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Teen goes blind from KFC & Coke
That eye, Jesus... how can it progress to that point before seeing a doctor who considers nutrient deficiencies? With that kind of diet there are numerous likely deficiencies and I doubt that giving him a shot of VA was the only thing the doctor did.
Anyway I agree that even if VA turns out to have some essential function, especially in growing children, the adverse effects of getting too much are far better scientifically established.
I'm still curious how much longer Grant can keep going with a zero VA diet before running into problems because he's supposedly been totally VA-depleted for over a year now.
Quote from Ronnie on July 12, 2019, 8:03 pmThis puts some cracks in the vitamin A theory for me. I really would like to hear Grant's take on it
Hi Ronnie,
Firstly, the overall story sounds somewhat suspect to me; what kind of parent would let their kid go on eating nothing but KFC and Coke for 6 years?
Secondly, a few years ago I inquired with a large US producer of chicken, asking them about how much vitamin A they feed to their animals. Their response was:
The feed contains a minimum of 3000 IU/lb of vitamin A activity. Daily intake is going to vary based on feed intake of the birds. Daily intake could range from 660 IU to 1050 IU of vitamin A activity in adult birds.
Therefore, since KFC includes the skin, this boy’s diet would have had a lot of vitamin A.
And lastly, there are about 100 million Americans reporting the same dry eye condition. Clearly then, it’s not caused by VAD. In other words, why blame just this isolated case on VAD, and not all of the 100 million other ones too?
Grant
That is a lot of VA for a bird that weighs like two pounds.
I got one source saying grilled chicken with skin contains about 160IU/100g as retinol, if ones diet was mainly this it could provide thousands of IUs.
Even back in the olden days before "fake news" was a term, we considered papers like "The Sun" to be entertainment.
However, in the upside down world we live in, it's almost turned around haha
Anyways, what this child and the parents are the most deficient in is
Common Sense.
Let me start off by saying how thankful I am for the research and work you have done. When it comes to exposing the damage Vitamin A causes in excess you have done incredible work. I would go as far as saying that this information has really saved my life to a degree if we are talking quality of life.
I'm far from convinced though about the idea that Vitamin A isn't a Vitamin/essential nutrient. I think it is healthy to have some skeptics of this controversial idea here on the forum though for the purpose of debating and thus identifying what is valid and what is not?
Fellow forum members, perhaps I should have posted this article which is from a more reputable source first. Apologies.
It's not unusual for children to be very picky eaters. Out of hundreds of thousands there will be some very picky ones with extremely restrictive diets.
When it comes to chicken it doesn't matter what chicken is fed, it matters how much retinol is contained in the fat and the meat and that is not a lot.
A KFC Zinger box (4825kJ) has three wings and breastmeat in the burger. Going by the USDA reference one wing has about 12.2 mcg of retinol and 86g (half a breast) of breast meat (guesstimate of how much meat is in burger) has about 5.16 mcg. Comparatively, one rib eye steak has about 23 mcg RAE. If he was eating two boxes a day then 12.2 mcg RAE x 6 + 5.16 mcg x 2 = 83.5 mcg. I also estimate about 5 mcg RAE from the iceberg lettuce and about 2 mcg RAE from the mayonnaise. 90.5 mcg RAE when the RDA for him was 600 mcg RAE. 15% of the RDA.
Occam's razor implies that Cian Moore did indeed suffer with Vitamin A deficiency. I don't think it is productive to try to explain away this one. Other than his eye problems it doesn't indicate that he had any significant health issues which might indicate nutritional deficiencies other than Vitamin A. It says he suffered with xerophthalmia for two years before he was given a supplement to correct the condition.
His case shows that Vitamin A deficiency is very difficult to achieve. He started his low VA diet when he was very young and his liver stores would have been much lower than ours. He was also growing which uses up VA. It then took six years for the xerophthalmia to develop. How long would it take one of us to develop the same condition? Probably significantly longer.
He is also featured in the documentary Vitamania:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpcUHAlBpnI
https://www.vitamaniathemovie.com/stories/
What implications does this have for those of us with sub clinical Hypervitaminosis A? Well not a lot as far as I'm concerned unless you start to suffer from xerophthalmia in a few years and keep eating low VA. Don't do that. That would be like me taking CLO when I already had Hypervitaminosis A because I thought I might be Vitamin A deficient :-/
Ok I'm off to go have some lunch now, I'm kinda hungry after talking about the Zinger box 😉
One odd thing about that eye photo (not sure if that is of Cian's eye or not) is that the adolescent has acne which would be odd if too much Vitamin A is the primary cause of acne.
Deleted
The idea that something might be very bad in excess, yet good or essential in small amounts is a difficult concept for us to accept, we generally want things to be black and white. I agree that the most straightforward explanation to account for all observations is that VA is essential in some amount. Even in animal studies, inducing VA deficiency symptoms in adults is almost impossible and the classic model for inducing VA deficiency in rats is to feed the zero-VA diet also to the mother for several weeks before the animals to be studied are even born. This shows just how difficult it can be to prove or disprove the essentiality of VA.
What this doesn't account for though is why the symptoms of VA deficiency are almost the same as those of VA excess. Dry eyes for instance is among the most common detox complaints of people starting on this diet, and this generally goes away with time.
I don't know of _any_ other nutrient where the symptoms of excess are the same as those of deficiency, so it does point to something being fishy about the whole theory of VA deficiency syndrome.
What also is very far from established is how much VA does an adult actually need to be healthy? One study on bone health found that people consuming less than 1500IU/day had the strongest bones. Another observation is that in Brazil numerous studies have shown that the average intake is not more than 1000IU/day, yet Brazil as a whole does not suffer from increased incidence of any VAD-associated diseases such as dry eyes compared to western nations, they even have lower than average incidence of many diseases such as cancer.
This would suggest that even in a person without chronic VA overload, the needs for VA are likely much lower than current recommendations.
"I don't know of _any_ other nutrient where the symptoms of excess are the same as those of deficiency, so it does point to something being fishy about the whole theory of VA deficiency syndrome."
....many nutrients, copper, zinc, most of the minerals