Some members here associate the legacy of Ray Peat with "diet principles". It can easily be overlooked that his most important achievement was the bioenergetic view of life and living organisms, not a specific diet.
Taking Ray Peat's work seriously is not necessarily dependent on milk, orange juice and carrot salads. In fact, it's a pretty myopic view, and neglects his larger work.
Before people started sending him emails and inviting him to podcasts, his public work did not include many specific diet concepts. His articles and books contain groundbreaking work, he is probably the greatest mind of the 20th century in the field of biology in the western world. He has rescued the holistic view of biology that was still so prevalent in Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and brought it to the west.
One can question the diet principles without taking away the deeper and really important aspects of his work. But those who do not see the deeper aspects now think that Peat is being dismissed.
The truth is that Peat was mislead on many topics that pertain to practical aspects, and he has, unintentionally, led many people into suffering with his focus on avoiding starch and ingesting massive amounts of fat soluble toxins - beta-carotene (carrots) and retinol (milk, eggs, liver and vitamin a supplements). His approach often lead to many people suppressing their symptoms with supplements and using hormones as a crutch for years and decades. There is no question that he also helped many, for example for many women progest-e was life saving. But there is a better way than having to take hormones or other chemicals for the rest of your life. He was sometimes quite disappointed with the "community" that formed around him. He did not like the myopic focus on foods, and sometimes noted that he misses the intellectually stimulating discussions around broader and larger concepts. He wrote that we as humans do not know much about our place in this world - where we come from, what we are doing here, and where we are going. He tried to stay curious and not close himself to new concepts.
Unfortunately, he did not base many of his practical diet recommendations on objective information, rather he was very biased by his empirical approach. He found something that worked for him and than looked for evidence to support it. Like drinking large amounts of milk, taking 100k units of retinol, or eating massive amounts of sugar. This approach is valid, as long as other people just don't copy him, but also let themselves be guided by their own experiences. This is what we are doing here, and our perception and experiences have led us to realize a better way to heal our metabolism than with a low-starch diet of dairy and orange juice supplemented with coffee, liver, carrots and oysters. Sadly, the late Ray Peat rejected the work of Genereux, but he did incorporate oats. Charlie has suggested that he intuitively realized that the body needs soluble fiber.
The Ray Peat style of eating, even with some oats included, is the perfect diet to shut down the liver detoxification completely and pretend for a while that everything is fine while your liver slowly fills up with toxicity. Toxicity that may take years to undo and recover from.
One of the most important parts of his work I think was highlighting the importance of carbon dioxide. He described CO2 as the master regulator of all other hormones. You don't need milk and orange juice to boost CO2.
Ray Peat always tried to avoid toxins. That's why he was very suspicious of vegetables. He did not realize that the biggest toxin in vegetables is beta-carotene, so cooking them well does not help very much (although it probably helps a bit). He also did not understand the toxicity of retinol. He was also misguided on the importance of calcium. That's why he recommended large amounts of dairy and the regular consumption of liver. Additionally, the large consumption of coffee, while certainly helping liver and bile flow in the short-term, has the effect of reducing the conversion of retinol to retinoic acid, which is an important part of the vitamin A detox pathway.
Around 10 years ago, Grant Genereux discovered the toxicity of even small amounts of retinol, and he published 3 books about this topic over the years. Later, Naturopathic Doctor Garret Smith built on top of his work and expanded it to include the concept of toxic bile and chronic toxicity from other things than merely retinol. The concept of toxic bile was known to our ancestors, but pretty much forgotten in our modern times, with the exception of nutritionist Karen Hurd, who used the soluble fiber in beans and physillium husk to bind toxic bile and heal her dying daughter from a "hopeless" case of pesticide poisoning, but she did not connect this with the toxicity from vitamin A and copper.
We here now have the unique opportunity to connect the dots and, for the first time in our known history, find a way out of collective degeneration and disease and open up the path towards regeneration and healing.
