Low Toxin Diet Grant Genereux's Theory Of Vitamin A Toxicity

[LLight]

Garrett Smith is part of the fad-diet-industry he rails against. He should make it all free.

I see him once say on Twitter that it was God that made him discover the vitamin A issue, or something like that.

No, it's Grant Genereux that made all the heavy lifting for him. He is just marketing the idea to make money. Not that it's really an issue that he wants to make money.

 

[orangebear]

So a detox guru with a conveniently simple explanation -vitamin A -for everything under the sun. And that's it. I looked at his twitter account and can't understand why anybody who has read Ray Peat would take this guy seriously.

Sorry to be blunt but this thread just seems ridiculous in both content and length, whether it's people who think carotene is vitamin A or a doctor who has no real idea how vitamin A fits into metabolism and thyroid, either of which he has no interest in.

It's a sad irony that the thyroid sub forums here are the least busy on a website devoted to metabolism. Instead people are chasing fads you could find on any other health forum.

Dr. Smith is a naturopathic doctor and used to work more or less like the rest of them, prescribing supplements for whatever ailment was thought to require X vitamin/mineral/herb. Once he discovered Grant Generoux’s work on vitamin A toxicity, he changed everything in his practice to focus on detoxing vA and related things. This might make him sound like he’s a one trick pony but there’s nothing wrong with specializing in one thing if you’re effective at it. The way he talks is certainly far less eloquent and sophisticated than Ray Peat and it can make one feel dismissive of what he has to say (it did initially for me), but one’s eloquence or lack thereof doesn’t necessarily prove or disprove the idea one is talking about. So I would recommend looking more into the idea than how one guy talks about it.

Grant Generoux is an engineer who had no medical background and he had personal health issues that no doctor could help him solve. He then started started doing experiments and going through medical research to come up with a hypothesis for why he had the health issues he had and how to solve them. Once he put his hypothesis to the test it took months to see results but it did work as he hypothesized. That is quite an impressive feat if you think about it. So I would very much recommend reading his books to really understand the theory and how he got there. I’m pretty sure Ray Peat would agree that ridiculing a straw man of the idea without knowing anything about the background isn’t perceiving, thinking, and then acting.

 

[orangebear]

Garrett Smith is part of the fad-diet-industry he rails against. He should make it all free.

I do find some of his practical advice to be very useful. That said, I don’t quite buy his explanation for why he puts things behind a paywall. Sometimes he’s honest about wanting to make money, which is absolutely within his rights, but other times he claims it’s for the good of his clients, which I don’t buy.

 

[Ainaga]

Yes, they are. And I did eat some grits — although they are not as good without butter and cheese (which I missed at first, but as I improved, the sacrifice of dairy became more than worth it).

Btw, one might be able to add some vitamin A foods like dairy back into your diet in the future, Genereux has said that it can take 200 days, on average, for your body to deplete it's vitamin A stores. So when your retinol stores have been fully depleted (Genereux has been doing a "No A" diet for I think 3 years now) you may be able to reintroduce them and have no ill effects as long as you keep your consumption moderate.

One thing that intrigued me initially was that the world's staple carbohydrates — rice, wheat, potatoes and oats — all have zero vitamin A.

makes me think of golden rice, the beta-carotene containing gmo. it is linked to the rockefeller foundation, monsanto, and the gates foundation (according to their advocate, wikipedia). given their record, it would not be surprising if its introduction into poor countries is a deliberate attempt to wreak even more havoc under the usual guise of humanitarianism.

 

[pondering]

makes me think of golden rice, the beta-carotene containing gmo. it is linked to the rockefeller foundation, monsanto, and the gates foundation (according to their advocate, wikipedia). given their record, it would not be surprising if its introduction into poor countries is a deliberate attempt to wreak even more havoc under the usual guise of humanitarianism.

I recently looked into this. Not only golden rice, but GMO sweet potatoes & corn with more beta carotene, and beans with more iron. There are a few others as well. Focused on the poor in developing countries as you say. Made my heart sink.

