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Liver King no longer eating daily liver
Interesting, Hermes! Hopefully being able to eyeball liver MIGHT help with this problem of high VA levels in infant animals. Besides turning yellow, older livers have an awful texture too. Purple liver is firmer, yellow liver is mealy and soft.
Joe2, some people might have it in their minds to eat certain things because for some reason they think there is a nutrient in that thing that they can't get anywhere else.
Personally, I don't think I would do it, but I understand why someone might want to take liver in tiny amounts almost like a supplement. Also, personally, I don't think this is a game of trying to have a zero VA diet; I don't see the point because there is no zero-VA diet on earth. Also I think vitamin A overload might be more complicated than just "how much did you ingest?". I do understand that other people do like that idea of zero VA intake, and I wish them only good results!
Quote from Joe2 on September 18, 2024, 12:23 amYep. marrow and young livers are probably what kept him so young looking. Otherwise he would probably look 50 years older in the last 2 years than he does.
Calf liver has one of the highest retinol contents of all livers.
"Due to the risk of malformations caused by high doses of vitamin A, the British Health Authority warns against vitamin A supplementation during pregnancy and in women of childbearing age, as well as against the consumption of liver during pregnancy.5 According to British data, liver contains an average of 13-39 mg vitamin A per 100 g, corresponding to 44,000-130,000 IU, due to supplementary feeding. In calf's liver, the most heavily contaminated liver, up to 128 mg (equivalent to 420,000 IU) of vitamin A per 100 g was found. As a medicinal product, calf's liver should therefore be subject to prescription starting with a single dose of 2.5 g"
"Daily doses of 7.5-12 mg vitamin A (25,000-40,000 IU) in the first trimester of pregnancy are considered to cause malformations in humans. This dose is reached from 10 g of calf's liver. For infants, 30 mg vitamin A (100,000 IU; from 25 g calf's liver) already poses a risk of acute intoxication.7"
https://www.arznei-telegramm.de/html/1990_11/9011100_01.html
Wow, very interesting article @mosaic. (On my computer I was able to hit view and translate and see it in English).
I didn't realize that calves' liver was so high, I only thought older liver was that high. Thanks for the enlightenment.
It's good that they are figuring these things out. It is kind of strange that traditional people didn't figure it out. I've never heard of traditional people having a warning against eating liver during pregnancy. But it does seem smart.
It scares me to think that maybe I might have influenced mothers-to-be to follow WAPF ideas like eating liver and taking cod liver oil. (back when I was a WAPF'er). I surfed around the interwebs to see if WAPF has changed it's advice regarding this and it hasn't. Also other "health" bloggers besides WAPF are out there recommending it too.
Strangely Google is on our side and says:
"AI Overview
Quote from lil chick on December 1, 2024, 6:41 pmIt's good that they are figuring these things out. It is kind of strange that traditional people didn't figure it out. I've never heard of traditional people having a warning against eating liver during pregnancy. But it does seem smart.
Last year, I met a 95-year old german woman. She had worked as a midwife for her entire life. She told me that during her education, she learnt that pregnant mothers should never eat liver and carrots. So our ancestors knew it and it even includes beta-carotene, but it seems like it's just slowly forgotten. Weston Price spread lies about the importance of vitamin A.
He observed that people living remotely on a whole foods diet and natural lifestyle were not suffering from tooth decay like modern people do, and that animal foods were highly priotized (which shouldn't come as a surprise). Peope ate what animal foods were available - meat, eggs, fish, seafood, dairy.
His chapter on the Polynesians in the book "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" does not even include a description of what constitutes the "native foods", except that shellfish was eaten regularly. He just explains that once the islands got flooded with sugar and canned foods from the west, people began to suffer. Other chapters will probably be similar. His work merely shows the degenerative influence of the western lifestyle compared to fresh and whole natural foods. His observations should be separated from the solution he came up with, mixing butter oil and cod liver oil. It should not come as a surprise that switching to a diet high in refined sugar and canned foods (they were contaminated with lead and other stuff back then) is not good for health.
I assume he made a lot of stuff up to sell his concept of fat-soluble vitamins. The tribes he was visiting were not 100% isolated, most of their people had already switched partially to a modern lifestyle. It's impossible for a single man to seperate all the variables while interacting with a remote tribe that doesn't even speak his language. It would be an almost impossible feat to even visit one of the countless tribes he visited and correctly document all the aspects of their lifestyle and understand why they are healthy, but assuming he did that for so many tribes in such a short timespan is just absurd. But I too was blinded by WAPF.
