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Why I don’t think that this is a legit theory anymore
Quote from clare on October 28, 2021, 11:00 amI think where Gerson success contradicts the poison A theory is that the liver would be filled with A many times over doing the therapy. The palms and soles turn orange, and this is considered normal. (Dr. Smith says this means poisoning every time) Gerson patients have gone on to live decades after this therapy with no signs of hyper-A. Unless coffee enemas remove significant amounts of A, which is something to consider...
I forgot to mention that coffee enemas indeed have this possibility. If the retinol in the bile isn't re-absorbed in the small intestine, it can be excreted.
I think the explanation for this phenomenon is that carrot juice is more than beta-carotene. Ray Peat believes that carrots have antibacterial properties, does the juice have them? This could explain the cure of tuberculosis, etc. But I won't eat it, I've seen several studies that make it clear that beta-carotene is not the best compound. Besides, I think lemon juice helps me heal my scars, maybe it's better than carrot.
Liver juice, I don't quite understand what it is. Is it blood from the liver? Does it contain a lot of vitamin A?
It is true that I am assuming that Saladino speaks truthfully about his diet. Having watched most of his videos, I think it's a pretty safe assumption. After being carnivore for a long time, writing a book that essentially proposed that plant foods should not be eaten, and starting an organ meat supplement company, he risked backlash and losing his followers by telling people they should in fact be eating carbs from plant foods. As far as I can see, he had more to lose than to gain by telling people that. He isn't selling plant-based supplements...
He does, quite obviously, market his organ meats really hard, and I am definitely skeptical that he would change his messaging even if he did come to believe that the Vitamin A in those organs was a problem for some people. I have said as much before. However, he seems completely convinced by what he's found in the literature and what he's observed extant hunter-gatherers eating, so I don't expect him to change his own mind anytime soon.
As far as beta-carotene possibly being a problem for him, he's said on numerous podcasts that he's been eating mangos and other tropical fruits in Costa Rica without issue, he regularly eats honey that contains beta-carotene, and I'm sure he's getting some beta-carotene from all the organs and animal fat he eats. So it would appear that beta-carotene does not cause his skin problems. And even if he is no longer eating liver every day, I would bet he's still eating enough to get at least the RDA value, and probably much more. Again, we can't know with certainty without monitoring him 24-7, but we also don't know how accurate anybody's record keeping is outside of peer-reviewed literature, so pretty much everybody's data is suspect if you're going to play that game.
Anyway, my point with Saladino was that plant compounds are the most likely cause of his skin problems, not Vitamin A. I was not using him as an example showing that Vitamin A consumption was beneficial, that's a different subject.
Until Grant reveals the flaws in every study on Vitamin A out there, he has not proven anything except that you don't need to consume the RDA value, which I could care less about considering that people on the carnivore diet have shown that most of the RDA values are complete hogwash anyway. You're talking about a single, non-academic person trying to overturn decades of peer-reviewed science...the onus is not on the scientists, it is on Grant or whoever wants to overturn the science, and it is going to take at least an equivalent amount of scientific rigor to do that. Good luck finding the money and expertise to undertake those studies...
Funding a single study on rats that repeats one of the early studies on Vitamin A is not going to be sufficient, but if the results are profound enough, it's possible they might spark someone's interest to look into the matter further. They would have to be REALLY profound results though, they would need to be published in a respected journal by a respected author, and to get that you're going to need a very robust study with large sample sizes and an immaculate study design, which I'm guessing he's never going to get the money or staff to conduct.
It would be a much better use of time and energy to study the frequency of Vitamin A toxicity and better understand whether that has been trending upwards and why.
Enemas shouldn't reach the small intestine unless you've got a serious problem with your ileocecal valve. Ff the main site of VA reabsorption is the small intestine, enemas aren't going to do anything to help.
