 mg per kg bodyweight of ursodeoxycholic acid. Ursodiol, as it is also called, removes poisonous bile acids and possibly also steroids from the liver by competition - and thus stimulates the recovery of the ducts through which the liver sends the bile acid to the duodenum in the gut. [Gut. 1991 Sep;32(9):1061-5.] It took a couple of months but the bodybuilder?s liver function recovered.
Sources:
Liver Int. 2008 Feb;28(2):278-82.
Quote from Guest on January 18, 2019, 12:37 pmI have changed the low vA foods I eat and the amounts of them. Also, one thing I didn't really do for the first 2 to 3 months is eat mostly organic, so that may have been something to hold my healing back. I think there is usually outliers and unfortunately I think I am one of those as far as how long it will take me to improve, though maybe there are many others who are like me and they just aren't heard from - it doesn't seem like there is a big enough sample size to know how long it takes to heal. Grant made a comment somewhere here than he knew of others that didn't improve in the first few months and so they gave up.
I don't think you're the only person who hasn't noticed benefits in the first few months. I did a low A diet fairly strictly for about 3.5 months and didn't feel any benefit - It became hard to motivate myself to continue to eat a restricted diet when I wasn't noticing any benefit, so I gave up before xmas.
I didn't notice any issue with consuming more high vitamin A foods, except for with dairy - which is definitely an issue for me. Whether that is because of vitamin A toxicity or not remains to be seen. I am not sure.
I have begun to eat a low vitamin A diet again recently, but it isn't quite as dependent upon grains as it was before and thus is higher in vitamin A than the previous low vitamin A diet.
So I don't think you're the only one. I have spoken to someone who's problems were definitely vitamin A related, who had been doing the diet for a number of months. His serum vitamin A was still very high, in spite of his having improved during that time, so it is clear that this is a lengthy process. Having said that, one would expect that after 4 months, some benefit might have been noticed if this were to be the problem.
Thanks Harry for the feedback. I don't really have any other things to try except getting more restrictive and maybe trying to elliminate salicylates. Grant established that vA causes allergies so if I have sort of sensitivity to them because of the vA then shouldn't one get rid of all problematic food till healed? Though elliminating them will be extremely difficult for me since the food list is very short.
So many of my symptoms line up with vA toxicity purposed by Grant that I just know it is the root cause.
Quote from Orion on January 16, 2019, 7:05 amRetinol (fat-soluble) is conjugated with glucuronic acid and then further metabolized to retinal and retinoic acid. Retinoic acid is excreted in feces via biliary elimination. Retinal, retinoic acid, and other water-soluble metabolites excreted in urine and feces.
Ethanol, morphine, paracetamol (acetaminophen), cyclooxygenase inhibitors (NSAIDs), endogenous steroids, and certain benzodiazepines are all capable of contributing to GCA depletion, with ethanol and acetaminophen being the most commonly implicated substances involved in cases of accidental overdoses which have been positively attributed to glucuronic acid depletion.
Probably why smoking helps decrease vitamin A:
Excessive quantities of GCA can also be hazardous to health, tobacco smoke, most barbiturates, and some carbamates are known to actually stimulate GCA production.
Glucuronic acid is a precursor of ascorbic acid (vitamin C, formerly called as L-hexuronic acid). Ascorbate can be biosynthesized by higher plants, algae, yeast and most animals. This ability is lacking in some mammals (including humans and guinea pigs) and also in insects, invertebrates and most fishes. These species require external ascorbate supply, because they lack the biosynthetic enzyme L-gulonolactone oxidase.
Orion, I have been wondering all along if there was a connection to all of this with benzodiazepine drugs. I quit taking lorazepam over three years ago, but the symptoms I had at first upon starting the low-A diet were EXACTLY like what I suffered after quitting the Rx drug! Intense itching, restless leg syndrome (more like restless BODY syndrome), insomnia, headache, fatigue, ringing in the ears. Can you point me to a source regarding benzos depleting GCA?
Hi Patti,
Pubmed might be useful, I do see that one study mentioned that:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23554428
"The widely used hypnosedative-anxiolytic agent R,S-lorazepam is cleared predominantly by conjugation with glucuronic acid in humans, but the enantioselective glucuronidation of lorazepam has received little attention."
So I suspect this would most likely deplete GCA stores, especially if someone was to consume alcohol frequently.
Quote from Orion on January 21, 2019, 6:26 amHi Patti,
Pubmed might be useful, I do see that one study mentioned that:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23554428
"The widely used hypnosedative-anxiolytic agent R,S-lorazepam is cleared predominantly by conjugation with glucuronic acid in humans, but the enantioselective glucuronidation of lorazepam has received little attention."
So I suspect this would most likely deplete GCA stores, especially if someone was to consume alcohol frequently.
Orion, thank you SO much! I've never been much of a drinker, but had to quit completely in 2015 when I stopped the lorazepam. The experts in benzo recovery warn that it's impossible to restore and up-regulate GABA receptors if you drink alcohol at ALL, since it acts in the very same way benzos do on the GABA system. Such a long and complicated road this is. Anyway, thanks!