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Matt Stone fixing night blindness with vit A
Quote from Jiří on November 20, 2025, 12:10 amI am questioning the period of the time when you do low vit A for 5+years and your serum numbers are close to deficient. Where you are no longer fixing any issues that you had during toxicity days..
Unfortunately no, some of my issues (notably rosacea) weren't fixed, so I'm not here out of curiosity or dogma. At my last serum test I was deficient (at a mark around 60% from zero to the bottom of the range) and I was at the top of the form compared to how my health fluctuate. I'm open to other ideas too, for example my issues could be linked to copper/mercury toxicity. Or that due to Accutane use it is unresolvable after all..
But if we concentrate on the video, I have hard time to believe the guy is/was vit A deficient.
Quote from Jiří on November 20, 2025, 1:54 am@grapes Matt should do some testing for sure. In your case I would recommend hair test. Are you taking some zinc for example?
If I remember well you know some good hair testing online services, could you remind please which are they? Yes I take zinc on and off, it does not feel like doing something much noticeable. I only feel in what I suppose as zinc replenished state after a few weeks on semen retention.
@grapes the only labs that are really doing hair testing as they should is https://arltma.com/ and https://www.traceelements.com/Default.aspx
The thing is they don't do testing directly with clients. You need practitioner to order the test.
If you are new to it and you think you need support during the program which I think iti s a good idea for most people. But I think the report you get from the lab with your hair test results is good enough. It is like 20 pages in pdf where they explain everything and give you recommended diet, supplements..
So you need to find nutritional balancing practitioner that does hair testing in those labs and you order just test or their some full package where you can msg them and talk about stuff etc.. There are all kinds of practitioners. But I never worked with anyone so I can't tell you which one is good.
I did last test with Luke Pryor, but I had no idea that he will give me his report not the original report from ARl... It was not so bad, but I still prefer the original stuff..
@grapes I really like Selig. From what I know he doesn't work with everyone. Just with people who take it really seriously and will not waste his time. From what I heard he is really hardcore and doesn't give a shit if you feel like living death during the program hehe. I would like to work with him. I think in terms of knowledge on the topic is it one of the best. He just works with homeopathy as well. I don't know anything about it just from what I heard it seems like a bullshit, but other than that he is really good..
Here he made new video about copper. Very interesting stuff. Nobody goes deep as him when it comes to mineral balancing..
Quote from Hermes on November 19, 2025, 2:44 pmQuote from Janelle525 on November 19, 2025, 1:26 pmI don't trust much of what he says. It's all anecdotal. Did he get a blood vitamin A test? I did because I had been consuming such low amounts and it proved my dry eye was not low vitamin A, nor could my less than great night vision as I still had pretty normal values in my blood.
I'm approaching 7 years of low vitamin A. The last couple of years, I've started to eat eggs, and most recently, some cheese (BTW, I'm still way below the RDA, probably about half or less, mostly depending on how much cheese I eat. Oddly, eggs don't contain that much A). My serum vitamin A levels are nowhere near being deficient. You're right; only blood serum levels dropping over years would even indicate depletion is actually happening, so I don't trust Matt Stone on this one either.
I've said this multiple times, but it's worth repeating: I think for some people, low vitamin A depletion takes decades, not just a few years. I don't know why Grant reached serum blood levels that put him in the deficient range within years. There are clearly puzzle pieces missing in how to fastest AND safest deplete vitamin A.
Simply avoiding A is not enough, at least for half the people who start the endeavor. For them, it's steady but consistent improvement of wellbeing and health markers. For the rest, it's way more tedious, an almost imperceptible change over many, many years.
Hi @christian
I see you mention consuming cheese / eggs etc. and estimating yourself as being approximately up to half the RDA (call it 1500 IU).
If the average human liver contain 1,000,000 IU (Matt Stone's estimate in this video - but in my first few posts of my progress log, I found examples of it being even higher), and detox is even marginally impaired, then being too relaxed about vA consumption could completely sabotage a person.
I think Grant's work shows that even hovering around or just above the RDA (c. 3000 IU) can lead to toxicity over time. So let's take an average detox rate of c. 2000 IU per day as standard (totally academic example, but bear with me):
If a person is eating 1500 IU daily, but is only detoxing 2,000 daily, that is a net of 500 IU detoxed daily.
