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

[Limon9]

Asian diets do incorporate vitamin A in the form of vegetables and fruits typically though too.

They do, but not a whole lot of it compared to someone on the daily half-gallon of milk (full of killcium) and bi-weekly beef liver. Genereux's theory revolves around the notion that an unspecified, tolerable intake can probably be continued for a lifetime, but that if one falls through the trapdoor of toxicity, they must restrict far more rigorously thereafter. None of his books address why primates tolerate so many killretinoids, either.

Edit: Speaking of Asians, one of the most amusing parts in his books is praising the Okinawans (see: two daily pounds of sweet potato) for their "low vitamin A diet".

 

[LLight]

Edit: Speaking of Asians, one of the most amusing parts in his books is praising the Okinawans (see: two daily pounds of sweet potato) for their "low vitamin A diet".

Do purple sweet potatoes contain as much vitamin A as orange ones?

 

[Limon9]

Do purple sweet potatoes contain as much vitamin A as orange ones?

They're not exactly the same, but "Hawaii Foods" from the University of Hawaii claims the content's considerable. That did occur to me too, but even leaves, which contain a lot of carotenoids, have absorption spectra dominated by the central magnesium ion of chlorophyll. No one wants orange kale, not even a gorilla.

"Orange sweet potatoes are higher in vitamin A, while purple sweet potatoes carry higher amounts of another kind of antioxidant, known as anthocyanins."

 

[Kray]

Yes, exactly! I was just talking about this with someone the other day.

 

[trance]

Honestly the importance of legumes makes sense because it is the one thing that diseased westerners almost invariably do not consume in significant amounts. People are throwing back huge amounts of pretty much everything else: PUFAs, SFAs, sugar, starch, coffee, animal products every meal, moderate-high protein, moderate-high fat, high carbs. Everything except soluble fiber. It could also explain the Hispanic paradox. Hispanics, despite having more poverty, have 24% lower risk of all-cause mortality, and lower risks of 9/15 of the leading causes of death in America.

 

[Limon9]

Honestly the importance of legumes makes sense because it is the one thing that diseased westerners almost invariably do not consume in significant amounts. People are throwing back huge amounts of pretty much everything else: PUFAs, SFAs, sugar, starch, coffee, animal products every meal, moderate-high protein, moderate-high fat, high carbs. Everything except soluble fiber. It could also explain the Hispanic paradox. Hispanics, despite having more poverty, have 24% lower risk of all-cause mortality, and lower risks of 9/15 of the leading causes of death in America.

Yeah. Lol. And the Japanese were long-lived due to their consumption of healthful fatty fish and fermented soy products. The vaccine hesitancy in both groups surely has nothing to do with it.

 

[ddjd]

Beans provide soluble fiber to bind VA in bile, excrete it rather than re-absorption. Eating beans with 3 meals per day and continue to improve.

Is there a particular bean which offers all of those benefits you mentioned without as many negatives from a peat perspective. Cannelloni?

 

[GreekDemiGod]

This might be relevant.

 

[Orion]

Is there a particular bean which offers all of those benefits you mentioned without as many negatives from a peat perspective. Cannelloni?

I was using a homemade medley; Black, Black-eyed, White Kidney, and Great Northern Soaked for 24hrs, cooked for 2hrs.

 

[orangebear]

Younger generations are sicker than ever because they eat the worst, have higher mental/emotional stress and/or often have the lowest stress resilience partially due to their terrible diet, and terrible lifestyle habits (drug use, sleep deprivation, etc). Poverty contributes to poor dietary habits as well. We are also in era of fad diets that even the rich will stupidly follow and enforce onto their children. This combination causes degeneration faster than any generation has ever experienced. Humans as a whole eat significantly less whole food and especially less nutritious animal food, more boxed garbage and frankenfood than ever before.

Just to be clear, I did mean younger generations in their youth, when they are still dependent on their parents. In such a case I would say that their parents are responsible for the terrible diet you mention, whether because the parents cannot get the right foods to feed their children due to poverty, laziness, etc., or whether that terrible diet is the result of the parents trying to follow some guidelines that are touted as healthy but in actuality aren't, whether mainstream or alternative. Now whether poor or rich, few parents will force or even allow drugs on their children unless said drugs are prescription drugs that they were told were good for their children. Neither my question nor your reply are precise about younger generations as children or as adults, but I want to make myself precise because I'm talking about the skyrocketing rates of childhood diseases which cannot be blamed on the children, who cannot yet make their own choices. What my question implied was that statistics seem to show that many people who are trying to be responsible are heeding the nutritional advice of the government and the medical industry, yet disease rates continue to climb. To me that would indicate that the mainstream recommendations aren't helpful, and may even be harmful. I am not the only person who has this intuition, and it is this very intuition that drives many parents to try alternative nutrition strategies with their children. The problem is that many of the alternatives are, of course, just as bad if not worse than the mainstream ones. That said, should we not strive to improve our and our children's health beyond what the mainstream offers (which perpetuates and perhaps increases disease)?