 

[unanimous]

I recently stumbled across the blog of Grant Genereux, an engineer from Canada, wherein he recounts his story of how he cured himself of severe eczema as well as chronic fatigue and brain fog with an elimination diet.

But that's just the beginning of it, because he has also done what I consider to be a genius work of health / nutritional investigation and he puts forth a compelling theory that Vitamin A is the root cause of the autoimmune diseases (eczema, diabetes, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto's, Celiac, Crohn's / IBD, etc.) and is also likely to be a major contributor to depression, chronic fatigue, cancer and obesity.

He presents the case that Vitamin A (i.e. retinol) has been misunderstood since it's initial discovery due to botched experiments by the original scientists and that this misunderstanding has essentially become entrenched in nutritional science because subsequent researchers either repeated the original mistake or dismissed their contrary findings to support the original conclusion.

In short, his theory is that "Vitamin A" is not a vitamin at all, and is actually a toxin and that our bodies are equipped to safely store and utilize the substance in appropriate amounts, but when the body exceeds its storage capacity for the substance (which is primarily stored in the liver) the body has to store it in other organs and tissues (because its fat-soluble and cannot be easily excreted) and that's when it wreaks havoc on the organs and tissues and slowly destroys your body from the inside out (which we observe as "autoimmune diseases").

Vitamin A is recognized by mainstream medicine to be toxic in excess (see: Hypervitaminosis A) but part of Grant's theory is that it is way more damaging than they realize because it accumulates over time, and we can reach toxic levels the substance over time just by consuming more of it than the body can safely store / utilize.

The theory sounds preposterous at first — but if you think about it, that's only because we assume that the scientists were smart people who did good research and any substance identified as a "vitamin" must surely be so — but if you read his research, I think you'll find that he presents a small mountain of evidence to back up his theory and that the mainstream theory has giant holes in it that most people are not aware of.

Here is a link to the post where he introduces his theory: Ending the Mystery of Autoimmune

Also, I know that my personal anecdote does not prove anything, per se, but I will add that I found this theory very compelling and so I gave it a try, and I could give much more detail, but the short version of my experience is: I completely dropped my previous Peat-inspired diet and went on a minimal vitamin A diet and within about 3 and a half months it has essentially cured my chronic fatigue and depression as well as improved or eliminated a myriad of other symptoms. I'm not saying I'm feeling perfect but it has been a dramatic reversal. I feel like my health was taking a dive for a decade — going into a steeper nosedive with each passing year — and it wasn't until trying this elimination diet that I've been able to "pull up" and start gaining altitude, to start genuinely healing.

I have been experimenting with diet and supplements and hormones for almost a decade now, trying to reverse my declining health, and I have never had a dramatic healing experience like this. And the amazing part is, I didn't add anything, I only subtracted things. I stopped taking thyroid, stopped any hormones, pretty much stopped all supplements (except for some infrequent B and K vitamins and some minerals).

All I did was stop everything else and just eat a vitamin A elimination diet — which in practice for me mostly meant: no more orange juice, no more dairy, no eggs, no pork. I mostly just ate beef and rice / bread / potatoes and coconut oil and some apple juice — and some other minimal vitamin A flavorings like onions, garlic, olive oil vinaigrettes, etc. Also less often I ate other low-retinol meats like chicken and tilapia.

I may write up my personal experience in more detail later, but for now I'm just trying to urge people to read Genereux's material and I am hoping to get some discussion going on his research and his vitamin A toxicity theory. Thanks for reading.

ADDENDUM:

If you want to skip the introduction linked above and download his books on the subject directly, here are the links. Here is a quote from Genereux about them:

"I am publishing this in a free eBook ... I’ve put this information into an eBook form because it is now just way too long to include in a blog post. The book is entirely free. There are no hooks or catches to it. There is no advertising, or any monetary gain in this book for me, or anyone else. The only cost to you is your time in reading it. This book is intended for the people who have these diseases, and for their families."

