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Tim's Log
Thanks mate. I can't imagine life without this knowledge, really improving my quality of life. I was planning to eat an egg a day but often I dont feel like it. Because my D was quite high i'm taking a break from it. Ive cut down on beer, refined carbs and refined fats. Im reducing my supplemental b vitamin intake and really focusing on maximising my B intake from food. Feels like I'm coming close to understanding my bodies blueprint for dietary intake.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for sharing your experience. How did you overcome the extreme fatigue you experienced near the beginning? I would say for about the first 1-1.5 months of the diet, I had decent energy levels and my sleep schedule was relatively normal. However, after the 1.5 month mark, my energy levels decreased. I have had days where I slept about 10-12 hours, woke up feeling rested, but still needed two two-hour naps that day. On those days I sometimes felt completely wiped out, like a zombie. I felt almost exactly like I felt when I took cyproheptadine - things like walking took a lot more conscious effort than normal.
Hi, the fatigue decreased after the first couple of months but continued in waves. I was trying to get zero VA at the start, I think this is a mistake and can probably lead to unnecessary suffering. I didn't consume enough foods rich in B vitamins as well. I now have a diet that has been tweaked to be high in everything except VA. I was also low in Vit D. I have also followed a long herbal treatment for gut dysbiosis, I think this has improved my health.
Hi @tim-2, went through your log and found it helpful—thank you for sharing!
Earlier in your posts, you detailed the improvements you'd enjoyed, one of which was the cessation of peeling on your lip. Could you please provide a little more on that specific health issue: were your lips constantly dry or peeling?, did they peel periodically?, in response to certain foods? I ask because my girlfriend has been struggling with this nagging symptom for about 4 years now, and I'm trying to convince her to experiment with low VA. I've also noticed she often has cold feet and is intolerant of the cold, but other than that, I can't identify other common high VA symptoms. Do you think it possible that mild toxicity could produce a limited set of issues, such as peeling lips, plus some?
And just above, you mention that you "now have a diet that has been tweaked to be high in everything except VA." Could you please share what that is, along with any general principles to guide one's choices? I'm finishing up my second week of low VA, eating dishes that are one part carb (potatoes, hulled barley, rice), one part beans (for sufficient soluble fiber), and one part meat (lean beef, lamb, chicken), along with sides of peeled apples and nuts and seeds (sunflower, Brazil, macadamia). I've come to this detox diet in search of relief from life-long cognitive impairments and I'm pleased to say that I already see improvements!
@jakub Most girls have also issues with copper. Especially if they were on estrogen pills and have diet low in animal proteins and high in nuts, seeds, chocolate etc.. Read this http://coppertoxic.com/
Hi @jakub, glad to hear, no problem, this video outlines the diet I follow:
Most days my diet contains fish, chicken, legumes, mushrooms, a mix of whole and refined grains, corn and chicken soup, leek, cabbage, potato, almond milk, peanuts, honey, dried herbs. I eat red meat a couple of times a week if that, I'm not a big fan of red meat unless it is fillet steak. I tried to include a few eggs per week but lately I don't have the desire to eat them. No dairy at all. If I have fruit I will eat no more than one serving per day due to pectin content, I have a video on my channel about it. I try to have limited sugar intake, I feel that more than small amounts may interfere with my thiamine status. I think that nuts are good but should be limited as well. Fish is extremely important for iodine, selenium and DHA. I used cronometer to make sure that I was getting a balanced diet and getting more than sufficient nutrition. Interestingly this diet is very good from a traditional chinese medicine perspective as well afaik.
I had constantly peeling lips for years. It is caused by VA toxicity/B vitamin deficiency. Now my lips never peel, a complete 180. Peeling lips are a symptom of riboflavin deficiency. Mushrooms are zero VA, very high in riboflavin, they contain other B vitamins and contain zero pectin. This is why I love mushrooms so much aside from their great taste. Mushrooms and legumes are true superfoods. I eat 1 serving of mushrooms every day and eat 1-2 servings of legumes per day.
Another characteristic of my diet is that by avoiding dairy and eggs and getting more protein from plant sources I'm not getting a higher than normal amount of cholesterol in my diet even though I do eat quite a bit of fish and chicken. Fish and chicken are my only sources of cholesterol. I jumped on the dietary cholesterol is harmless bandwagon years ago because at first glance the theory makes no sense. This is because it isn't explained well at all. Cholesterol in itself I think is unlikely to be a problem however when animal products are cooked oxidized cholesterol is formed which is highly atherogenic. This is why you want to be conservative about animal products in the diet. Eggs are extremely high in cholesterol. Liver is too, so another reason to hate liver haha. The WAPF style diet is a heart disease nightmare. Liver, meat, fried animal fats, eggs, dairy etc...
"A widespread misconception has been developing among the Canadian public and among physicians. It is increasingly believed that consumption of dietary cholesterol and egg yolks is harmless. There are good reasons for long-standing recommendations that dietary cholesterol should be limited to less than 200 mg/day; a single large egg yolk contains approximately 275 mg of cholesterol (more than a day’s worth of cholesterol).
Despite widespread belief to the contrary, it is simply not true that dietary cholesterol is harmless. Concern about dietary cholesterol has been developing over the past 40 years. This concern is based on the careful and independent conclusions of Ancel Keys and Mike Hegsted, who formulated our two most commonly used equations (44,45) relating dietary saturated and polyunsaturated fat and cholesterol to serum cholesterol.
There is also no doubt that cholesterol feeding is a causal factor in animal models of atherosclerosis. Such models include rhesus monkeys fed a diet rich in egg yolks that developed hypercholesterolemia, xanthomatosis and atherosclerosis (46,47). In 1908, Ignatowski showed that meat – containing the pro-oxidant iron – fed to adult rabbits, or milk and egg yolks fed to weanling rabbits, induced atherosclerosis (48). In 1913, Anitschkov established the cholesterol-fed rabbit as a model for dietary atherosclerosis (49). Cholesterol feeding in rabbits not only causes cholesterol accumulation in plasma and the arterial wall but also promotes inflammation and cell proliferation, which may be blocked by the anti-inflammatory agent cortisone to prevent the formation of raised atherosclerotic lesions (50).
The human diet contains large quantities of oxidized fatty acids and oxidized cholesterol because a large portion of the fat and cholesterol in the diet is often prepared in fried, heated or processed form (51); as much as 12% of dietary cholesterol is in the oxidized form (39). Salonen et al (52) showed that lipid oxidation independently increased progression of carotid intima-media thickness. It seems likely that it is oxidized cholesterol in the diet that is harmful."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989358/
Also eggs are a great source of biotin but:
"Egg whites contain high levels of avidin, a protein that binds biotin strongly. When cooked, avidin is partially denatured and binding to biotin is reduced. However one study showed that 30-40% of the avidin activity was still present in the white after frying or boiling."
That's why I soft boil the eggs so whites are done, but yolks are untouched.. I do believe that egg yolks in some baking recipe is not safe like raw or soft boiled.. Avidin is not a big deal. Yolk is rich in biotin. So maybe it will inhibit some biotin from the egg meal. But it will not make you biotin deficient LOL.. Especially if you take B complex anyway.
Heh, with cholesterol I went exactly other way around. I was afraid about it at the beginning then found some strange data (like Minnesota Coronary Experiment), started searching more, finding more contrary data and finally found Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. Read his long list of post "What causes heart disease" and now I don't care about cholesterol in my diet any more.
Just in short: you get atherosclerotic plaques when something is destroying your endothelium faster than your body could fix it or something is slowing down process of fixing it. When you start thinking in this way there are no more paradoxes (like French etc.) and he provide a lot of data for this.