Quote from Armin on June 6, 2023, 7:10 pm

Labeling anyone a "flat earther" is sad and pathetic. It is the equivalent to labeling everyone you don't agree with as a "science denier" or a nazi. Lame weak ass shit.

I'm sure many outside of the Vitamin A detox group would call all of us flat earthers. It is childish and not productive. I don't fear people who really believe that the earth is flat. Let them speak, let them be proven wrong. Some are so scared of differing opinions.

Quote from PJ on June 6, 2023, 8:09 pm

@dom

Have you tried Lactospore, (AFI LactoSpore | Bacillus coagulans MTCC 5856) there are a number of people on Smith's network that have had luck with it?

Also, wanted to share this video with you. (perhaps you are already familiar with Dr. William Davis - Wheat Belly, he has had like a 90% success rate with SIBO with three different types of probiotics as explained in the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8bD5B9WTBs

 

Quote from puddleduck on June 6, 2023, 8:43 pm

Quote from Dom on June 6, 2023, 12:53 pm

How is your diet @puddleduck?

I'm really having a problem with metabolism of animal protein, since I been having a high protein diet(600,800 grams of chicken breast and 5-7 eggs a day) for like 7 years I think throughout theses years my organism was slowly fermentating this protein until I became chronic constipated 3 years ago, and I'm still dealing with constipation even lowering intake of animal protein and different sources. it made me feel a little better but I'm still not having bowel movements( even with tweaks on the fiber intake), I'm doing low vit A diet for 17 months now, but probably not detoxing at all because I'm not pooping in a regular basis. one interesting symptom that I have is that always at night after a day that I eat some kind of meat or even eggs, my hair smells kinda burnt(it may be bad iron metabolism as well) and I did a correlation thought that this could possibly be sub products of protein fermentation, I did a stool test some time ago that actually showed intact and degraded albumin and protein, and trypsin insufficiency that means an enzyme that directly acts in the protein to absorb it. My main objective now is to get bowel movements again to start detoxing, but in this current time I don't think my body tolerates animal protein anymore, I tried a lot of approaches and it seems to get worse. I tried b1( all forms) and magnesium but doesn't seem to be a solution.

Disclaimer: I'm not a healthcare professional or educated in science, and none of what follows constitutes medical advice.

Constipation is the worst! I'm sorry you're dealing with that, @dom.

What you said about the burnt smell and your stool test results is crazy. Wow!

Google tells me trypsin is made in the pancreas, and has to flow through the bile duct into the small intestine where it is activated.

One thing that comes to mind, based on my own experience, is the potential for manganese deficiency on an animal-protein based diet. Apparently manganese is important for the health of the pancreas:

"Because of the relative richness of the pancreas in manganesel, it has been suggested that this divalent cation may also participate in the regulation of pancreatic function. This hypothesis is supported by several types of observations. Thus, manganese is taken up from the systemic circulation by the pancreas, and the concentration of manganese in the pancreatic duct is greater than in the blood2. Second-generation manganese-deficient animals may exhibit ultrastructural damage or complete atrophy of the pancreatic acinar ce113,4. These animals also exhibit beta cell dysfunction that is manifested by decreased insulin secretion and synthesis, and enhanced insulin degradations5."

source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-0723-5_15?

Manganese is also important as part of an antioxidant enzyme the body makes: 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1444472/
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325636 

The worst diet I ever did was designed to intentionally deplete manganese (Dr. Shauna Young's Spectrum Balance Protocol), so I know manganese deficiency causes suffering (my teeth got so weak they started started chipping off).

My current diet is unusually high in manganese. Every day, I eat:

- EFAs from whole or freshly ground seeds (hemp hearts, sunflower seeds, and flaxseed) and cold pressed hempseed oil
- Legumes (chickpeas, lima beans, lentils, black-eyed peas, tofu)
- Lots of raw and dried fruit (bananas, apples, dates, raisins, dried cranberries, pears, strawberries, and in limited amounts: citrus, olives, figs, avocado)
- Low-vitamin A veggies (green cabbage, mushrooms, cauliflower, peeled cucumbers, etc)
- Gluten-free starch (white rice, organic brown rice, organic oatmeal, organic white potatoes)

Of all the foods I eat, hemp hearts are the highest in manganese. Brown rice and legumes are super high, too.

In order to recover from the severe constipation I developed on the eggsperiment, I temporarily stopped eating animal protein. I also stopped eating saturated fats. And instead I started eating WAY more raw fruit, which resolved the constipation immediately.

I also recently heard an interesting suggestion from some successful long-term vegan elders, who swear by the principles in the 1980s fad diet book "Fit for Life," in which Harvey and Marylin Diamond suggest eating nothing but raw fruit in the morning because it supports the body's natural elimination cycle. I dunno how legit the science of all their food combining stuff is, but they did have some evidence supporting the idea fruit eaten by itself digests super quickly.