Extinguishing the Fires of Hell (2015)
https://ggenereux.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/extinguishing-the-fires-of-hell2.pdf

Poisoning For Profits (2017)
https://ggenereux.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/poisoningforprofits.pdf

can be due to overconsumption of liver no? ie no more than 30g a day

 

[Kray]

Dr. Smith is a naturopathic doctor and used to work more or less like the rest of them, prescribing supplements for whatever ailment was thought to require X vitamin/mineral/herb. Once he discovered Grant Generoux’s work on vitamin A toxicity, he changed everything in his practice to focus on detoxing vA and related things. This might make him sound like he’s a one trick pony but there’s nothing wrong with specializing in one thing if you’re effective at it. The way he talks is certainly far less eloquent and sophisticated than Ray Peat and it can make one feel dismissive of what he has to say (it did initially for me), but one’s eloquence or lack thereof doesn’t necessarily prove or disprove the idea one is talking about. So I would recommend looking more into the idea than how one guy talks about it.

Grant Generoux is an engineer who had no medical background and he had personal health issues that no doctor could help him solve. He then started started doing experiments and going through medical research to come up with a hypothesis for why he had the health issues he had and how to solve them. Once he put his hypothesis to the test it took months to see results but it did work as he hypothesized. That is quite an impressive feat if you think about it. So I would very much recommend reading his books to really understand the theory and how he got there. I’m pretty sure Ray Peat would agree that ridiculing a straw man of the idea without knowing anything about the background isn’t perceiving, thinking, and then acting.

I wish I knew. Apparently he passed away but I don’t know any details.

Thanks Blossom.

 

[Kray]

I recently looked into this. Not only golden rice, but GMO sweet potatoes & corn with more beta carotene, and beans with more iron. There are a few others as well. Focused on the poor in developing countries as you say. Made my heart sink.

Ignorance or evil?

 

[pondering]

Ignorance or evil?

Hopefully ignorance. The stated goal of improving malnutrition is admirable. Probably many involved have good intentions. But it gives me pause when the same funding organizations that pushed the shots are behind things. I do have to wonder if there isn’t some questionable intent there.

I don’t understand the insistence on adding more beta carotene to things that already have it, and also adding it to staples that have never had it. Especially now knowing that having too much can cause health issues, and it’s something that may only become apparent after many years due the liver’s storage capacity. Plus, it’s not like the places they’re releasing these GMO crops to (Asia, Middle East, Africa) don’t already have foods that contain beta carotene (veggies, greens, eggs, and myriad fruits).

 

[Ainaga]

no offense to anybody. on the contrary, i post this with the intention of steering things in (what i truly believe is) the right direction. none of this is due to ignorance, it is (ill-) intentioned.

 

[redsun]

I recently looked into this. Not only golden rice, but GMO sweet potatoes & corn with more beta carotene, and beans with more iron. There are a few others as well. Focused on the poor in developing countries as you say. Made my heart sink.

Its amusing how alternative health info from people like Grant can make you guys completely forget the very obvious reasoning for why they are fortifying beta-carotene and iron into foods for developing countries.

Iron deficiency is still the most common nutritional deficiency in the world and is very real issue in developing and poor countries who do not have access to much animal food or food in general. Same issue with beta carotene. Vitamin A is a rare deficiency in developed countries like the US but is still a common problem in undeveloped countries because of the lack of animal foods containing retinol.

They literally need fortified foods because they dont have access to real food to get these nutrients. Don't get so stuck in the vitamin A is the devil hivemind that you fail to see the obvious. Ideally this impoverished countries need real animal food and better quality food in general but that is never going to happen.

 

[Kray]

no offense to anybody. on the contrary, i post this with the intention of steering things in (what i truly believe is) the right direction. none of this is due to ignorance, it is (ill-) intentioned.

Hopefully ignorance. The stated goal of improving malnutrition is admirable. Probably many involved have good intentions. But it gives me pause when the same funding organizations that pushed the shots are behind things. I do have to wonder if there isn’t some questionable intent there.

