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Rapid Gum Recession
If you have enough bodyfat you could also try waterfasting. This probably heals the gums the fastest. Depending on how heavy you are you could fast for 2-3 weeks easily.
@wavygravygadzooks, if vitamin C or pedantic dental hygiene were healing to the receding gums, mine would have been healed. I have several of those and they haven’t changed for better or worse since the low vitamin A diet. I wonder if anyone has actually managed to have them grow back.
Thanks, Grant. To me, one of the most interesting points in your health updates was the amazing improvements despite extremely low Vitamin C intake. It's n=1, but it only takes one case to show that, under the right circumstances, a person does not need hardly any of some "essential" nutrient (obviously, this is the concept you are testing with Vitamin A as well). It seems like you've gone even lower than the Vitamin C people get on a carnivore diet, which itself had concerned many people, yet things associated with Vitamin C deficiency, such as gum health, are markedly improved for you.
I will try consuming lemons regularly as you suggested. Wikipedia shows limes as having more citral (6-9%) than lemons (2-5%), yet it sounds like limes did not have the same effect in preventing scurvy in the British Navy as lemons did. If those things are true, then it seems like it is the Vitamin C content that prevented scurvy, and therefore we would hypothesize that excessive Vitamin A intake drives down Vitamin C levels in the body?
That hypothesis would seem to match up with my general experience with Vitamin A detox...the faster the Vitamin A seems to be coming out of the body, the worse the symptoms seem to get. So I've still got the notion that Vitamin A coming out of storage is going to cause damage of some kind, and the main way to mitigate the damage is to bring the VA out slowly. In my case, when you're eating primarily meat, it would appear that you're already getting so many of the necessary nutrients that detox is somewhat painful, and then supplementing with any nutrient needed to process VA speeds up the detox even more to a point of misery and undesired damage.
So the conundrum I'm left with is: do I eat more of something that has fewer nutrients to slow the detox? If I'm trying to avoid plant toxins, I suppose the best choices would be fat (except that I seem to get fat malabsorption lately when I increase my intake too much), white rice (except that white rice isn't very filling), or fibrous fruit (which might worsen my gut issues, at least during a transition period).
Do you floss a lot? I use to floss religiously and it made me have rly bad receded gums, then I stopped flossing and it slowly started to heal. You could be doing more damage than good if you're flossing a lot.
Why can't you eat non-acidic fruit? Like bananas and peeled apples and stuff? Fruit has way less toxins than potatoes or other plants. The fiber will actually probably help too, to keep things moving to where you don't have to rely on magnesium as a type of laxative.
And with the diarrhea thing. When you eat a carnivore diet you're producing more bile bc of the high fat content of the diet...and when your colon gets overwhelmed and can't reabsorb properly you get diarrhea, thats probably why it was yellow and burned...you were pooping out bile.
@are
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm definitely reluctant to go any lower on my fat intake, but I'll consider it.
I floss at least once a day, sometimes twice. When my gums are inflamed, I definitely think flossing makes it worse, but it's a Catch 22 because the gum recession means I get more stuff stuck between my teeth, which means I need to floss more, which worsens recession 🙁 I use a water flosser and swish a lot to try to get as much out as I can without using physical floss.
At this point I'm almost positive the yellow in my stool is retinoic acid (or another form of Vitamin A). I was getting it in firm stools at the beginning of my low VA diet, well before I started getting chronic diarrhea. Also, I get plenty of diarrhea that isn't bright yellow. Some of it may be due to unabsorbed bile acids, some to unabsorbed fat, but the worst stuff is probably from retinoic acid/VA. I've gotten a lot of greenish stool...that's definitely got a lot of bile in it. I switched to a lower fat diet and started eating white rice in place of added tallow I'd been eating, and I still get diarrhea all the time...I get less fat malabsorption, but that didn't stop the diarrhea.
Fruit has fructose, salicylates, and oxalates in the seeds. At this point, I think white rice that's been well rinsed is probably the safest source of carbs around, and I actually think it might be more consistent with pre-agricultural diets than fruit because grass seeds would have been easier to access and store than many fruits, and they were probably more prevalent than fruit in colder landscapes/climates, along with tubers/corms. Starch in small amounts seems more evolutionarily consistent than eating fruit all the time, although humans clearly have been eating fruit seasonally wherever it occurs.
