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Tackling the Detox setback by Grant Genereux
I don't think universally recommending eggs is a good idea. People can react quite poorly to them depending on their dietary history, as we've seen. What's worse than detox cycle setback is not detoxing at all and dismissing the theory altogether.
I got "the ick" really early on with egg whites and wouldn't recommend that. But personally I think eggs have been a benefit to me. We are all unique. I also don't think people should go overboard with them. I do sort of feel like when I became a backyard egg producer I began to have better mornings with better blood sugar (say, not feeling dizzy when arising in the garden after weeding). It does sometimes worry me that eczema has the sound "egg" in it hahaha....
Quote from ggenereux on June 5, 2023, 11:34 amThanks everyone here for the feedback and thoughtful comments. Do you have suggestions as to the next steps regarding this topic? Obviously, asking people to take on a low vA diet, and just keeping their fingers crossed, hoping for the best is not going to cut it. I guess some recommendations might be:
- Go all muscle meat carnivore for the first 6 - 12 months?
- Priming the pump so to speak with choline? And can this be done effectively without eggs?
- Low vA + AC + fibre?
- Other approaches?
- Giving up is not an option.
1. The first suggestion is a whole different ball game and I don’t think you should suggest it to others unless you are very well across it yourself.
2. I think suggestion number 2 can be done with sufficient muscle meat in the diet.
3. Sounds good to me.
4. There’s no point telling people to eat eggs. We don’t have any actual evidence that someone consuming eggs is actually reducing the vit A in their body.
If people want to eat eggs and it makes them feel better then that’s awesome and they should just stick to that, but they are no longer on a vit A reducing diet, and that’s okay.
Until somebody can actually get to sustained Grant levels of serum retinol then there’s no proof that eggs reduces vit A in the body.
5. Agreed.
@ggenereux2014 I found that progesterone is helpful when detox is too fast.
RE: But, haven't most people coming into this already been regularly eating eggs, including in baked items? So, here they are now sick with autoimmune diseases, etc, in-spite of eating eggs?
Most people regularly eating eggs are also/have been eating high vitamin A foods. I think eggs (even eating just 1 a day, if tolerated) in combination with a low A approach allows for a safer detox, but one must start slowly and find the sweet spot because eggs can and will increase bowel movements when consuming little vitamin A, and possibly trigger anxiety if one goes too quickly. I have still been healing and seeing benefits with one egg (sometimes 2) a day for more than 6 months.
@ggenereux2014 You dont want to trigger a big vitamin A detox right at the start. You can taper off them as time goes by. Avoid the highest ones at the start. There is some common ground here: I do agree on increasing fibre foods after you've replenished low choline levels. That's why fibre may have helped many people. On the other hand it makes things worse at first for people with high leakiness. So it's the order you do things that's important. Everybody can be right in a sense just at different times for different people. The main problem with fatty liver is low choline.
Generally speaking eating eggs was not the problem. It was eating liver which is 50 times higher in retinol than eggs. Or taking cod liver oil.
We have plenty of clinicians already curing liver disease with eggs. That's what Meri Arthur does with test results. We experimenters dont need to prove eggs remove vitamin A from the liver. We already know from real liver detoxification experts. We know from what's happening. My hair is growing again where it was bald. I have sexual function like a 16 year old. I have digestive function as good as a 6 year old.
@jaj has been involved with this project for over 4 years now. She trained in nutrition. She has spoken to possibly the most people and heard their stories. We are the two people with no commercial axe to grind. We fully support Vitamin A reduction done right.
Sometimes I wonder if it is a good goal at all to drain off all the vitamin A? I'm not sure I'm going to live that long, that I'd finally be rid of a large portion of it. I ate copious amounts of VA, I mean, really hit it hard for many, many years as a WAPF'er and probably was already toxic when I arrived at their doorstep. I suppose it is an interesting question if my egg consumption kept me from feeling worse than I did.
If you can rid yourself of the acute symptoms, that means you aren't circulating VA.
Then, it would seem to me that your body will slowly heal the chronic symptoms, (perhaps by slowly moving VA out of the places where it is doing harm) and that might cause some discomfort. Healing can be uncomfortable.
I have a question for @jessica2, and I hope she doesn't feel beset upon. I'm just curious why she feels that she had a bad reaction to the (LOL) so-called "prison food diet"? Sorry if I haven't gotten it from her posts, I was probably thinking about other things.
Hasn't it been shown to be surprisingly nutritious?
I guess you can see where this is going... If you have a bad reaction to the "prison food diet" I would guess that it maybe doesn't agree with your gut OR that you are detoxing something. There are plenty of people that can't do beans, I have loads of trouble with certain ones. I remember reading the blood type diet and thinking it was particularly right in my case that legumes were hard on me. There are also entire societies for which a dinner of beans/rice/meat would be the daily norm.
Not feeling great today so I’ll be brief. I don’t think inducing a strong detox is safe for SOME people. Some get away with it.
I think a slow reduction is much safer. Similar to the ‘trying low oxalate’ group suggestion for going low oxalate. A slow decrease in intake.
Going low vA is a remarkably strong way of inducing a ‘dump’ of vA from the liver. If this exceeds the capacity of the body to handle it (with RBP) and then get rid of it, we get what I think of as ‘auto poisoning’ - i.e. prolonged and possibly worse vA toxicity. Not good.
There are numerous steps which can go wrong in vA metabolism as it’s a complex multi step process. Therefore, there are different accumulations of different types of vA causing different damage and deficiencies, which cause different symptoms in different people. None are good. Therefore, we don’t want to overwhelm this pathway with excess vA exiting the liver. A badly done detox is the SAME as eating excess liver and CLO.
Low and slow is the only safe way imo. With support for each step of metabolism and excretion. Understanding this is key. Choline is vital for several steps, so is a key thing to support.
Excess vA is so nasty that we need to do a SAFE detox. Can’t have it both ways. Can’t say vA is a poison but provoking a vA dump from the liver is fine. It’s the SAME thing. Excess vA in the body.
Quote from Jessica2 on June 6, 2023, 4:29 am@lil-chick because it tripled my liver enzymes, caused weight gain, didn't help hair a single bit and also gave me horrible kidney pain that radiated through my legs and abdomen and that didn't respond to any painkillers of any kind (ibuprofen, Tylenol, aspirin, and prescription meds for pain my mom gave me). I had to go to the ER, where they did a CT scan AND an Xray. Doc confirmed it wasn't due to bone degeneration or spinal pain/injury/issues. No gallstones detected. Liver looked perfect.
You could be right and I was "detoxing". If that is detox though, NO THANK YOU. Like you, I'll take the slow boat and reduce high VA sources and try to eat nutritious organic stuff and that is it.
Thanks, the second part is why I'm after, the "why would that diet bother you" part.