I don’t understand the insistence on adding more beta carotene to things that already have it, and also adding it to staples that have never had it. Especially now knowing that having too much can cause health issues, and it’s something that may only become apparent after many years due the liver’s storage capacity. Plus, it’s not like the places they’re releasing these GMO crops to (Asia, Middle East, Africa) don’t already have foods that contain beta carotene (veggies, greens, eggs, and myriad fruits).

I edited my response after seeing redsun's comments about the nutritional needs of poor and underdeveloped areas of the world. While A toxicity may be real, it is maybe not as prevalent in these areas of the world. In this case, I am thankful to have the benefit of the forum where we can share what's happening in "our world", and I think we are learning from anecdotal experience that many people do indeed seem to have improved health when eliminating excess Vitamin A, myself included.

 

[pondering]

Its amusing how alternative health info from people like Grant can make you guys completely forget the very obvious reasoning for why they are fortifying beta-carotene and iron into foods for developing countries.

Iron deficiency is still the most common nutritional deficiency in the world and is very real issue in developing and poor countries who do not have access to much animal food or food in general. Same issue with beta carotene. Vitamin A is a rare deficiency in developed countries like the US but is still a common problem in undeveloped countries because of the lack of animal foods containing retinol.

They literally need fortified foods because they dont have access to real food to get these nutrients. Don't get so stuck in the vitamin A is the devil hivemind that you fail to see the obvious. Ideally this impoverished countries need real animal food and better quality food in general but that is never going to happen.

I admire your understanding of physiology and nutrition and often read your posts Redsun.

I don’t personally think beta carotene is a poison. Always been a fan of greens and vegetables and still am. However, as someone who was already replete in vitamin A from diet (mostly via beta carotene), I unknowingly over supplemented vitamin A, and am still dealing with the aftermath of that. My dental health and digestion seriously suffered. Hence my concern when it’s added to so many foods.

But as you say, there are parts of the world that may need more. And you make good point regarding the iron, which I don’t know enough about. Just that when you have too much, it becomes an issue, much like the vitamin A. They are also doing zinc wheat and zinc rice. So I suppose that would offset (?) the additional beta carotened GMO crops, even if the parts of the world receiving one are not the same as those receiving the other.

 

[Kray]

I figured he would say something like that. And it was my first thought that it's just an elimination diet. Doesn't prove vitamin A is toxic. Just like how eliminating dairy when my son had eczema seemed to make it go away. But it wasn't addressing the root cause as to why he was reacting to it.

Did your son's eczema ever return? Any insights, permanent dietary changes/restrictions that you have found helpful in healing? No dairy still? I suffer from eczema, would love your feedback. I am limiting eggs and milk, liver currently. Thank you

 

[orangebear]

Thanks Blossom.

You quoted my post along with Blossom's but didn't actually respond to it. Was that accidental or did you mean to respond to me?

 

[Kray]

orangebear- sorry it was an accident I posted your quote.

But since you asked, I appreciate your observations. We want to "trust but verify" in cases where we are looking for help, and sometimes we have to look at the messenger as well as the message. But in the end, it's the message about what works, what doesn't. And your point about results is what matters. Who can argue what and how Grant was helped by what he did? I appreciate his hard work of posting and sharing, whatever else people might think. I have eczema and it's no party. That's why I follow threads on the forum about eczema, and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback if you're not in someone else's shoes, in their trial.

I don't know Grant Genereux, just what he writes. His style doesn't matter. I want to know what he did to help his eczema. He went through a lot of misery with his condition, but I really appreciate that he went the extra mile to share with others his success with the chance it might help them.

