I needed to disable self sign-ups because I’ve been getting too many spam-type accounts. Thanks.
What do you think of the iheal.me blog?
I'm pretty sure I found the iheal.me blog site because it was a link on Garrett's Nutrition Restored website, but it is no longer a link on his site. They were originally all on board with the zero vitamin A diet, with quite an elaborate website telling the story. They have taken down the anti-vitamin A page and have a new blog post saying that we need to stop at some point and start eating a little bit of vitamin A again or we will start to have health problems from being vitamin A deficient.
They were about a year on the zero A diet. I have been on the zero A diet for 19 months and I still have some skin issues. Recently the skin around my eye lashes got red and crusty in spots, and at the same time I was reading the iheal blog, so the new symptoms Anika listed really resonated with me. I added white fish (sole or pacific cod) to my diet once or twice a week and my skin seems a bit better (of course it could be a coincidence). I also tried adding a small amount of cabbage, and then a larger amount soon after, too much, so I stopped. But I think I will stick with the fish once a week.
Has anyone added back a tiny amount of vitamin A and felt better?
Scientifically Vitamin A is essential for human body but not in huge amounts. I suppose Vit A deficiency exists and if you experience its symptoms, you should try to widen your food list. At least you have already been on zero diet for more than 1.5 years and you are not toxic anymore. So, I don't see something wrong in adding back vit A in rational amounts
Grant says it could take up to 2 years to get out of the toxic range depending on many factors. If you've take accutane or vitamin A supplements it could even take 10 years to undo the incorrect gene expression that vitamin A toxicity causes.
I'm with Grant in that how could something so toxic and cause soooo many problems actually be essential. Your reaction is similar to people who report after adding CLO or supplements that they feel better or have something beneficial happen. This is explained by the body stopping the detox process and removing it from the blood because more is coming in. I believe Grant would say you are just delaying the healing process.
I've been watching all this unfold too, and have some questions about what's going on there.
One of the people running the iheal blog is Annika, and she was the moderator for Dr. Smith's private forum. Then, at around the same time Mary from the justtakeabite is also rewinding claims-yet as she reports introducing foods to her kids (peppers and peaches) yet they have horrible reactions and acting like she just can't figure out why, and before she had blogged about some amazing recovery for her kids AND she was the one who wrote the Vit A detox children's book with a forward by Dr. Smith. (Sorry, quite the run on sentence)
Of course I'm just an outsider looking in, but they both had "working" relationships with Dr. Smith and have been very vocal about their dislike for him on Facebook, so they just seem suspect in their motivations.
The diet was never supposed to be forever, so introducing foods as you feel necessary only makes sense but for them to say it never helped them is very contradictory from what they reported and at least Mary, even profited from and continues to.
Idk this is just my two sense obviously, and has been bothering me too.
Perhaps the most important argument for me is that Anika feels very well and healthy, I read all her posts, she overdosed with VA supplement but probably she was not so toxic and not for a long time, she is able to work daily almost 10 hours, if she is still VA toxic - then I want to have such toxicity. About Mary I am not sure, her arguments did not convince me...maybe she got into some nutritional imbalances. For me personally low VA diet is difficult, I must balance some nutrients and then I have VA dumping symptoms but I am 100% sure that I'm on the right track but I have experiences with detox, it takes some time for the body to heal - but it is really important to distinguish whether I have nutritional imbalances or detox symptoms or maybe for some people VA deficiency symptoms. This can be very difficult for some more toxic people and even after seven months, I am far from a significant improvement. About twice I tried to eat a little more carotenes and I started to feel better because the body began to stop the detox process (the same with oxalates). But for me VA is an essential nutrient, the women have a smaller liver, more copper in the liver and less VA, maybe it takes less time to run out of reserves, but I think it's very individual - how healthy a person is, metabolic rate, physical activity, thyroid and adrenal health, ADH and ALDH enzymes - if the person is toxic, if she takes or took some drugs, some diseases, fatty liver, impaired beta carotenes conversion and very important how long the person was toxic.... And I always wonder when I see Chris Masterjohn, his diet is super high in VA + daily VA supplementation (50 000 IU - probably not all the time) but he looks totall healthy with high functional brain, a normal person with these doses would have been a long time ago toxic.
What I think that it is even possible to be both deficient and toxic at the same time, the toxic brain needs a very long time to heal and maybe the liver vitamin VA reserves will run out sooner. This situation I had with copper toxicity, my brain was still toxic and the body was deficient in bioavailable copper. I had to saturate copper on some days (and to increase ceruloplasmin, a little copper from food stimulates it) and continue with detox. But this may only happen in people who have been toxic for a very long time with impaired copper metabolism (when the liver is full of copper, the body starts to move the copper into the brain).