1,000,000 IU / 500 IU = 2,000 days to detox - that is 6 years -> way longer than it needs to be.
Now let's assume that a person is struggling with detox even more than the above example (or perhaps never really fully started properly detoxing because their intake of vA remained too high) -> let's say vA detox capacity is 1500 IU per day in this instance... any person eating cheese / dairy / eggs etc, to the sum of 1000-1500 IU of vA daily (in the form of animal / retinol no less, not just beta carotene) - they will be spinning their wheels almost in perpetuity.
Apologies, I haven't read into your full history, so I don't want to make assumptions - but in a bid to do things in moderation / not go to extremes / cover other bases nutritionally, people might be severely sabotaging themselves in pursuit of the goal.
I really do think it is worth it for people to try to run the numbers - they might come to startling realizations.
The absolute highest concentration of vA in the liver I could find across all studies was c. 2 500 000 IU of vA (which I computed from this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3798076/#:~:text=The%20mean%20(%C2%B1SD)%20liver,(513%20%CE%BCg%2Fg) ) - doesn't mean it's the highest ever, just that it was the highest measurement I could find. In that study: the results part of the abstract - the max was 513 ug/g of vA in the liver, that is roughly 1700 IU/g, and assuming a liver weight of 1500g (3lbs) that is 2.5m IU.
If we say that someone with impaired detox pathways could only excrete around 1000 IU per day, then this would take them 2500 days (or c. 7 years) being strict. If they were eating even 500 IU of vA daily, this would increase to 14 years!
I guess my point is, ultimately: being really strict about this stuff is pretty much essential. People criticize Grant's prison diet for not being nutritionally replete, and maybe it isn't, but it IS a great way to get to the goal quickly.
I don't say this to criticize or sound holier-than-thou ... I am nearly 2.5 years in with no obvious improvements, my serum retinol is still elevated. Despite working quite hard on this, I know for fact that over the past 30 months, I have had instances of eating: ice cream / milk, Haribo sweets, chocolate bars, white fish (at restaurants), seed oils (at restaurants).
Not that I am really into the "calorie counting" crowd anymore, but vA-food cheat meals can be akin to a dieter working really hard to stay 300kcal under maintenace for 6 days of the week (1800kcal defecit total), and then gorging on a restaurant meal at the weekend once per week because they've "been good". They are sabotaging their progress.
Quote from grapes on November 20, 2025, 1:40 amQuote from Jiří on November 20, 2025, 12:10 amI am questioning the period of the time when you do low vit A for 5+years and your serum numbers are close to deficient. Where you are no longer fixing any issues that you had during toxicity days..
Unfortunately no, some of my issues (notably rosacea) weren't fixed, so I'm not here out of curiosity or dogma. At my last serum test I was deficient (at a mark around 60% from zero to the bottom of the range) and I was at the top of the form compared to how my health fluctuate. I'm open to other ideas too, for example my issues could be linked to copper/mercury toxicity. Or that due to Accutane use it is unresolvable after all..
But if we concentrate on the video, I have hard time to believe the guy is/was vit A deficient.
Hi @grapes, I just bumped the rosacea thread if you want to talk about what you are still experiencing, I'm interested and also still have some symptoms.
Andrew2's post above is sobering. But do we have to get our body's storage of VA down to zero to start feeling better?
Now and then I've waxed on about the difference between acute and chronic symptoms, and occasionally I've also mentioned things that I think are long-lasting damages. To me those are kind of 3 different things.
Acute: To me, on the "just cutting back" route, I saw great help with acute (especially at about 1.5 years in), such as migraines, nausea, dizziness.
Chronic: I see slow change at the pace of glaciers (like asthma or skin or joint improvement or tinnitus). But I bet that it takes a good long time to fix things. And I bet it hurts! (sort of like Harry Potter trying to grow a new arm)
Damage: example: no one is going to be able to grow back a new tooth if they lost it due to gum recession. Real damages have gone on. There is hope for many things, though, as long as we are on this side of the dirt.
We probably need to unpack a certain amount of storage of vA in the visceral fat so that it stops being inflammatory. And of course get the liver down to an amount that it can handle and be healthy.
I suppose over time we will have more answers, theories only get us so far.