During the vitamin-mania of the early 20th century, scientists were paid to find "essential substances" in foods, and some people apparently had a great interest in discovering the retinol chemical. Because it was the first "vitamine" to be identified, retinol was given the first letter of the Alphabet. A major milestone in vitamine research was reached when the letter -e was dropped and "vitamines" were renamed to "vitamins" (the new term hid the fact that retinol was not an amine). Unfortunately, this did not change the toxicity of retinol, which is indeed a toxin, and probably not essential for life. If it is essential for life, the amounts are so small that it doesn't matter practically because it's basically in all foods (just like PUFA can't be avoided practically). Grant Genereux discusses the evidence for this in his books and you can also find interviews with him on Youtube.
The carotenoids and retinoids ("Vitamin A") are so toxic that they burden the body, especially the liver, and by this mechanism, shut down or reduce the elimination of all kinds of (often fat-soluble) toxins. This leads to a vicious cycle, which is often unnoticable for the first years because the liver is so good at storing toxins away in body fat and in the liver itself.
Some readers here may not be able to or interested in moving to a zero or low vitamin A diet immediately (or at all). Often, small changes can already give good results. It is very easy to reduce the vA intake by 80% with just avoiding a few things.
When it comes to vitamin A intake, when you consume more than your body can excrete, your body starts storing the excess amount in the liver. Mathematically, it's just a question of time until the liver is full and the toxic retinol metabolites overflow into the tissues and organs. Because measuring liver stores is impossible without harming the liver, and serum retinol levels don't reflect liver stores, the only way to judge toxicity is via a vitamin A elimination diet. The body only starts eliminating excess vitamin A when the intake is lowered as much as possible.
The official recommendation by national nutrition authorities suggest an RDA of around 900mcg. These authorities also say that doses of around 3mg of vitamin A is the upper limit (UL). It's very easy to even go beyond the official UL on a "Peat diet", which means that this diet s considered a toxic diet according to mainstream scientific standards. To reduce the body burden, one has to reduce the vitamin A intake to below the RDA, though. That's why the primary strategy resolves around building a diet that does not have much vitamin A. This is pretty difficult when consuming dairy, but the overall intake can still be greatly reduced with various strategies.
The following suggestions are my personal thoughts, gathered from researching the topic on my own. It's just meant to help you getting started on this, without having to turn your diet upside down in a single day.
Here are easy steps to gradually move towards a low vitamin A diet/low toxin diet, which is the foundation for eliminating toxic bile:
1. Stop eating liver, liverwurst, or anything else made from liver. It's high copper and retinol content make it very toxic even in small amounts, when consumed regularly. Don't eat fatty fish (mercury) and seafood (lead, cadmium, marine biotoxins) regularly.
2. Stop all coffee and chocolate. I think this may even be the most important change for many. Caffeine can harm the nervous system, and coffee stops the detoxification of retinol. It may take a couple months to recover from chronic caffeine intake, but many feel better after that period. Chocolate also contains lots of caffeine and is too high in copper, cadmium, aluminium and lead. Many people on the subreddit r/decaf report good results and healing from just stopping caffeine.
3. Stop all colored vegetables, but especially carrots, pumpkin/squash, sweet potatos, spinach, kale. These foods contain so much beta-carotene, they are outright toxic. I noticed people usually get most of their carotene from this small list of vegetables. Limit other colored vegetables if you have to still eat them. Eat white or pale vegetables, they don't have large amounts of beta-carotene. In green vegetables, the chlorophyll hides the orange color of the beta-carotene, but those are also very high in carotene. Tomatoes are probably ok, they don't have a very high beta-carotene content.
4. Limit eggs to a 1-2 a week, or one per day, depending on how much you feel you need.
5. Stop cooking or frying with butter, and stop cooking with dairy. If you have an appetite for dairy, just drink milk or eat some cheese, or put butter on your bread. Not using dairy for cooking will reduce the amount of total dairy you consume. This is just a way to reduce the total amount of dairy, in the end it's about the total amount consumed, not how you consume it. But I found that avoiding dairy when cooking meals is a good way to reduce the overall intake. Many meals call for something like 200-300g of cheese, or 200ml of heavy cream, and frying and cooking with butter also adds up.