And a few days ago I had a little more green olive oil in food- one tablespoon and got a light nausea, I had this nausea befor low VA diet very often and the first two months on the diet, this is my typical VA toxicity symptom. My liver is still full of VA but now I can eat more carotenoids foods and the body is still in detox mode, the first months I had to be more strict.
I don't follow the strict regimen. All I'm doing is living a MUCH lower-A lifestyle than at any other time of my life. I figure things have to normalize eventually.
I might feel differently about things if I had a scary diagnosis like Grant did.
But even if I did follow a very strict protocol for a while, it would be temporary.
I think the idea that you will intuit your need for A is a strong one, and I'm not sure there is any better way than that.
I think vitamin A foods will enter your dreams, I think you will feel the mouth watering when you see the foods you need, etc.
I've been trying to solve my health problems with diet for so long that really, I'm jaded! hahaha... or maybe you could say that I've found that intuition and tradition are the only guidelines that work. I was done with special diets and supplements even before I happened onto Grant's site ( WAPF'ers were talking about it).
I'm surprised I was even open to going lowish A! 🙂 But I can see that it might be the yin to the yang of what I did before. And so I may need lowish-A-diet to unwind the damage I've done.
Regarding the future, I will never eat more than the RDA, and I currently warn "healthy" people not to eat more than the RDA. To take the time and actually Do the Math.
I am very doubtful of Anika's claims. She said that although they went off the diet a little shy of 1 year on it, that she and people in her circle started to develop signs of vitamin A "deficiency" at about 6 months into the diet. And yet apparently nobody had any blood tests to determine their serum retinol levels. Although I don't believe the the serum retinol test is good for assessing toxicity, I do think if it's exceptionally low that it can indicate when your liver/body has a low level of retinol. Or if you want "deficient." So in my opinion they were experiencing detox symptoms. But the symptoms were scary because they didn't just come and go. They persisted. It was like they hit a wall and things just started getting worse. Based on Grant's survey results, I think they are not the only ones who experienced a huge improvement at the beginning (which she does attribute to the vitamin A detox), only to hit a wall at some point. I don't think any of us can know for sure what is going on. But based on research about how long it takes the liver to empty its retinol stores and in the absence of any clinical markers of deficiency (by that I mean blood or liver tests), I would guess that at some point the detox process just gets overwhelmed.
In a recent podcast that Garrett did, he said that for people whose detox symptoms are too difficult to deal with, he recommends that they consume small amounts of vitamin A to help slow things down. I think the reason Annika et al. started feeling better was because they slowed down their body's attempt to detox. I think that Garret's new insights about the ADH/ALDH enzyme systems could have helped them and could be helpful to others who are hitting a similar wall. I certainly hope so. As Garrett put it somewhere: we built a race car with regular tires. Get the body to go into detox mode (releasing retinol) but with a detox apparatus that was not up to the task; at least not for the long haul.
Long story short: I think Annika et al. panicked and jumped ship. It seems that they are still consuming a relatively small amount of retinol, so I assume they will continue to detox, just more slowly. It may be that that turns out to be the best way for some people to detox. If that's true, then I don't really see a problem with it.
Thanks for all the interesting replies! I'm still trying to decide if humans need just a tiny bit of vitamin A, or if it is in fact just a toxin, and not really a vitamin at all.
I've been on a zero A diet for 19 months. Before that I ate a very low salicylate gluten free diet which is essentially devoid of carotenoids. The only thing I changed right before my health fell of a cliff, was adding in lots of liver. The point of this story is that I know for a fact that it was the vitamin A overload that caused my health problems. I cut out liver, eggs, dairy and supplements and immediately starting noticing improvements in my physical and mental health. Within a few months I felt very good, but still had rosacea. My skin has steadily improved over the last 1.5 years, but now seems to be stalled. In the last few months I have new skin problems around my eyes in my lower lashes, little red spots that form dry crusts.I don't like this new development, and it seems like I am going backwards. I guess I will keep trying tiny amounts of vitamin A and see how it goes.
My zero A diet is beef, buckwheat, pealed pears, celery root sauerkraut, high oleic sunflower oil, dark chocolate, vitamin C, mineral water, gelatin and topical magnesium oil. Now I am adding white fish once a week and will try a little bit of very pale green cabbage.
Thanks for reading! This website has been a life saver! Here's hoping we all get back to good health soon!