Testing it out a bit, I've determined it's definitely a good to be able to eliminate properly in the morning, and raw fruit does seem to support that result. Lol.

So for breakfast, I'll eat 4 to 8 bananas (this is to get lots of B6--Chris Masterjohn wrote in his ebook that bananas offer the most easily utilized form of B6 in plant foods), with an apple and a handful of dates. For lunch or dinner I'll do a fresh cabbage salad (for vitamin K) with hemp oil dressing and lentil soup, brown rice pasta, oatmeal, or anything involving chickpeas (hummus, vegan pancakes made with chickpea flour, chickpea curry, etc). And I'll always have plant "milk" made from the EFA seeds at some point during the day.

You may know this already, but Google reminded me soy, and some other beans, contain trypsin inhibitors, so cooking them super well is essential.

Have you ever worked with a practitioner who specializes in treating dysbiosis with probiotics and stuff?

In another thread AlexM was posting about coffee enemas, which I know nothing about, but just bringing that up because there are so many people here on the boards with ideas...

Hope that gives you a few ideas to mull over, Dom. Trust your body to help you know what it needs. Maybe your appetite will guide you towards a helpful direction?

Man, you'll feel SO much better once toxins are moving along and out of your system! Please let us know what you end up finding helpful...I'm sure you will find something soon!

Quote from Tommy on June 6, 2023, 9:16 pm

Quote from puddleduck on June 6, 2023, 8:43 pm

Quote from Dom on June 6, 2023, 12:53 pm

How is your diet @puddleduck?

I'm really having a problem with metabolism of animal protein, since I been having a high protein diet(600,800 grams of chicken breast and 5-7 eggs a day) for like 7 years I think throughout theses years my organism was slowly fermentating this protein until I became chronic constipated 3 years ago, and I'm still dealing with constipation even lowering intake of animal protein and different sources. it made me feel a little better but I'm still not having bowel movements( even with tweaks on the fiber intake), I'm doing low vit A diet for 17 months now, but probably not detoxing at all because I'm not pooping in a regular basis. one interesting symptom that I have is that always at night after a day that I eat some kind of meat or even eggs, my hair smells kinda burnt(it may be bad iron metabolism as well) and I did a correlation thought that this could possibly be sub products of protein fermentation, I did a stool test some time ago that actually showed intact and degraded albumin and protein, and trypsin insufficiency that means an enzyme that directly acts in the protein to absorb it. My main objective now is to get bowel movements again to start detoxing, but in this current time I don't think my body tolerates animal protein anymore, I tried a lot of approaches and it seems to get worse. I tried b1( all forms) and magnesium but doesn't seem to be a solution.

Disclaimer: I'm not a healthcare professional or educated in science, and none of what follows constitutes medical advice.

Constipation is the worst! I'm sorry you're dealing with that, @dom.

What you said about the burnt smell and your stool test results is crazy. Wow!

Google tells me trypsin is made in the pancreas, and has to flow through the bile duct into the small intestine where it is activated.

One thing that comes to mind, based on my own experience, is the potential for manganese deficiency on an animal-protein based diet. Apparently manganese is important for the health of the pancreas:

"Because of the relative richness of the pancreas in manganesel, it has been suggested that this divalent cation may also participate in the regulation of pancreatic function. This hypothesis is supported by several types of observations. Thus, manganese is taken up from the systemic circulation by the pancreas, and the concentration of manganese in the pancreatic duct is greater than in the blood2. Second-generation manganese-deficient animals may exhibit ultrastructural damage or complete atrophy of the pancreatic acinar ce113,4. These animals also exhibit beta cell dysfunction that is manifested by decreased insulin secretion and synthesis, and enhanced insulin degradations5."

source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-0723-5_15?

Manganese is also important as part of an antioxidant enzyme the body makes: 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1444472/
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325636 

The worst diet I ever did was designed to intentionally deplete manganese (Dr. Shauna Young's Spectrum Balance Protocol), so I know manganese deficiency causes suffering (my teeth got so weak they started started chipping off).

My current diet is unusually high in manganese. Every day, I eat:

- EFAs from whole or freshly ground seeds (hemp hearts, sunflower seeds, and flaxseed) and cold pressed hempseed oil
- Legumes (chickpeas, lima beans, lentils, black-eyed peas, tofu)
- Lots of raw and dried fruit (bananas, apples, dates, raisins, dried cranberries, pears, strawberries, and in limited amounts: citrus, olives, figs, avocado)
- Low-vitamin A veggies (green cabbage, mushrooms, cauliflower, peeled cucumbers, etc)
- Gluten-free starch (white rice, organic brown rice, organic oatmeal, organic white potatoes)

Of all the foods I eat, hemp hearts are the highest in manganese. Brown rice and legumes are super high, too.