6. Stop eating spices if you can. Especially chili, paprica, tomato, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Also avoid things like concentrated vegetable broth if possible, but don't stress over small amounts of spices or vegetables. Spices were considered medicine by our ancestors, and they burden liver and kidneys. They do eradicate problematic micro-organisms in the intestine, so stopping all of them could maybe lead to flare-ups.
7. Switch from orange juice to white grape juice and/or apple juice.
8. If you do not medically depend on supplements, stop taking them. Especially taking vitamin D, vitamin E, calcium and multivitamins is problematic. The idea that humans need supplements to be healthy has been engrained in our culture and became a deadly ideology. Of course, also stop ingesting any retinol from supplements or cosmetics. Women can receive up to 25% of their daily retinol intake from cosmetics.
The above changes will probably lower your vitamin A intake by >80% and may give your liver the opportunity to start detoxing. I developed the above steps over the course of a couple weeks for people in my social circle who were not interested in starting the "extreme" low A diet, and for myself to have some guidance when in environments where I can't control 100% of my diet.
You can also start taking into account the following:
- Gradually include more beans and oats in your diet, they have soluble fiber which binds to toxic bile and helps excrete toxins from the body. Beans and oats are probably the most important foods for bile detox. Per Karen Hurd, ingesting them without much fat is important, otherwise they bind to fat instead of toxic bile.
- Eat more rice. Best is rice from Thailand (rice from Asia in general is also good I think) due to low arsenic concentrations. Rinse rice in water and cook in excess water to reduce arsenic further. Rice from the USA is often contaminated, due to the history of arsenic-based pesticides, and should be avoided.
- You can eat potatoes if you tolerate them. While they do contain toxic solanine, and are part of the problematic nightshade family, they also offer some benefits, including large amounts of potassium. Use only fresh potatos without black parts, green colored skin and shoots. Discard the skin to reduce solanine.
- Eat apples for the pectin
- Eat more bread and pasta
- Eat more beef
- Karen Hurd used physillium husk powder to bind toxic bile when people were unable to tolerate beans. There's a product called Sunfiber that has a similar function, it consists of soluble fiber. You can also take a small dose of activated charcoal (100-200mg). I can't tolerate it so I take bentonite or zeolite instead a few times per day.
- If you are a smoker, don't force yourself to quit, rather look into organic tobacco. Smoking tobacco is helpful for reducing the liver stores of retinol, and has other benefits. You can stop smoking when you don't need it any longer.
This is basically all that's needed. At this point you will still have most of your "Peat diet" - fruits, meats, gelatin, dairy, well-cooked vegetables, but you will stop ingesting retinol in amounts that border on acute toxicity. Your retinol intake will probably be around 40-80% of the RDA, depending on the amount of dairy you consume. You will also gradually reduce your copper burden. Years of chocolate and liver consumption will often lead to chronic copper toxicity. If you stop here, you will likely get a lot of benefits, depending on your current state of toxicity, without having to change your entire life and all of your routines. You can even keep your dairy goats.
Stopping dairy and eggs (beyond maybe 1 per day) would then be the next move, this will reduce your vitamin A intake to around maybe 200-300mcg. A calcium source can be important during the first 1-2 years of vitamin A detox, because the body uses calcium to buffer the acidic retinol. This can be high calcium water (>300mg/L) or eggshell calcium. If you depend on milk to feel well, one or two glasses of low-fat milk could be an option, but milk is very problematic, the heat and homogenization treatments make milk toxic, by turning the retinol into retinoic acid. So if you need milk, raw or gently pasteurized milk.
If you feel well on this transition diet, you can move to a low-toxin diet, which puts more emphasis on avoiding foods that are not toxic in a strict sense, but put a burden on the body.
raypeatforum.com
Note that it is possible you feel worse at first. Stopping caffeine alone is a pretty large step, and your nervous system will probably need a couple weeks to recover from chronic stimulant abuse.