The liver "juice" was made from liver carrots ground together and then pressed with a hydraulic press in fabric packs that you make with the grinder. It's quite disgusting. If a cup of carrot juice is about 45000 IU of A, and the full therapy contains 13 cups of juices of which half are carrot and the others are greens and apples that is a lot of A right there. Meals include large green salads and cooked vegetables which would provide much less A. Finally, crude liver is injected daily intramuscular.
None of the therapy makes sense from a chemo mindset because the idea is to rebuild the immune system so that the body can defend itself. Healthy bodies are constantly destroying cancer cells but the cancer patient has lost this ability to mount a strong inflammatory response. With chemo, the cancer is hopefully poisoned or burned out but the condition of the body is left the same (or worse) and so what will prevent its return? That is what I meant by healing-restoring the immune system. Sorry, I am neither a writer nor a scientist
It's strange why the Ray Peat diet didn't make me health, I was doing almost the same thing, lol.
Like you, I believe that Mr Saladino is sincere and is generally a completely decent person. Where I think our opinions differ is that I believe that even the most scrupulous people are liable to lie, deceive, and manipulate if it serves their interests. Suppose his faith in liver begins to wane, what if he conveniently reduces his liver consumption to an ounce a week? Oh, and now he prefers the liver of freshly born calves as opposed to mature animals. He might omit telling us these little details, while still claiming that he's a faithful carnivore eating in an "evolutionarily consistent" way. And you know what, it would be hard to point out the lie or even fault him for that.
Obviously this is all speculation on my part, but witness his video "debunking" VA toxicity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuGB0Zdjhw0 From this video, it's pretty clear to me that not only he hasn't done his homework on this topic, but that he's completely uninterested in investigating this subject in any depth. Readers are free to watch this video and make their own call, but I've written him off as a source of insight on this topic.
Do you have a source on honey containing a lot of BC? Everywhere I've looked states that honey is low-ish in BC. In particular, "white" honey has negligible amounts.
I think we need to roll back a lot further on the whole eczema thing, as I'm not exactly sure what your argument is, because I don't see any contradictions in what you're stating. In a nutshell, for VA toxicity to occur, we must have VA in excess of the capacity to detoxify it. Even if Saladino started consuming more VA, what do you think happened to his detox capacity after he switched his diet? My impression is that he obviously improved his VA status in several ways:
- He started consuming nutrients such as zinc, B vitamins, and taurine. Those are all necessary for detox pathways.
- He started consuming saturated fats. These are required to esterify retinol and safely store it in the liver or adipose.
- He lowered his BC consumption. BC's are in fact stored preferentially in the skin as opposed to retinol.
So whatever extra retinol he started consuming in the short term is more than offset by the factors above.
Or are you perhaps not convinced that VA poisoning causes eczema? I can share a couple of papers that observe eczema caused by acute VA poisoning. In my mind, the only questions that remain are those about conditions under which chronic VA toxicity induces eczema. This is certainly not settled yet, but there's evidence showing that this is likely.
Finally, Grant does not need to debunk every bogus study in the world to claim VA isn't a vitamin. The bar you're asking for is so impossibly high, and only serves to protect orthodox junk science. It's true that Grant's experiments are tiny, but he's raised enough doubt to the point where we should take any paper that starts with "Vitamin A is essential for vision, epithelial function, and cell differentiation" with a hefty pinch of salt, and demand justification from the scientists behind these claims.
I generally don't recommend Wikipedia as a source of truth. "For some reason" it is not unbiased...
I don't hold "peer-reviewed" papers/studies to the level of gospel like many seem to like to do; that they are the only ways science can be done or that they are superior. Holding "peer-reviewed" papers/studies to such high regard is a fallacy in my mind and only shows ones' cognitive dissonance. "Here's a bunch of people who believe the same thing so it must be true".
Grant, nor anyone, doesn't need to have "really profound" results, published in an "accredited" journal, or reviewed in such to be a scientist or challenge scientific orthodoxy. That is a bunch of crap that holds science back. Innovation and discovery rarely comes from the middle of academia. It comes from the fringes who don't have vested interests.