In order to recover from the severe constipation I developed on the eggsperiment, I temporarily stopped eating animal protein. I also stopped eating saturated fats. And instead I started eating WAY more raw fruit, which resolved the constipation immediately.

I also recently heard an interesting suggestion from some successful long-term vegan elders, who swear by the principles in the 1980s fad diet book "Fit for Life," in which Harvey and Marylin Diamond suggest eating nothing but raw fruit in the morning because it supports the body's natural elimination cycle. I dunno how legit the science of all their food combining stuff is, but they did have some evidence supporting the idea fruit eaten by itself digests super quickly.

Testing it out a bit, I've determined it's definitely a good to be able to eliminate properly in the morning, and raw fruit does seem to support that result. Lol.

So for breakfast, I'll eat 4 to 8 bananas (this is to get lots of B6--Chris Masterjohn wrote in his ebook that bananas offer the most easily utilized form of B6 in plant foods), with an apple and a handful of dates. For lunch or dinner I'll do a fresh cabbage salad (for vitamin K) with hemp oil dressing and lentil soup, brown rice pasta, oatmeal, or anything involving chickpeas (hummus, vegan pancakes made with chickpea flour, chickpea curry, etc). And I'll always have plant "milk" made from the EFA seeds at some point during the day.

You may know this already, but Google reminded me soy, and some other beans, contain trypsin inhibitors, so cooking them super well is essential.

Have you ever worked with a practitioner who specializes in treating dysbiosis with probiotics and stuff?

In another thread AlexM was posting about coffee enemas, which I know nothing about, but just bringing that up because there are so many people here on the boards with ideas...

Hope that gives you a few ideas to mull over, Dom. Trust your body to help you know what it needs. Maybe your appetite will guide you towards a helpful direction?

Man, you'll feel SO much better once toxins are moving along and out of your system! Please let us know what you end up finding helpful...I'm sure you will find something soon!

Is there any animal protein you consume at the moment?

Quote from puddleduck on June 6, 2023, 9:32 pm

Quote from Jessica2 on June 6, 2023, 5:34 pm

@puddleduck interesting ideas as usual...how long did the "overshoot" weight last? I was on 2MAD (meals a day) and OMADs when the weight began, but keto/low carb and a lot of protein and fat. Your idea however is after you begin a detox diet you start to gain weight? Mine definitely began before: 30 pound gain on low carb 2MADs and OMADS, then 10-15 more on detox rice/beans/meat. 

Hmm... Interesting. So you maybe were gaining weight despite possibly restricting your caloric intake? I don't have any answers, really. Just questions and observations.

Ancel Keys starvation experiment suggests the body heals itself from starvation following a specific order:

1. Starving (caloric restriction)
2. Refeeding (caloric restoration)
3. Uncontrollable hunger (eating constantly, more than one did prior to starvation)
4. Excess weight gain (an "overshoot" above the individual's natural setpoint)
5. Return to balance (appetite normalizes and the excess weight gain naturally "resolves itself" without any conscious effort)

I moved into step 5 immediately after lowering my vitamin A intake in 2018, so I never gained weight eating like Grant. But I had already entered step 2 in 2014 and experienced step 3 and 4 for a couple of years before getting stuck at step 4 (right up until I learned about Grant's hypothesis in summer of 2018).

There's a YouTuber, Stephanie Buttermore, who explores this concept in a series on her channel. She was a competitive body builder, and the extreme dieting she did messed up her hormonal health, basically. Her videos on refeeding start around 4 years ago: 

https://www.youtube.com/@StephanieButtermore/videos

So my question is...will individuals who have restricted their caloric intake need to temporarily "overshoot" (gain excess weight above their natural setpoint) in order to heal their metabolism and start detoxing well and all that stuff? I don't know the answer to that. It was the path I took. 

Quote from Audrey on June 7, 2023, 1:23 am

Quote from Jessica2 on June 4, 2023, 2:12 pm

@alexm sudden unexplained weight gain of 30 lbs put on in a month, especially around midsection where my gain pattern NEVER happened, diffuse hair loss, inability of hair to grow past shoulders, high cholesterol and blood pressure, fatigue, general achiness, inability to concentrate or focus, inability to tolerate exercise after a lifetime of using exercise for control of depression and resultant worsening depression. Since I had been mega dosing cod liver oil and using retinol face creams I thought for sure my issue was high vitamin a.