Once you lower your toxin intake, and stop toxic supplements, you will gradually realize that your body is highly intelligent and tells you everything you need to know to make decisions around foods and supplements. In my experience, even small amounts of beneficial supplements like zinc, niacin or egg yolks taken only for 1-2 days can lead to lasting changes and benefits. You will feel toxins leaving the body, and that you get closer to becoming who you really are, beyond the layers of toxicity. You should always feel better afterwards. Supplements should never be used as a crutch, if you don't feel better after taking something for a couple days and then stopping, it's not helping.
- There are some supplements that are often used, but they are optional at this transition stage and could be necessary when seriously starting a low toxin diet. These include regular flush-niacin (nicotinic acid), electrolytes/minerals, B1, B2, B3, folate and trace minerals like zinc. Taking niacin seem to help many people, 200-300mg on an empty stomach will lead to a therapeutic flush.
- Use a high quality activated carbon water filter, reverse osmosis or water distiller. Beware of cheap reverse osmosis systems used for things like fish tanks with low quality filters.
- Look into using an air purifier or ionization device if you have bad air quality.
- Consider the use of infrared sauna, CO2 baths, and ozone if available in your environment, but don't stress over it if not available for you or too expensive to set up. Health does not require complicated technology and expensive devices beyond the basics.
- Look into taping your mouth at night, if you tend to breath through your mouth. Chronic mouth breathing is dangerous. There are some videos about this on Youtube.
- To read up on the dangers of chronic overconsumption of vitamin A, you can read the free e-books (My eBooks) and the blog by Grant Genereux, who discovered that there is a worldwide "epidemic" of vitamin A toxicity: Ideas, Concepts, and Observations.
- His forum contains many interesting threads: Discussion
- Youtube Interview with Grant
- Dr. Smith: Nutrition Detective | Research-Based Vitamin A Toxicity & Liver Health
- Karen Hurd: Karen R. Hurd Nutritional Practice
- Paolas Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepowerofozone
- This thread contains a large amount of information: Low Toxin Diet - Grant Genereux's Theory Of Vitamin A Toxicity
- This forum section contains all the threads related to the low toxin lifestyle and toxic bile theory: Forum list
This post will probably be expanded, the idea is for this post to collect all the relevant information for people to start from. I just wrote this down as a first quick attempt to help people here make sense of the sudden transition of this forum, which may have alienated some members, but it is a pretty courageous decision by charlie and will help many people find true health.
“My recommendation is to eat to increase the metabolic rate (usually temperature and heart rate), rather than any particular foods.”
"Nutrition is as complex, open, and undefined as metaphysics or cosmology. It's a process of exploring, learning, and figuring things out. It's never a closed book or a finished subject."
- Dr. Raymond Peat
"Nutrition is as complex, open, and undefined as metaphysics or cosmology. It's a process of exploring, learning, and figuring things out. It's never a closed book or a finished subject."
- Dr. Raymond Peat
Taking Ray Peat's work seriously is not necessarily dependent on milk, orange juice and carrot salads. In fact, it's a pretty myopic view, and neglects his larger work.
Before people started sending him emails and inviting him to podcasts, his public work did not include many specific diet concepts. His articles and books contain groundbreaking work, he is probably the greatest mind of the 20th century in the field of biology in the western world. He has rescued the holistic view of biology that was still so prevalent in Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and brought it to the west.
One can question the diet principles without taking away the deeper and really important aspects of his work. But those who do not see the deeper aspects now think that Peat is being dismissed.
The truth is that Peat was mislead on many topics that pertain to practical aspects, and he has, unintentionally, led many people into suffering with his focus on avoiding starch and ingesting massive amounts of fat soluble toxins - beta-carotene (carrots) and retinol (milk, eggs, liver and vitamin a supplements). His approach often lead to many people suppressing their symptoms with supplements and using hormones as a crutch for years and decades. There is no question that he also helped many, for example for many women progest-e was life saving. But there is a better way than having to take hormones or other chemicals for the rest of your life. He was sometimes quite disappointed with the "community" that formed around him. He did not like the myopic focus on foods, and sometimes noted that he misses the intellectually stimulating discussions around broader and larger concepts. He wrote that we as humans do not know much about our place in this world - where we come from, what we are doing here, and where we are going. He tried to stay curious and not close himself to new concepts.
