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Pork
Pork can be problematic because their digestive system is very similar to people, and they absorb nutrients and toxins in the same way. Since most pork is fed a diet that is fortified, they will accumulate vitamins in a similar way to people. According to this website, it is recommended to fortify pork feed with at least 1000 iu Vitamin A/lb in addition to whatever is in their ordinary diet. That means that actual vitamin A content of pork or the retinoic acid of lard may be much higher than what the databases claim. According to the study I posted a while back, even cow's can be bred to produce milk with absurd amounts of Vitamin A by the use of supplements. Since the amount of Vitamin A in pork will be variable, it is advisable for someone to not rely on pork.
There are farms that feed their swine much healthier diets without any vitamin supplements, which may be ok. Additionally, lean pork should be fine since most of the Vitamin will be in the fat or the liver. Organic or pasture raised pork don't typically eat a fortified diet.
- My friend raises pork and she gets cast off foods from the (fruit/veg) farm, which are often very high in carotenes--pumpkins for instance.
2. It is traditional to also raise pork on skim milk on cow farms after taking the fat away to make butter and cream.
These two (small farm) pigs would possibly also have D in their fat, if the pigs get out in the sun.
3. Grocery store pork might be more about what is in manufactured pig chow, and grown in confinement with no sun.
I'm sort of thinking the 1. would have more carotenes or A... and 2. might have less. 3, maybe look and see what is in pig chow?
- Wouldn't necessarily have more carotenoids since it has more sun exposure and the sun depletes carotenoids.
It's probably one reason why we seem to have less tolerance to them now. We are indoors most of the time away from the sun.
Vitamin A supplementation is the norm in the pork industry if I remember correctly. So, the grocery store pork is probably higher in A than the one personally raised.
Her intuition is that eating her home-raised pork has helped a lot with cracks in her hands and feet in winter.
Quote from Judy on April 18, 2019, 10:29 amI’ve also been trying to figure out if and why pork and lard are considered to be off limits on a vitamin A elimination diet. Dr. Garret Smith is especially anti-pork:
He gives a page full of links to studies as evidence. Some of the links went to pages that just had the title of a study but nothing else that could be read. One was a study of lamb and beef fat and none of the others that I did read were convincing. His argument that pork has been traditionally considered bad doesn’t hold water. The Chinese have one of the longest and most successful civilizations in the world and pork was a staple food for them. The societies that avoided pork were mostly Middle Eastern (Jewish and Muslim).
Six of the links on Dr. Smith’s list involve something called “lard factor.” The studies were all from the ‘50s. The researchers concluded that lard must contain some unknown form of vitamin A because they could not detect even a speck of it, but it very efficiently reversed the symptoms of what they mistakenly thought was vitamin A deficiency. They were convinced the lack of vitamin A was responsible for the lesions observed in the lab rats, no doubt based on studies like the ones Grant tells about in his books. They were attributing the animals’ lesions to the LACK of vitamin A, when they were really caused by excess vitamin A. By giving the rats the lard distillate, they were replacing the source of the vitamin A they had been giving them that was making them sick, with something that had no vitamin A. They were sure that anything that cures vitamin A deficiency MUST contain vitamin A, so they concluded that the lard must have some previously unknown vitamin A activity, which they named the “lard factor.”
You can spot the problem in the excerpt below:
“The nutritional effects on rats of the distillate and residue fractions of molecularly distilled lard were studied. When vitamin A-free diets containing the residue fraction as the fat source were supplemented by distillate, or when this material was injected, the animals could be protected against the signs of vitamin A deficiency. The protection given by 2% distillate in the diet seemed nearly complete and was much better than that provided by weekly injections of 7.5 units of vitamin A palmitate.
These results could be explained neither by the presence of vitamin A in the distillate nor by a nonspecific anti-oxidant action of the distillate. It was therefore concluded that lard contains a factor with vitamin A-like activity but which is chemically different from the known forms of vitamin A.”
© 1950 The American Institute of Nutrition
Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
Lard has a little bit of A as well as D and K2, maybe these nutrients synergize to create a "pork factor" effect?
Did anyone see my post about my grandmother's childhood diet (which seemed lowish A)? There is more to the story, and that is: her own children didn't fare as well health-wise, and THEY were probably raised on more vegetable oils and less lard... (Such as Crisco.) Of course other things changed too...
I think about what many say here about being constipated. I wonder if more fats are needed in the recovery diet in general. Fats release water as they digest, I have read. Drinking water doesn't have the same effect. (the hump on a camel's back is fat, not water)
It interests me that someone on page one of this thread said they had a nice BM on lard! 🙂
So far, I'm including pork in my diet, but it's a goal for me to keep my diet looking as much like a traditional diet as possible and not to make my diet small. I buy locally raised meats when I can. When I really think about it, meat fats are the most trad fats that there are. NOT vegetable fats. It irks me to walk into a restaurant that stakes a claim of being "strictly authentic" and then find they use modern vegetable oil, lol. They called the food pantry a "larder" for a reason.
My husband's family ate a lot of beef tallow, which they got from a farm. They fried fish and potatoes in it weekly. THEY had great health for a more modern era.
Just FYI, I knew a beef farmer who would just THROW AWAY TALLOW. He just couldn't find enough people interested in it. (the angels weep)
Those following high fat diets such as WAPF followers and Optimal Diet followers are invariably eating a boatload of VA at the same time because of the consumption of dairy fats.
I think the reasoning for high fat is sound but I think VA overload is an important confounding issue here.
While dairy fats can likely intoxicate us with VA animal fats like tallow and lard possibly help us detoxify A due to stimulation of bile release.
When it comes to K2 MK-4 to VA ratios, lard and tallow have the best ratios:
Lard has 90 ng/g RAE and 200 ng/g of K2 MK-4
200:90 = 2.2
Ratio of K2 to VA
Butter has 7490 ng/g RAE
150:7490 = 0.02 ratio of K2 to VA makes butter a very poor source of K2
Eggs have 800 ng/g RAE
300:800 = 0.375
In other words if we eat plenty of tallow and lard each day we will get a moderate amount of K2 MK-4 without getting much VA.
That was me that had a great BM with lard. I was a bit more strict at the beginning and had results, then, I got off the rail during the holidays and never got back to the same feeling.
I have now started to feel better. The key for me seems to be oats, dairy, apples and bananas with ample proteins from animals and carbs. Those two make me feel great. I avoid dairy with added A though. Since then, I have tried eating various high A fruits and vegetables and the experiment is most often not a good one. I get night sweats, waking up hungry and an itch on my hand. Tomatoes and squash seem OK, it might oxalates in my case.
I will try adding lard back at some point as a fat for frying and pies.
Quote from ggenereux on November 9, 2018, 2:57 pm
I don’t have a good explanation for why I had such a bad reaction to pork. I’m only documenting what happened to me. Others may have a different experience.
Maybe you had bad reaction to pork, because it is good source of B1. So it started detox? Like many people here are saying. I think we need good amount of other nutrients to "detox" excess of vit A and eating just beef and white rice is deficient in many micronutrients... I have issues with anti nutrients from plants and I am eating low vit A as well. So it is very hard for me to get as much micronutrients as possible. Pork is best animal source of B1, turkey/pork heart is good source of copper as well as zinc and other micros with only very low amount of retinol.. I think that eating little more vit A, but having good amount of all minerals and vitamins will work much better for vit A "detox" than just eating zero vit A diet that is deficient in very important minerals and vitamins that are probably needed to make RBP etc.. What is the point of detoxing vit A if you develop x nutritional deficiencies that will create other health issues overtime..