The food chain of the past was not contaminated with artificial carotene and retinol supplementation, the animals were not treated with antibiotics to prevent infections, and people lived under the sun and had to deal with many infections themselves. Their lifestyle depleted retinol all the time. Herding animals, shielding them from all kinds of natural stressors, and feeding them high-carotene foods on top of supplements makes retinol accumulate in the meat and milk eventually.
So let's say you have a primitive tribe that lives on a diet that has <200 mcg of retinol per day. Their livers are basically empty. Maybe they would give their pregnant mothers egg yolks and some liver (like a couple grams) during pregnancy because of past issues with lack of something they did not understand but is in egg yolks and liver. But it doesn't even have to be lack of retinol, it could be anything, including b-vitamins. Either way, these people came from the background of completely depleted retinol stores. Not comparable.
Quote from mosaic on December 2, 2024, 12:25 amQuote from lil chick on December 1, 2024, 6:41 pmIt's good that they are figuring these things out. It is kind of strange that traditional people didn't figure it out. I've never heard of traditional people having a warning against eating liver during pregnancy. But it does seem smart.
Last year, I met a 95-year old german woman. She had worked as a midwife for her entire life. She told me that during her education, she learnt that pregnant mothers should never eat liver and carrots. So our ancestors knew it and it even includes beta-carotene, but it seems like it's just slowly forgotten. Weston Price spread lies about the importance of vitamin A.
He observed that people living remotely on a whole foods diet and natural lifestyle were not suffering from tooth decay like modern people do, and that animal foods were highly priotized (which shouldn't come as a surprise). Peope ate what animal foods were available - meat, eggs, fish, seafood, dairy.
His chapter on the Polynesians in the book "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" does not even include a description of what constitutes the "native foods", except that shellfish was eaten regularly. He just explains that once the islands got flooded with sugar and canned foods from the west, people began to suffer. Other chapters will probably be similar. His work merely shows the degenerative influence of the western lifestyle compared to fresh and whole natural foods. His observations should be separated from the solution he came up with, mixing butter oil and cod liver oil. It should not come as a surprise that switching to a diet high in refined sugar and canned foods (they were contaminated with lead and other stuff back then) is not good for health.
I assume he made a lot of stuff up to sell his concept of fat-soluble vitamins. The tribes he was visiting were not 100% isolated, most of their people had already switched partially to a modern lifestyle. It's impossible for a single man to seperate all the variables while interacting with a remote tribe that doesn't even speak his language. It would be an almost impossible feat to even visit one of the countless tribes he visited and correctly document all the aspects of their lifestyle and understand why they are healthy, but assuming he did that for so many tribes in such a short timespan is just absurd. But I too was blinded by WAPF.
The food chain of the past was not contaminated with artificial carotene and retinol supplementation, the animals were not treated with antibiotics to prevent infections, and people lived under the sun and had to deal with many infections themselves. Their lifestyle depleted retinol all the time. Herding animals, shielding them from all kinds of natural stressors, and feeding them high-carotene foods on top of supplements makes retinol accumulate in the meat and milk eventually.
So let's say you have a primitive tribe that lives on a diet that has <200 mcg of retinol per day. Their livers are basically empty. Maybe they would give their pregnant mothers egg yolks and some liver (like a couple grams) during pregnancy because of past issues with lack of something they did not understand but is in egg yolks and liver. But it doesn't even have to be lack of retinol, it could be anything, including b-vitamins. Either way, these people came from the background of completely depleted retinol stores. Not comparable.
Well written Mosaic. Glad to see you here. Appreciate the sarcasm catch.
1000% on take on Price. I doubt he did it on purpose the way Ancel Keys flat out lied about his nutritional take. Price did write that all the groups he visited had a special diet for their prospective Mothers that the girls were required to eat for a year or two before conception. He never did describe that diet though. He speculated it was high in the fat parts of the animals. Given what is written on kosher law in Bible and elsewhere, I think that speculation is backwards. Most old cultures already knew to avoid bottom feeders, limit fat intake and max out protein with good carbohydrates and fiber. My bet is that they cleaned up the young girls' diets even more so.