Quote from Kurtis on October 8, 2022, 9:10 am

Quote from Jenny on October 8, 2022, 8:51 am

@kurtis 

‘It's just a vitamin you have to be aware of not to eat too much of for too long because it can build up. Eating a little under the RDA just to be safe is fine too. Nobody should be afraid of VA in normal amounts.’

I totally agree with you. 

The main point as I see it is this:

People DON’T understand that it can build up. Even on my nutritional therapist course this wasn’t taught. Just that extraordinary high amounts were harmful. People are ingesting amounts well over RDA and don’t realise it’s an issue. Two friends recently both takin CLO and a multi and eating sweet potatoes multiple times a week. One a successful athlete was bright orange! This is not well known. The over ingestion is paired with poor detox which is very common in our toxic world which makes the accumulation more likely. 

The big issue as I see it is therefore that EXCESS vA is common NOT rare and is a very under appreciated problem. People need to be aware of the very real dangers. If people have excess vA then reducing it will be helpful to health. I do not think we need to go very low vA or reduce it to zero. I think we want to get the level down and then get on with our lives, eating a nutrient dense diet and de-stressing. 

Grant writes about VA being nothing but toxic and Garrett seems to be so arrogantly stupid. I'm simply saying Grants hypothesis is wrong. He didn't heal because he cut out VA from his diet. He can't point at one of the many variables he cut out from his diet to land on meat rice and beans and say that it was the cause, with no prior diagnosis of clinical VA toxicity. And VA cannot be blamed on the all the world's ills.

Quote from Liz on October 8, 2022, 9:14 am

I probably shouldn't bother but @kurtis it seems like you have tried low A for some time and not gotten better, maybe even feel worse, and now you are angry and disappointed and need to blow off some stram.

Grant did a low A rodent study, the animals were perfectly fine and no siges of deficiency. Info is on this site.

The science is VERY clear about vit A toxicity and there is usually no need to go full retard and live off meat and rice. For most it is quite enough to come off supplements and high A foods like carrots and liver.

Accutane victims play in a whole different league of A poisoning. If you have not taken accutane you have no idea what so ever what they are going through and to claim they do not have A poisoning that is pretty ignorant at Best.

Detox is a complicated matter, and highly personal based on micronutrient status and genes. For some they feel better within weeks. For some it takes years. I felt like shit from time to time but it kept getting better. I am still not well and I have been doing this for 4 years. I could tell I had A coming out because all my skin would literally peel off from the inside. I had almost every symtom of A poisoning. I could not even eat a small piece of cheese without breaking out with eczema within 30 minutes (i had NO ALLERGY, which I of course had tested).

Today I eat dairy daily again no issues. Also whole eggs a few times a week and am still improving. I can no longer say for sure how much is from A and how much from ox because some symptoms overlap. But the first year I was dead sure!

I am sorry you are disappointed. But please, A toxicity is a real thing, and from reading the personal blogs on here you should see that many are slowly lmproving.

 

Edit: again, pardon spelling..

Also, I think it is great to discuss these matters and that is precisely what this forum is for. To try to get closer to the truth.

Quote from Kurtis on October 8, 2022, 9:32 am

@liz No Ive gotten much better by easing up on such a stupid diet and considering other things for healing. It's like seeing keto being promoted for diabetes, it's almost comically wrong. I'm really just interested in results and from the logs I've read and my own personal experience believing VA to be a complete toxin like grant and Garrett write about hasn't actually yielded the results such an idea would yield. 

Quote from Liz on October 8, 2022, 9:14 am

 But please, A toxicity is a real thing

You are dumber than your eloquent writing style would suggest 

Quote from Jenny on October 8, 2022, 11:44 am

I agree with some of what you say Kurtis. I do think looking at the bigger picture is vital. I use Klinghardt’s pyramid of healing and vA toxicity sits firmly in the bottom physical level (unless it has some energetic link??) so is only one part of the big picture. A significant issue for some but not for others. But not the only issue as it only happens if someone is slow with detoxification, unless ludicrous amounts are continually eaten.
I no longer align myself with limited thinking.

Having said that I wouldn’t use derogatory language it’s not needed. You make some good points and we need discussions like this. 