Unfortunately, he did not base many of his practical diet recommendations on objective information, rather he was very biased by his empirical approach. He found something that worked for him and than looked for evidence to support it. Like drinking large amounts of milk, taking 100k units of retinol, or eating massive amounts of sugar. This approach is valid, as long as other people just don't copy him, but also let themselves be guided by their own experiences. This is what we are doing here, and our perception and experiences have led us to realize a better way to heal our metabolism than with a low-starch diet of dairy and orange juice supplemented with coffee, liver, carrots and oysters. Sadly, the late Ray Peat rejected the work of Genereux, but he did incorporate oats. Charlie has suggested that he intuitively realized that the body needs soluble fiber.
The Ray Peat style of eating, even with some oats included, is the perfect diet to shut down the liver detoxification completely and pretend for a while that everything is fine while your liver slowly fills up with toxicity. Toxicity that may take years to undo and recover from.
One of the most important parts of his work I think was highlighting the importance of carbon dioxide. He described CO2 as the master regulator of all other hormones. You don't need milk and orange juice to boost CO2.
Ray Peat always tried to avoid toxins. That's why he was very suspicious of vegetables. He did not realize that the biggest toxin in vegetables is beta-carotene, so cooking them well does not help very much (although it probably helps a bit). He also did not understand the toxicity of retinol. He was also misguided on the importance of calcium. That's why he recommended large amounts of dairy and the regular consumption of liver. Additionally, the large consumption of coffee, while certainly helping liver and bile flow in the short-term, has the effect of reducing the conversion of retinol to retinoic acid, which is an important part of the vitamin A detox pathway.
Around 10 years ago, Grant Genereux discovered the toxicity of even small amounts of retinol, and he published 3 books about this topic over the years. Later, Naturopathic Doctor Garret Smith built on top of his work and expanded it to include the concept of toxic bile and chronic toxicity from other things than merely retinol. The concept of toxic bile was known to our ancestors, but pretty much forgotten in our modern times, with the exception of nutritionist Karen Hurd, who used the soluble fiber in beans and physillium husk to bind toxic bile and heal her dying daughter from a "hopeless" case of pesticide poisoning, but she did not connect this with the toxicity from vitamin A and copper.
We here now have the unique opportunity to connect the dots and, for the first time in our known history, find a way out of collective degeneration and disease and open up the path towards regeneration and healing.
During the vitamin-mania of the early 20th century, scientists were paid to find "essential substances" in foods, and some people apparently had a great interest in discovering the retinol chemical. Because it was the first "vitamine" to be identified, retinol was given the first letter of the Alphabet. A major milestone in vitamine research was reached when the letter -e was dropped and "vitamines" were renamed to "vitamins" (the new term hid the fact that retinol was not an amine). Unfortunately, this did not change the toxicity of retinol, which is indeed a toxin, and probably not essential for life. If it is essential for life, the amounts are so small that it doesn't matter practically because it's basically in all foods (just like PUFA can't be avoided practically). Grant Genereux discusses the evidence for this in his books and you can also find interviews with him on Youtube.
The carotenoids and retinoids ("Vitamin A") are so toxic that they burden the body, especially the liver, and by this mechanism, shut down or reduce the elimination of all kinds of (often fat-soluble) toxins. This leads to a vicious cycle, which is often unnoticable for the first years because the liver is so good at storing toxins away in body fat and in the liver itself.
Some readers here may not be able to or interested in moving to a zero or low vitamin A diet immediately (or at all). Often, small changes can already give good results. It is very easy to reduce the vA intake by 80% with just avoiding a few things.
When it comes to vitamin A intake, when you consume more than your body can excrete, your body starts storing the excess amount in the liver. Mathematically, it's just a question of time until the liver is full and the toxic retinol metabolites overflow into the tissues and organs. Because measuring liver stores is impossible without harming the liver, and serum retinol levels don't reflect liver stores, the only way to judge toxicity is via a vitamin A elimination diet. The body only starts eliminating excess vitamin A when the intake is lowered as much as possible.