Europeans as long as there wasn't famine ate quality food and most of these were animal flesh and organs but also grains and root vegetables, fish, dairy and other things depending on what region you were in. The diet can be both bland and adequate. Being bland does not mean things were inheritantly missing in european diets. Otherwise there would be no europeans.

I'd argue that ancient diets had various levels of various vitamins, and also had various results in terms of health. I don't have enough data to argue which exactly was healthier, so I'll leave it at that, but in those times we certainly were more limited by what was available. There was no way to megadose vitamins by eating more organ meats than muscle meat or whatever other method we have available to us today. So I would assume that overdoing vitamins is much more of a modern—and more importantly, legitimate—problem as compared to the past.

The authorities on nutrition in this country are not wrong necessarily on PUFA. We do not require plant derived omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. We do require DHA and arachidonic acid to form various signalling compounds but you can obtain the small amounts you need from animal food. If you obtained no DHA or AA, technically the plant polyunsaturated acids would allow you to make these essential fatty acids and would be essential in that way. But they have no function in tbe body except as precursors to the small amount of PUFAs we actually do need. Ray peat is right in that some PUFAs are not actually essential, but AA and DHA are.

Ray Peat was also not a fan of DHA or AA. So was he irresponsible and worthy of judgment as well? Are all the people on this forum with children who keep PUFAs, including DHA and AA, away from them at Ray Peat's advice irresponsible and worthy of judgment? They might be wrong, and indeed I see many people feed their children things that I believe are wrong, but I still have understanding and compassion towards them because of the things I have experienced. I personally don't want any children until I get some of my own health issues out of the way and am confident that I know what nutrients they will need and what things they will need to stay away from in order to avoid the things I went through. Here's a quote from Ray Peat's website on DHA:

In declaring EPA and DHA to be safe, the FDA neglected to evaluate their antithyroid, immunosuppressive, lipid peroxidative (Song et al., 2000), light sensitizing, and antimitochondrial effects, their depression of glucose oxidation (Delarue et al., 2003), and their contribution to metastatic cancer (Klieveri, et al., 2000), lipofuscinosis and liver damage, among other problems.

If a concerned parent who respected RP read that and decided to keep DHA away from their children for fear of giving them thyroid issues, light sensitivity, compromised immunity,..., or cancer, would they be worthy of your judgement then?

1. We refers to the collection of scientists and researchers who have observed and documented the various deficiency syndromes that occur when intake of any particular substance is insufficient. These are the collection of "experts" that have led to an mutual agreement overtime (which led to dietary guidelines) on what nutrients are considered essential and which are not.
2. My position is based off of large amounts of research that has already been done that has determined what is and is not essential to humans. The amount of research favoring Smith's conclusion is very little comparatively.

Thank you for answering that. That helps make your position clearer. Unfortunately, it isn't enough to assuage the fears that many people feel that some of the conclusions of those observations are incorrect. Have you read Grant Generoux's breakdown of the original vA deficiency studies? The gist of it is that the low vA diets fed to the rats consisted of fat and protein derived from things that naturally are high in vA, but were treated with heat to break down the vA, which converted the retinol into retinoic acid. These high retinoic acid diets quickly made the rats sick and die. Other experiments using naturally low vA foods could not replicate the results of these vA deficiency experiments, but were rejected as flukes. If that isn't botched science, I don't know what it. Now, perhaps Grant missed something in his analysis and he is wrong. If you have more scientific knowledge and can poke holes in his analysis, that would very much be welcome. The thing is that this premise is important in the conversation of this thread, and it needs to be addresses in order to be helpful in this conversation. "We know x", on the other hand, is not helpful to the conversation and is very similar to an appeal to authority fallacy.

 

[orangebear]

Is there a particular bean which offers all of those benefits you mentioned without as many negatives from a peat perspective. Cannelloni?

Ray Peat preferred oat bran when it comes to a low vA soluble fiber. I don't think he was a fan of beans of any kind. In my experience though, the beans seem to be fine, though it took some time and just doing psyllium husk before I started doing well on beans. I like black beans the most but I also do pinto beans sometimes. I haven't really tried a lot of others enough to tell, but I seem to do fine with lentils and chickpeas on occasion as well. I make sure to soak my beans for 24 hours or at least overnight, then rinse and pressure cook them. Oat milk (which I know isn't good with the vegetable oils they put in it, but sometimes I get coffee out) seems to make me go to the bathroom a lot at this point, so I don't know if I'm ready for oats yet.