Hmm, not what I wanted to hear! Fingers crossed our gums will eventually turn around.
It seems like the longer I go between meals, the worse my GI symptoms get at night, probably because there's a greater accumulation of bile in the gallbladder and when it gets released it makes more of a mess in my colon. No doubt fasting is a great cure for some things, but I'm still of the opinion that it's a bad idea for resolving toxicities that rely on bile flow for resolution (Vitamin A toxicity being one of those).
Once the gums have receded, I think the "rough" stuff you're talking about makes it hard or impossible for them to fully recover, but the rapid recession I'm experiencing does not seem related to that at all. Seems like a major inflammatory problem from stirring up too much Vitamin A and not having the nutrients (zinc, maybe Vitamin C) to repair the damage.
While I am eating a fair amount of protein from meat, there's a big difference between high protein intake and rabbit starvation. I'm getting enough calories to go exercise every day, so I'm not starving, and the amount of protein I eat is probably nowhere near as much as what most body builders consume.
I'm very careful about the contents of my supplements. Most of them are made by Pure Encapsulations or Thorne and use ascorbyl palmitate and/or some form of cellulose as a flow agent or filler...at least, that's what it says on the ingredient list. No talc in any of them. I do hate taking supplements though because you never really know for sure what's in there and it's highly unnatural.
In 1747 James Lind somewhat demonstrated that scurvy could be treated by supplementing the diet with citrus fruit, in the first ever clinical trial. However, the number of people in each arm of his clinical trial was just two each. So, the first evidence of lemons being effective in treating scurvy was based on just two people.
But, Lind's real results must have been far from spectacular because it will take another 50 years before the use of citrus fruits for preventing scurvy gets any serious attention by the Royal Navy.
Also, at that time (~1800) they decided to use the juice from limes, and not lemons. I’m not sure yet why that decision was made.
Maybe it’s just me, but the leg and skin lesions documented for “scurvy” in the 18th century sure look awfully similar to those of modern day late stage diabetes.
I’ll try to follow up with a blog post soon.
As to limes instead of lemons I saw a possible answer from a Jonathan Holmes (unfortunately there is no original source for the claim):
"Why were limes used for scurvy? Why were limes added to Royal Navy sailors diet? Scurvy was a huge problem for English sailors in the 1600s and 1700s. Doctors thought that lime juice would work better because it has more acid than lemon juice, so they substituted lime juice for lemon juice on the English Royal Navy ships."
https://cementanswers.com/what-did-sailors-drink-to-prevent-scurvy/
The word anti-scorbutics was a term that was used in the time of sail for anything that helped with scurvy, so there were many alternatives.
The famous James Cook thought sweet malt was the main answer as to why he was able to sail enormous distances without serious problems with scurvy.
Here is a really short 1776 report from James Cook to the Sir John Pringles on the subject (less than 1 page long).
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1776.0023
I think David MacBride M.D. was the first to propose the use of sweet malt for scurvy. He wrote a 64 page book in 1767 that probably talks about that and more, but I haven't read it. I found a link to the book at least that is called "An Historical Account of a New Method of Treating the Scurvy at Sea":
"Malt is germinated cereal grain that has been dried in a process known as "malting". The grain is made to germinate by soaking in water and is then halted ..."
Germinating seeds create things like vitamin c and vitamin B like out of thin air. It looks like people are mad at Captain Cook for saying malt helped, (the scientists say he might have slowed down the understanding of scurvy) but I bet it depended on how the malt was created and handled. I can see how it could be very nutritious. I could also see how if the growing grains got sun, they might have created carotenes.
I bet the sheer volume of alcohol taken by sailors really added a lot to their detox load and ran down their b-vities. And I bet they were much more likely to become high VA because of that.
I'm not telling you what to do, but when eat you just white rice you run the risk of beriberi. Really might be in your best interest to find some fruit that you don't react to/have problems with. Both scurvy and beriberi can cause death...so it's really not worth the risk imo. But you do w/e you feel is best and what works for you. Beriberi is B1 deficiency which the only meat that is a good source of B1 is pork, so idk how you react to pork, but might be worth adding to your diet...beef isn't a good source of B1. A pound of ground beef only supplies 0.2 mg of B1 15% of the RDA..I'm not big on rda's but you're eating white rice as your carbs.