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Tim's Log
I'm just recovering from the latest round of cold symptoms then food poisoning symptoms, the third round this year, all while going low VA. I haven't experienced this before. I don't have any proof of it being VA related but since headaches, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, lengthy periods of loss of appetite etc are all hypervitaminosis A symptoms I strongly suspect that I am having some megadumps of VA.
This makes sense given I was a committed and zealous follower of the WAPF ideology. I consumed CLO for years, I even took FCLO. I forced down masses of liver. I consumed vast quantities of butter and didn't think a meal was complete without it. I consumed large amounts of sweet potato and many other high VA foods. My liver felt very sick and I couldn't work out why. I thought I had iron overload or Wilson's disease or something. So it would make sense if I have been dumping large quantities of VA, this is probably the first time in my life that my diet is less than 2x the RDA for VA. But it doesn't seem like anyone else is experiencing what I am so I'm a bit concerned that it's not VA dumping and it's just confirmation bias.
I'm going to try some activated charcoal, has anyone else tried this?
I'm adding some green herbs to my diet like spring onion and parsley, just small quantities. Some days I'm having an egg. Some days I have a mandarin orange. If I am correct and I am dumping VA it is causing me quite a bit of distress, if I include a small amount of food that contains VA but provides crucial nutrients that support detoxification of VA I'm thinking that may make the depletion process easier and probably less damaging to my body as well. There are also a lot of unknowns here, I feel more comfortable consuming the amount of VA a third world citizen consumes compared with going really extreme and avoiding it almost entirely.
Also, after these episodes everything tastes bad, water has a bitter taste.
When VA gets released from the liver I wonder if other stored fat soluble toxins are also released at the same time?
I had very bad cold symptoms every time when I had a copper deficiency - it practically totally paralyzed me for a few days (with copper deficiency antibacterial immunity is weak and there are low white blood cells). But I didn't had food poisoning - I added a few weeks ago additional betain hcl because my thyroid worked not optimal wenn I had copper deficiency, I was often very cold and when a person is hypothyroid, the stomach secretes less gastric acid and then one does not use nutrients, minerals effectively from food and one can be poisoned more easily from food. Only a few days ago has the saturation of copper definitly stopped and I am starting to feel slowly better on this low VA diet and nobody here writes about this - only one person mentioned copper problem. I tried to eat two eggs with butter and two oranges for one day - I wanted to slow down a bit a vitamin A dumping but my intracranial pressure headaches worsened - my body is still massively dumping vitamin A and additional vitamin A made it worse even though I was better for a while after eggs eating but later worse (and I had absolute no appetite for eggs as if my body didn't need this food). I do not understand how people can feel better when they include these foods and they are still VA toxic or maybe they don't dump VA so aggressively or they are no longer so toxic. If I exceed my daily tolerated vitamin A dose (now I tolerate more than in the beginning - I am eating peleed apples, sometimes pineapple, chickpeas, yellow split peas, light olive oil, hemp seeds but absolut no dairy products, eggs...) I get nausea, my heart starts pounding right after the meal, I get tachycardia - my very typical VA toxicity symptom and I get intracranial pressure headaches - then I have for 2-3 days only beef, rice, white beans and one peeled apple. If I have only VA dumping symptoms I get very sleepy and fatigued, the skin starts to itch - these are symptoms that come almost immediately e.g. after a big meal with fat, as if the gallbladder started secreting accumulated amounts of VA. Sometimes I make coffee enema and I feel a little better.
Thanks Bludicka,
Maybe I need to look into copper more. Funny that you mention itchiness. Just in the last week I got a really itchy back and small sores formed when I tried to scratch. Then it went to the top of my chest, I have to consciously avoid scratching because sores form almost immediately upon scratching. I haven't had this before.
Tim, I've told you about my everything-must-go times. So I won't repeat. But I will say that my every-thing-must-go sessions taught me to NEVER eat fast food.
I did go through a time when I called these attacks "food poisoning". It name isn't far off, because what I've come to realize is that they are a poisoning! Your body is actually fighting to un-poison you with everything it has (mucus, vomiting, runs, sweats, refusing new input).
If not fast food, can you relate your attacks to times when you may be hitting up your fat stores? (my new theory!) It could be that these attacks themselves cause you to use up fat stores, leading to a bit of a self-fulfilling black hole. It may be important to get back to eating asap after an attack. (you could use the old brat diet: bananas, applesauce, rice, toast)
If you can relate it to an activity or habit that uses up fat stores, you could scale it back a bit so that the detox isn't overwhelming?
Something tells me you don't do anything by halves 🙂
You can have a gastric acid deficiency and a susceptibility to food poisoning. I know one person who had a severe gastric acid deficiency and he often had problems with digestion and food poisoning, then he suplemented betaine hcl and had no problems.
@lil-chick Haha yeah it is possibly correlated with fast food but it could be part of the VA detox, I don't really know.
@bludicka It is likely I have low stomach acid. I've tried betaine hcl in the past and I felt it helped at the start and then stopped being helpful. I think it potentially allows the body to scale back its own production. Either way it isn't a long term solution. From my research helicobacter pylori is normally responsible for low stomach acid. There are a range of foods that inhibit its growth and many of these foods also inhibit the growth of other undesirable microorganisms in the gut. I'm going to try to include the following foods in my diet as much as possible:
Olive oil
Garlic
Onion
Manuka honey
Blueberry
Parsley
Cumin
Chilli
Lemongrass tea
Ginger beer
Mixed herbs
In the past I had low stomach acid many times....I knew it because I became anemic, iron from food was not absorbed and betaine hcl always helped. There are many reasons for hypochlorhydria: it can be just stress - very common cause, because stress depletes zinc - important for stomach acid production, hypothyroidism, deficiency of some nutrients - zinc, iron, manganese, amino acid - histidine, salt - chloride, B1. For me it was always temporary solution and the own production of stomac acid started again.
You can add chilli peppers - white, apple vinegar to increase acidity and stomach acid production - but for me personally it was always weak, betaine+ pepsin worked much better (the best is from Now - highest concentration of pepsin).
I you really have low stomach acid - you can eat garlic, onion, chilli, cumin... antimicrobial herbs - it doesn't solve the digestive problem significantly and does not prevent food fermentation, protein putrefaction in the gut.
You have high protein intake now - meat three times a day and you need hydrochloric acid+pepsin especially for protein digestion and with high protein intake you need more hydrochloric acid.
@bludicka I appreciate your thoughts but taking hcl imo is like taking glandulars, it's not addressing the cause and anything that doesn't address the cause will have downsides. Gut bugs are a major cause of gut problems, I believe that most cases of low stomach acid are caused by helicobacter.
In addition to using chemotaxis to avoid areas of low pH, H. pylori also neutralizes the acid in its environment by producing large amounts of urease, which breaks down the urea present in the stomach to carbon dioxide and ammonia. These react with the strong acids in the environment to produce a neutralized area around H. pylori.[45] Urease knockout mutants are incapable of colonization. In fact, urease expression is not only required for establishing initial colonization but also for maintaining chronic infection.[46]