Sorry again for the mixup-

 

[Sinjin]

Did your son's eczema ever return? Any insights, permanent dietary changes/restrictions that you have found helpful in healing? No dairy still? I suffer from eczema, would love your feedback. I am limiting eggs and milk, liver currently. Thank you

“These diseases, the autoimmune diseases, of Crohn’s, colitis, Lupus, eczema, MS, psoriasis, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, celiac, Sjögrens, vitiligo, and others are indeed rooted in vitamin A poisoning. These are not some spontaneously occurring, or just random bad luck, diseases. That ridiculous concept is entirely wrong. They are completely not the result of a defective immune system either. They are auto-poisonings that cause the immune system to respond in the way it does. The only bad luck part here is that you probably live in a Western country that has fortified its national milk and dairy products with the very chemical that causes these diseases. Somehow, modern medicine has ignored what Hippocrates knew all too well some 2,500 years ago….
The key to understanding all of this is the fact that all tissues associated with the chronic diseases, the thought to be diseases of aging, and the believed to be diseases of childhood, are all diseases of the stratified epithelial (and endothelial) tissues. Therefore, a gastroenterologist is dealing with the same tissue type (structure) as an ophthalmologist, and so is the dermatologist, the cardiologist, and the nephrologist, etc. The organ (the location of the disease, the gut, the eye, the skin or the kidneys, etc.) is irrelevant.”

Ending the Mystery of Autoimmune

About a year ago, I posted my initial theory that low dose chronic vitamin A poisoning was causing the epidemics of Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s/IBD, and eczema. That blog post was so long, and rambling, I…

ggenereux.blog

Many children experience autoimmune conditions like eczema but grow out of them as their liver grows and they are able store more of the circulating VA in the liver

 

[orangebear]

orangebear- sorry it was an accident I posted your quote.

But since you asked, I appreciate your observations. We want to "trust but verify" in cases where we are looking for help, and sometimes we have to look at the messenger as well as the message. But in the end, it's the message about what works, what doesn't. And your point about results is what matters. Who can argue what and how Grant was helped by what he did? I appreciate his hard work of posting and sharing, whatever else people might think. I have eczema and it's no party. That's why I follow threads on the forum about eczema, and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback if you're not in someone else's shoes, in their trial.

I don't know Grant Genereux, just what he writes. His style doesn't matter. I want to know what he did to help his eczema. He went through a lot of misery with his condition, but I really appreciate that he went the extra mile to share with others his success with the chance it might help them.

Sorry again for the mixup-

All good. I had eczema as a kid but it went away in my late teens. The worst that has happened since is dry scaly skin in the areas I used to have it sometimes. I think Grant's idea about kids' livers getting larger as they grow up allowing them to "outgrow" various conditions—even if temporarily—makes sense, though I can't quite verify it. I had a bunch of other issues crop up in my late twenties, but the eczema never really returned. However, all the things I tried to get better have backfired usually within months of starting them. So far the low vA, high fiber thing seems to have been the most helpful and has lasted longer than the previous 4 or 5 things I've tried. Now, if you take my history and the patterns I have experienced, they do seem to fit Grant's theory about 90+%. That's enough to make me hopeful that I am on the right track, though it's not enough to prove that the theory is true. The latter is simply a much more demanding feat. For now though, this seems to be working so I'll continue doing it, and hopefully it gets even better.

Even if it's not enough to prove the theory, the fact that I have seen improvement is enough for me to advocate for others to learn about the theory. The more people that understand it, the more it can be tested, refined, and improved. Or perhaps it can open the door to an even more effective theory, if there is one to discover out there. If nothing else though, reading the source material definitely helps in the discussion. Occasionally we get posts in this thread just trashing the theory by people who haven't read any of it, but formed an opinion from just a few posts that at best only provide a brief synopsis of the theory. It's somewhat annoying and makes me wonder why they even bother.

 

[Kray]

All good. I had eczema as a kid but it went away in my late teens. The worst that has happened since is dry scaly skin in the areas I used to have it sometimes. I think Grant's idea about kids' livers getting larger as they grow up allowing them to "outgrow" various conditions—even if temporarily—makes sense, though I can't quite verify it. I had a bunch of other issues crop up in my late twenties, but the eczema never really returned. However, all the things I tried to get better have backfired usually within months of starting them. So far the low vA, high fiber thing seems to have been the most helpful and has lasted longer than the previous 4 or 5 things I've tried. Now, if you take my history and the patterns I have experienced, they do seem to fit Grant's theory about 90+%. That's enough to make me hopeful that I am on the right track, though it's not enough to prove that the theory is true. The latter is simply a much more demanding feat. For now though, this seems to be working so I'll continue doing it, and hopefully it gets even better.