Quote from r on October 8, 2022, 12:09 pm

Quote from Kurtis on October 8, 2022, 3:45 am

Quote from Jiří on October 8, 2022, 3:40 am

@kurtis that is not the case. It is not like I had no idea about  nutrition before starting with vit A detox.. In eyes of "nutritionist" my diet was very healthy full of micronutrients and balanced.. It's not like I was eating pound a liver a day or something. But I was eating all foods that are highest in vit A in small amounts every day for dacade.. Another thing is that the same diet for someone else could be perfectly fine. If that person doesn't have other health issue. Can have sun exposure daily etc.. So in fact I started to get sick because of "healthy diet" that is recommended by many nutritionists.. Before that I was on bodybuilding diet basically meat and rice and I was ok. The problem started when I started with stupid diets like keto, paleo, Ray Peat, Morley Robbins etc..

Grants grand hypothesis is that people are sick because they eat too much VA and that it's not a vitamin at all, this is false because many people who are sick try the very restrictive low VA diet and don't heal all their health problems, some people actually feel worse but people here want to say it's "detox". They may heal a little bit but you can't chalk that up to VA alone because of how many things are excluded on a low VA diet. I can't spell this out any simpler for you.

Nothing as per nutritional value is excluded in Vitamin A detox diet or grants ( beef, rice and beans diet ) .

Now regarding substances and toxins that his diet eliminated 

1 : Sugar / glucose  -  If you go though. grants podcast he clearly mentioned that at one point he  introduced like crazy. amount of sugar around 200 gms a day .  That didn't change anything for him , so clearly it was nothing to do with eliminating sugar.

2 : Oxalate content / organic / toxins - many of us have come here after eliminating all those foods ( vegan , organic, low oxalate etc )  , that didnt help many of us 

what else did he eliminate ?

Quote from wavygravygadzooks on October 8, 2022, 12:59 pm

It seems like @kurtis overriding point here is that Vitamin A toxicity is not the cause of all disease, and at most is the cause of only a small proportion of disease states.  I totally agree, it's being way overblown by Grant and dipSmith.  It was a hypothesis worth investigating but just does not pan out based on the data, and there are almost always confounding variables in the data that prevent drawing a firm causal connection.

Another point @kurtis is making is that Grant's case is likely not one of Vitamin A toxicity, and that his self-experimentation does not prove it was Vitamin A toxicity.  I totally agree, again because there are so many confounding variables he could never draw a firm causal connection, and he didn't even seem to have a high Vitamin A intake to begin with.  COULD it be Vitamin A?  Yes.  Is it likely?  Based on what I've heard, no.  Statistical probabilities are not in Grant's favor on any of this.

One thing I will push back on with @kurtis is that I do feel strongly that symptoms of toxicity can worsen when removing the offending substance because it begins to come out of long-term storage in parts of the body where it does not belong.  In my case, it was abundantly clear with both oxalate toxicity and Vitamin A toxicity.  When I removed oxalates, I got distinctly cloudy urine, which was also quite foamy...I'd never experienced anything like that in my life, and the biggest variable that changed just prior to that symptom pattern was the removal of high-oxalate foods.  I'd also had bladder/prostate/urinary issues prior to removing oxalates that have been gone ever since.  Can I prove causation?  Certainly not.  But of all the variables I could think of it makes the most sense, and I had elevated levels of oxalates on an Organic Acids Test prior to that.

The Vitamin A detox was even more obvious...I'd been regularly consuming eggs, liver, cod liver oil, etc. for a long time, and incidentally began eating even more liver after dropping oxalates.  Then I started getting insane watery diarrhea out of nowhere that I'd never experienced in my life, even with IBS-D for 15 year prior, nothing compared to this insane diarrhea that would just come out of nowhere.  When I looked back through my food/symptom records, I discovered it was happening whenever I [by chance] stopped eating all major sources of Vitamin A for more than a day.  And then when I consciously stopped eating Vitamin A all hell broke loose...such a long string of weird symptoms, the majority of which are in line with those reported for Vitamin A toxicity.  One of them seems so unique I can't fathom any other explanation given the circumstances: my eyelids became extremely oily during the day and would burn like crazy, and then at night they would get so dry while I slept that they would crack and bleed...my eyelids fucking bleeding!  What else could possibly explain that in my situation?  I'm a research biologist...I've tried hard to come up with alternative explanations and I can't come up with anything reasonable.  So, again, can I prove causation?  No.  But there is no alternative explanation I have seen that makes sense.

So, in summary, Vitamin A toxicity is definitely the best explanation for some people's heath problems, it could very well be playing a minor role in many more people's health problems, but it is hardly the cause of all health problems.  The length of time it takes to undo Vitamin A toxicity is likely generally underestimated, and the "just stop eating Vitamin A" recommendation for fixing toxicity is clearly a lazy response by doctors who could be prescribing better nutritional guidance if they had a clue about Vitamin A metabolism (or nutrition at all).