I also experienced unexplained weight gain before going low A, almost like bloating all over. I couldn't lose the weight no matter what I tried. When I first went low A I started to think that my weight gain was my bodies way of storing excess A in my tissues because my liver was overwhelmed. I used to eat a lot of coconut oil as it did make some of my symptoms temporarily better at the time (dizziness being one symptom) but it also really seemed to make me heavier. Now each year on this diet I have steadily lost some of this excess weight, and sometimes I gained a little during the times detox was too strong. But ever since starting the EPO a few weeks or more ago I have almost instantly lost weight in places that I could never lose weight in before. I don't know what exactly is going on but it seems like EPO is improving some things for me that simply going low A has not improved (over 4 years on this diet!) I am super curious about EFA's and the role (if any) they could play in combination with going low A. As usual my post/reply feels a bit vague but maybe something intuitively can be picked out of it?

Quote from Andrew B on June 7, 2023, 1:41 am

I did the high fibre and beans first and it backfired. I then desperately needed to resolve weird cramps that I thought might cause heart attacks cause they were happening in my upper body. I'd always been eating 1-2 eggs a day and getting better healing numerous conditions like bleeding capillaries, baldness and arthritis. Note eggs never stopped the detox. I also got eczema from the detox. It got worse with beans as detox got stronger. Eggs contain about a gram of phosphatidylcholine checked with a pharmacist but we could be wrong. That's what's different from beef plus there's biotin, selenium and iodine in good amounts.

So I've been increasing the eggs in a 9 month period and clearly getting better bile flow, digestion and libido. Once you do this you are able to increase the fibre from foods up to about 40 grams in total (about as much as I could eat). All sorts of benefits from a variety of fibre: bile flow, removal of toxins, SCFAs, improved pH and improved gut microbiome aiding the detox. Now I further increased the fats thanks to this group discussing it. You can lower the eggs if you want. I did for 6 months or the choline supplement whatever. I'm nearly there hopefully. It's definitely the right strategy for me. Note I did high fibre from beans and it didnt work. I've been doing this for 4 years alongside a balanced diet. Thousands of hours trying to figure it out and doing the experiments. My improvements do the talking for me. The way I've done it is much more effective and quicker. 4-5 years for liver detox and feeling like hot garbage is ridiculous. Choline/eggs, fibre, fat. Finished.

 

Quote from Andrew B on June 7, 2023, 3:57 am

Choline deficiency leads to non alcoholic fatty liver disease. The adequate intake of choline to avoid fatty liver disease is 550 mgs per day for men. How to set up an eggs study to fail ? Give people only 1-2 eggs a week (125-250 mgs of choline) which is well below the adequate intake of choline to avoid NAFLD. Unlikely also to be eating enough meat to get sufficient choline particularly in poorer populations. In one Iranian study they gave this message that 2-3 eggs a week led to higher risk of NAFLD. But more eggs didnt ! More choline leads to less NAFLD.

"An unexpected finding of the present study was that more than 4 eggs consumption per week was not significantly associated with risk of NAFLD. This may be explained by the fact that nutritional factors are correlated with each other, and determining of the effect of particular nutrients or particular foods on a risk factor is difficult. The effects of egg cholesterol on serum cholesterol concentrations depends on the content of individuals’ diet specially the fiber content of it[43,44]. It is possible that those who ate more than 4 eggs per week, consumed it in mixed dishes containing vegetables, which reduces the absorption of cholesterol. Thus, we suggest that future studies assess the type of dishes with egg to find the possible interactions of different constituent of them."

Egg consumption and risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease - PMC (nih.gov)

This was also one of the studies in Garrett Smith's poorly researched egg/choline twitter thread that was mostly debunked. Epidemiological studies when so many doing the experiment in this group are doing much better and still reporting strong detox. And eggs dont work for everybody. If you increased eggs too much too quickly then that wasnt my suggested approach. I'd been doing 1-2 eggs a day for 2.5 years before I increased them. And 3 would probably have been enough if I'd gone slower. Low and slow and be patient. See page 10 and 25 on this thread for comments on his thread. There's more comments of mine later on. Eggs as part of Vitamin A reduction - Page 10 - Discussion | Ideas, Concepts, and Observations (ggenereux.blog)

 

Quote from lil chick on June 7, 2023, 4:40 am

Quote from Armin on June 6, 2023, 7:10 pm

Labeling anyone a "flat earther" is sad and pathetic. It is the equivalent to labeling everyone you don't agree with as a "science denier" or a nazi. Lame weak ass shit.

I'm sure many outside of the Vitamin A detox group would call all of us flat earthers. It is childish and not productive. I don't fear people who really believe that the earth is flat. Let them speak, let them be proven wrong. Some are so scared of differing opinions.

I agree, attacking the person and not the argument is always lazy debating.   I did like William's post about maxing out fiber tho.  Interesting idea, although maybe not for everyone.   We are all unique.  We are even unique from year to year.