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Nine Year Update
For that matter, why would a person base his diet on evolutionary eating then throw out the whole "gathering" part of hunter-gatherer?
And then accuse others of being illogical?
BTW, I don't want you to change your life, Wavy, if it works for you.
I've already answered those questions in previous posts. I know you are a good-natured person and mean well, so I don't mean to be curt here, but I'm not going to repeat myself anymore at the moment. I've tried to explain these ideas from different angles and apparently it's not helping get the message across for some people. My usual recommendation is to try listening to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (Darkhorse Podcast), they are well-liked professors of evolutionary biology who have a knack for clearly explaining the philosophy of science. Maybe you will learn something from them that I have been unsuccessful in conveying.
I guess my point is that "logical" is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to something as complicated as human diet.
IMO strict science isn't possible when it comes to human diet. You'd have to control things going back 3 generations. Anyone expecting Grant's total success is just in la-la land. Even if you are Grant's identical twin and living in the same room eating from the same pot you aren't necessarily going to have the same results because for the 60 years before that you lived separately. And for nine months as you developed in your mother's womb, it fed you differently. There are endless other factors affecting human health besides retinoids.
I've hung around the nutrition boards since there were nutrition boards and this year's guru is next year's dumb-ass.
:')
The reason I hang out here is because I think Grant has exposed something that needed to be exposed. Nobody needs to "eat the rainbow", cod liver oil is toxic and liver can be overdone. Vitamin pills should not contain vitamin A, neither should animal feeds or dairy products or any food or medicine.
All of these things were new-fangled ideas that we were sold by nutrition gurus who shouted "Science!"
"IMO strict science isn't possible when it comes to human diet. You'd have to control things going back 3 generations. Anyone expecting Grant's total success is just in la-la land. Even if you are Grant's identical twin and living in the same room eating from the same pot you aren't necessarily going to have the same results because for the 60 years before that you lived separately. And for nine months as you developed in your mother's womb, it fed you differently. There are endless other factors affecting human health besides retinoids."
When you say "strict science", I think what you mean is 100% experimental control of all variables involved, and you are correct in suggesting that is impossible when it comes to human dietary studies (Bart Kay loves to harp on this). You can still conduct valid science without using experimental controls (meaning holding some variables constant while changing others), but in order to gain any meaningful insight you have to account for (as opposed to "control") as many variables as possible by measuring their values, then you have to use appropriate statistical analyses to piece apart the relative contributions of the variables you measured to the observed outcome of the system you're investigating. In general, the less "control" you have over a system, the more measurements you need to have for all of the variables at play in order to make any real headway in understanding the system. On top of all this, you need replication of these measurements within independent sub-systems nested within the overall system you are studying,
This is why my general field of study, ecology, is so difficult to approach...we study complex systems in their natural state without really controlling any variables, which means we need to take a lot of other measurements, very carefully consider all the variables at play, and get the assistance of a biometrician who specializes in statistics to make the most of our relatively meager measurements in the complex system. Achieving truly independent replication is extremely challenging and resource intensive. Despite all our efforts, at the end of the day our individual studies cannot say with much confidence what is truly going on in the systems we study, which is why such science advances extremely slowly over centuries with the accumulation of observations by many generations of scientists.
For the above reasons, it is absolutely unreasonable to expect Grant to outright prove anything. He has no replication, no controls, and relatively little accounting of confounding variables. He has only had his serum Vitamin A levels measured a handful of times over the past 9 years. He has not had the major storage site (liver) measured at all. Outside of generating new hypotheses to investigate, his surveys of people doing a low Vitamin A diet are nearly scientifically worthless (surveys of people in general are pretty much the weakest source of data because of the subjectivity involved and the difficulties in getting a sufficient number of responses from a balanced demographic sample) so he really can't use those as supporting evidence for much.
As I have said many times before, he has done a reasonably good job of documenting how little Vitamin A is required by someone of his sex, age, and genetics, living in his environment, and for that we can all be grateful to him. Anything beyond that is pure speculation at this point.
@eio wrote:
Whether it is essential as a vitamin or not, people like me who have reduced consumption and resolved many health problems don't care.
Arbitrarily spreading the idea that vitamin A is not a vitamin but a toxin to people at all stages of life including pregnant women, what could possibly go wrong?
Quote from tim on August 20, 2023, 8:29 pm@eio wrote:
Whether it is essential as a vitamin or not, people like me who have reduced consumption and resolved many health problems don't care.
Arbitrarily spreading the idea that vitamin A is not a vitamin but a toxin to people at all stages of life including pregnant women, what could possibly go wrong?
That they will dismiss this idea immediately and will never look again on vit A and if it could be a problem for them. Most people will simply say "just another crazy ideas from crazy people" or something like that and will never look into it.. Now if you say that chronic vit A toxicity is not so uncommon like you would think and here are the reasons why you could become toxic... That is completely different story and I think much more people would consider read something about it.. Same thing with iron, same thing with copper etc.. Dr.Smith is completely crazy if he really believes that even copper doesn't have any function in the body.. For Grant I think that he is so deep into this "vit A is just a poison" that he doesn't want to admit any possibility that vit A is not a poison in ideal scenario that it is vitamin, but just hard to manage today for people in modern world..