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Vitamin A Killer?
Just an Innocent Vitamin that Cures...or Causes Cancer?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194705940
Medicine Girl looks at the evidence.
Thanks for the heads-up on that article, @livy! Super interesting, and possibly even interesting to people on the fringes of "grokking" the issues with vitamin A and with supplementation in general (thanks @joe2 for that new word in my vocabulary haha).
I thought the comments were also very interesting. Especially the one who says that he was tested and that genetically he is not able to convert carotenes to vitamin A and because of that he gets night blindness! Perhaps Matt Stone has that problem? Now, you'd think the easy answer to that... is to just eat pre-formed vitamin A, such as that in butter or eggs.
BUT if you think about it, vitamin A palmitate and acetate are in animal feeds, and so possibly... vitamin A in "real" food... is often industrial, horror-show, Frankenstein A... that has come through a chicken or a cow. Because we forget that we (and our animals) are what we eat.
I still think we need to eat these valuable foods, but we need to fix this as a society. Just like if you poisoned all the bamboo, Pandas would still have to eat it. You can't switch Pandas to eating other things, their systems need bamboo . You have to fix the bamboo.
(edited)
Hi @lil-chick,
Glad you enjoyed the article. Here is Part 2. Medicine Girl takes aim at Garrett Smith big time in this one!
Losing a Checkmate-The Vitamin A Lie (Part 2)
OK, I'm not in total agreement here (with Medicine Girl) because she seems to think (am I reading this wrong?) but she seems to think you cannot get vitamin A overload without supplements?
But we do know that polar explorers died from polar bear liver before widespread franken-vitamin A supplement usage.
And we also know that lupus is an ancient disease that predates franken-vitamin A supplementation. (my theory is that MY lupus IS vitamin A overload -- other people's version of lupus may be too. (I do not discount that other people's "brands" of lupus might be other toxicities)). (Ancients thought the butterfly rash made you look like a wolf, thus the name).
Now I'm not saying that the supplementation of Franken-A is not evil. It's just not the whole story.
Plants make carotenes for their benefit, not ours. All vitamin A begins as sunscreen for plants.
The things I regret most are cod liver oil, liver, and my talents at creating hundreds of butternut squash per year.
All completely natural.
Now, I'm on the slow boat and have not entirely thrown out what I consider important foods that happen to have VA, such as moderate amounts of butter, milk and eggs. I don't regret those. I eat veggies and fruits but keep the color to a dull roar.
I feel great lately, actually, here in my 7th year. I do have some damage, but I feel spry.
Old age is just toxicity catching up with you. We aren't able to out-run it forever, which is why we start out new babies and then give up the toxic meat suit. But the diseases of old age shouldn't hit until we are actually OLD!
I have not taken a vitamin A pill in the last 35 + years. After 8 + years of a really strict low everything diet, fasting and finally getting to the point where I did not burn in the sun. I thought it was time to reintroduced eggs, dairy and oats back into my diet. What a huge mistake that was!
Major vitamin A overload with out taking a pill!
It's funny that people just don't want this to be true. Heck, I do miss pizza with red sauce.
In fact, if the stupid government wasn't supplementing everything, including animal feeds, with Franken-A, we probably wouldn't have to worry so much about an occasional slice of pumpkin pie.
The supplementation of animal feeds and foods and baby milks... gets us to overload ... FASTER.
And each generation gets there faster because their mothers had a bigger load.
I will tell my larger story later, maybe in another thread, but for now I want thoughts on this.
I became overloaded from a year (or more … a year is all I can verify with one source of Vitamin A) of cod liver oil (one of the few that does not reduce it, and then add it back in) + greens powder with 1 gram of beta-carotene + regular flexitarian diet heavy on dried apricots, salads, greens, but also a healthy amount of caned mackerel and sardines.
Everything I am reading shows that beta carotene is not a cause of toxic build-up of VitA, but I feel that all sources (preformed and retinol from beta carotene ) combined really pushed me over the limit and basically broke me down … badly. I also don't think enough emphasis is being placed on the retinol forms from plants.