Even if it's not enough to prove the theory, the fact that I have seen improvement is enough for me to advocate for others to learn about the theory. The more people that understand it, the more it can be tested, refined, and improved. Or perhaps it can open the door to an even more effective theory, if there is one to discover out there. If nothing else though, reading the source material definitely helps in the discussion. Occasionally we get posts in this thread just trashing the theory by people who haven't read any of it, but formed an opinion from just a few posts that at best only provide a brief synopsis of the theory. It's somewhat annoying and makes me wonder why they even bother.

Great to hear you're finding good results! Would you mind sharing tips on low vA and fiber details? How are you covering calcium and fats, what fiber? I just began a few days ago, not much to go on yet. I don't know if I need to eliminate A altogether since I don't supplement often and when I had in recent past it was 10,000IU intermittent for about a week (thinking eczema = low vA). I do eat a lot of dairy, including raw milk, about 2-3 cups/day, but it is not A & D fortified. I also eat a lot of eggs- 2 to 3 per day. Liver has been sporadic, maybe 1-2 oz liverwurst (combo liver, heart, kidney) once every 7-10 days-- but not whole liver. I wonder if I'm just eating too much dairy, and could see enough change by lowering my overall dairy vs. eliminating it altogether. My only complaint (only- ha!) is eczema. No GI issues, etc.

I contacted some of my dairy sources to find that most dairy products, other than milk, don't use fortified milk- it would only be whatever retinol naturally within the milk-- probably because gov't doesn't require fortification in these products. I checked on USDA site which is actually pretty detailed for food nutrient breakdown, and most dairy such as yogurt, cottage cheese, and cheeses, don't contain a lot of natural vA, which I found to be somewhat encouraging, not to say these smaller amounts wouldn't affect someone negatively if their vA stores are already at max capacity. I don't want to have to change things so drastically, since I don't know how maxxed vA might be, and I'd really like to keep calcium from natural foods rather than supplementing. Does eczema necessarily mean I have vA toxicity? There's the million dollar question, I guess.

I really don't know yet if I should go no-A or low-A for the above reasons. One thing to mention- I just switched from raw cow milk to pasteurized goat milk (Summerhill). I never knew this, but goat milk is naturally homogenized because of its fat structure, and has a higher beta carotene level than cow milk. As I was looking on the forum I found this post on a calcium thread, written by Travis:

This is interesting, and I've talked to two people on this forum who had overdosed on retinol.

I think you will find that you have a higher capacity for ethanol once retinol liver concentrations fall. The cool thing about getting retinol from β-carotene is that the enzyme responsible for transformation is under genetic negative-feedback from retinoic acid, meaning that the more retinoids you have the less are created:
Bachmann, Heinrich. "Feedback regulation of β, β-carotene 15, 15′-monooxygenase by retinoic acid in rats and chickens." The Journal of nutrition (2002)

What do you make of it? Also not sure what he meant by "a higher capacity for ethanol". Maybe you can translate it better. Can we keep good nutrient-dense foods that happen to contain beta carotene and just focus on low-A foods? And if not all dairy has high vA, can I opt for low-fat dairy to meet my Ca needs, while lowering dairy fat intake?

Great point about anecdotal findings, sharing, opening the door to greater knowledge. And as is often the case in a forum setting, sometimes getting derailed by off-topic stuff that is just as subjective as the writer claims you are being, or being attacked for simply sharing results and thoughts to ponder in helping remediate our health concerns.

 

[Kray]

Update: Here's the link for the Travis post, starting @ #12. Maybe you've already read it, since it relates topically.

My Vitamin A Elimination Diet

This is the diet I tried for my VA Elimination (VAE) experiment based on Grant Genereux's Vitamin A toxicity theory. Notes • If you want to see Grant G's VAE diet, it's on p 334 of PFP. His was much stricter. I did things a little different, but with the same goal: eliminate / minimize VA. This...

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