Also, @jaj the numbers I've seen for choline are about 70 mg per 100 g of raw ruminant meat, versus 225 mg per 100 g of eggs.  So 3 large eggs contain roughly the same choline (337 mg) as a pound of raw ground beef (315 mg).  Considering there are way more essential amino acids in meat than eggs, and way less Vitamin A, I personally consider meat to be a better and safer source of choline than eggs [if you can digest meat], and it is also much more consistent with our evolutionary history (nobody had access to eggs every day, but everybody was eating meat).

Quote from Jenny on October 8, 2022, 2:02 pm

Yes I think those eating (and digesting) large amounts of meat are ok for choline. I have low stomach acid and really struggle to eat much meat. Until I put back in eggs I wasn’t getting enough. As I said it’s probably one reason carnivores don’t have detox setback cycles as discussed by Grant. You make some good points. 

Quote from Liz on October 9, 2022, 12:45 am

Quote from Jenny on October 8, 2022, 7:25 am

Interesting debate. 

I was an extremely clear case of vA poisoning. Got ill when i started the supplement. Felt a lot better when I cut it out. My main symptom was bizarre weight gain. I had others but this was the easiest to follow precisely. I drew a graph of my weight. Since birth of first child completely stable for 17 years. Then in 2013 a dramatic 20lb gain for no apparent reason. This levelled off but never went away. Then in 2018 sudddenly it happened again. This time another 10lbs on. This put me 30lbs over my normal weight and well into the overweight range, a place I’d never been in my entire life. Then I discovered Grants work and thought maybe it’s the 5000IU retinyl palmitate I’m taking (at that point recommended by Garrett Smith for high calcium). I’d also been having head pressure and light sensitivity. Then I looked back at the supplements I was taking in 2013 and in June 2013, the very month my weight started to shoot up, I’d added high strength cod liver oil!! Luckily I’d changed to another omega 3 product after a while. That was enough for me. I lowered my vA intake. I never went VERY  low vA and I never excluded food groups. I lost my excess weight and the other bizarre symptoms went away too. 

However, sadly I think I did make a big mistake with my low vA diet because I wasn’t mindful of my choline intake. I now think I was showing signs of choline and acetylcholine deficiency. Unforeseen consequences of limited diets. I cut out eggs. I don’t digest meat well. Big mistake I now think. Shot myself in the foot. I’m now trying to sort out the consequences of this. At least I’m not fat anymore! Andrew Baird on FB or on Garrett Smith’s network is the man talking sense about this. I’m becoming more and more convinced. The one thing I could never improve was my anxiety. I think B6 was part of the answer but if you don’t have acetylcholine then you can’t run your parasympathetic (rest and digest) system so you tend to stay stuck in sympathetic (flight or fight). That was me. I’m so much better with B6 and choline. So much better. Beware of unintended consequences.  

Thanks @jaj for the choline reminder, it had me reinstall mighty networks to check out Andrew's posts and he has made quite a few posts on the topic lately. Also there are some interesting studies as well. Smith seems to be all cholestatis = fatty liver = buy his (very expensive) supplement, and he believes choline to be shuffeling A back into liver storage. But he changes his view like every week so hard to keep tack 😅. If choline helps with what we like to call detox it could definately be a key nutrient to keep in mind. And for some, meat seems not to be enough. Andrew did eat lots of meat but he also needed like 4 eggs a day, which probably had A lot of helpful co-factors as well despite providing a lot of A. The extra A can also have eased on the (what we like to refer to as) "dumping". I am surprised Smith hasn't banned him yet for providing ideas that goes against his own, or maybe he has stopped doing that?

But you did take choline supplement some years ago, but stopped? 

If the dose makes the poison, and the dose depends on the liver's capacity to "detox", along with genes/mutations/nutritional status, with nutritional background in mind, the way out of this mess, and the time needed, is indeed very individual. 

@kurtis thanks for your very constructive feedback. 👍

Edit: Andrew did not do well on eggs at first if I remember correctly but after 2,5 years low A they are now helpful for him. I have similar experience with eggs and low fat dairy. No issues anymore, might even be beneficial (dairy also have choline, b2 and other helpful nutrients, iuised to crave like 2 liters a day 6 months ago, now only a cup here and there)

Quote from Jenny on October 9, 2022, 2:39 pm

Andrew has done some great work on choline. I don’t agree with  Garrett Smith’s opinion on this or many other things come to that. Full story still emerging. I realise now I probably have acetylcholine deficiency. I have all the symptom list.