 

[Kray]

Apparently, goats are much better at converting Beta Carotene than cows are. If you see some goat cheese next to real cow cheese, compare the two. The goat cheese is dramatically whiter, even when compared side by side to a white cow cheese, like mozzarella.

If I read this right, are you suggesting to opt for goat milk products over cow, if I am trying to keep some amount of foods in my diet for calcium needs?

 

[Kray]

Ray Peat preferred oat bran when it comes to a low vA soluble fiber. I don't think he was a fan of beans of any kind. In my experience though, the beans seem to be fine, though it took some time and just doing psyllium husk before I started doing well on beans. I like black beans the most but I also do pinto beans sometimes. I haven't really tried a lot of others enough to tell, but I seem to do fine with lentils and chickpeas on occasion as well. I make sure to soak my beans for 24 hours or at least overnight, then rinse and pressure cook them. Oat milk (which I know isn't good with the vegetable oils they put in it, but sometimes I get coffee out) seems to make me go to the bathroom a lot at this point, so I don't know if I'm ready for oats yet.

Thanks for posting this. I'm on beans for only 3 days now (used to eat them often enough before Peat days and love them), and I'm doing ok, too. Since I'm only on page 233 out of 473 of this thread, at last count, I don't know if and when Bean Protocol might be addressed as being compatible in any way with the VAD. I have no complaints eating them so far, and find that I don't need to supplement as much magnesium as before, which I like. I do like the extra protein in lieu of some dairy I've cut out.

Thanks for the tips on soaking/cooking. For starters I found some inexpensive canned organic beans, and rinse and then simmer them for an hour or so until they're a bit more tender.

 

[Kray]

I tried staying off food rich in Vitamin A for a month at least. I noticed my heart rate going down to 56 waking up and at most 62 during the day. I went back to eating mussels, oysters, and internal organs and my heart rate went higher to as much as 77 during the day.

I guess I'm using up plenty vitamin A in tropical weather especially at the height of summer months.

Am I reading your post correctly, that higher A foods in sunny summer months when vD levels should be higher, might be ok, vs. winter months?

 

[Kray]

@Nstocks I add collagen to coffee and sugar and drink it with a starch like a corn tortilla and raisins for a snack in the morning. I still eat egg white at breakfast. I have a small amount of meat of some kind three times a day so the snacks haven’t needed to be high protein.

Egg white recipes, please?

 

[Kray]

After 9weeks I still haven't noticed any detox or adverse effects from eating low a and no betacarotene foods. I actually feel as if my metabolism is just functioning better. I have lost a lot of weight that I gained from milk,oj, and carrots, my skin is better and my mood is better. I think it is like Peat says that beta carotene can cause hypothyroidism, causing vitamin a to not be used properly and estrogen to dominate. After reading about others trying this diet change who are not good at converting betacarotene, I think I may fit in that group, too. I am not sure how lower vitamin a fits. I plan to continue as I am for now because my thyroid really seems to be working great now.

Good points, I agree, just a week in, very small dairy amounts but almost no BC foods.

 

[Kray]

This was posted on page 50 and is part of Hypervitaminosis A by Ray Peat. This is what I am wondering about in my case. Prior to the last 9 weeks my diet included beta carotene daily.

 

[Dolomite]

Egg white recipes, please?

Hard boiled egg whites. I eat the whole egg now after avoiding the yolks for 3 1/2 years without any problems. If you look at the Grant Genereux forum, the discussion is that choline is needed to help the liver get rid of Vitamin A. I still avoid betacarotene.

 

[Kray]

Hard boiled egg whites. I eat the whole egg now after avoiding the yolks for 3 1/2 years without any problems. If you look at the Grant Genereux forum, the discussion is that choline is needed to help the liver get rid of Vitamin A. I still avoid betacarotene.

Thank you! Do you include any beans in your diet? They are high in both folate and choline. I'm having a small portion at least once a day. Still getting a pulse (no pun) from others if that's a no-go on VAD, not to mention non-Peaty, I guess.

 

[Kray]

Is it just me or does anyone else think Mrs. Carnivore looks like she is dressed in a Pebbles costume from the cartoon Flintstones?
It’s almost like someone’s playing a joke.

sorry- I'm reading from the beginning (new here) and LOL after reading this. Especially 3 years later with who-knows-what-going-on-weird-stuff post-COVID, etc. Anyway, I think there is a striking resemblance to Pebbles and the simple explanation is that eating total carnivore expressed her Flintstonagean genes. What else could explain this phenomenon?