The official recommendation by national nutrition authorities suggest an RDA of around 900mcg. These authorities also say that doses of around 3mg of vitamin A is the upper limit (UL). It's very easy to even go beyond the official UL on a "Peat diet", which means that this diet s considered a toxic diet according to mainstream scientific standards. To reduce the body burden, one has to reduce the vitamin A intake to below the RDA, though. That's why the primary strategy resolves around building a diet that does not have much vitamin A. This is pretty difficult when consuming dairy, but the overall intake can still be greatly reduced with various strategies.
The following suggestions are my personal thoughts, gathered from researching the topic on my own. It's just meant to help you getting started on this, without having to turn your diet upside down in a single day.
Simple steps towards a lower A intake and a low toxin diet
Here are easy steps to gradually move towards a low vitamin A diet/low toxin diet, which is the foundation for eliminating toxic bile:
1. Stop eating liver, liverwurst, or anything else made from liver. It's high copper and retinol content make it very toxic even in small amounts, when consumed regularly. Don't eat fatty fish (mercury) and seafood (lead, cadmium, marine biotoxins) regularly.
2. Stop all coffee and chocolate. I think this may even be the most important change for many. Caffeine can harm the nervous system, and coffee stops the detoxification of retinol. It may take a couple months to recover from chronic caffeine intake, but many feel better after that period. Chocolate also contains lots of caffeine and is too high in copper, cadmium, aluminium and lead. Many people on the subreddit r/decaf report good results and healing from just stopping caffeine.
3. Stop all colored vegetables, but especially carrots, pumpkin/squash, sweet potatos, spinach, kale. These foods contain so much beta-carotene, they are outright toxic. I noticed people usually get most of their carotene from this small list of vegetables. Limit other colored vegetables if you have to still eat them. Eat white or pale vegetables, they don't have large amounts of beta-carotene. In green vegetables, the chlorophyll hides the orange color of the beta-carotene, but those are also very high in carotene. Tomatoes are probably ok, they don't have a very high beta-carotene content.
4. Limit eggs to a 1-2 a week, or one per day, depending on how much you feel you need.
5. Stop cooking or frying with butter, and stop cooking with dairy. If you have an appetite for dairy, just drink milk or eat some cheese, or put butter on your bread. Not using dairy for cooking will reduce the amount of total dairy you consume. This is just a way to reduce the total amount of dairy, in the end it's about the total amount consumed, not how you consume it. But I found that avoiding dairy when cooking meals is a good way to reduce the overall intake. Many meals call for something like 200-300g of cheese, or 200ml of heavy cream, and frying and cooking with butter also adds up.
6. Stop eating spices if you can. Especially chili, paprica, tomato, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Also avoid things like concentrated vegetable broth if possible, but don't stress over small amounts of spices or vegetables. Spices were considered medicine by our ancestors, and they burden liver and kidneys. They do eradicate problematic micro-organisms in the intestine, so stopping all of them could maybe lead to flare-ups.
7. Switch from orange juice to white grape juice and/or apple juice.
8. If you do not medically depend on supplements, stop taking them. Especially taking vitamin D, vitamin E, calcium and multivitamins is problematic. The idea that humans need supplements to be healthy has been engrained in our culture and became a deadly ideology. Of course, also stop ingesting any retinol from supplements or cosmetics. Women can receive up to 25% of their daily retinol intake from cosmetics.
The above changes will probably lower your vitamin A intake by >80% and may give your liver the opportunity to start detoxing. I developed the above steps over the course of a couple weeks for people in my social circle who were not interested in starting the "extreme" low A diet, and for myself to have some guidance when in environments where I can't control 100% of my diet.
Other considerations
You can also start taking into account the following:
- Gradually include more beans and oats in your diet, they have soluble fiber which binds to toxic bile and helps excrete toxins from the body. Beans and oats are probably the most important foods for bile detox. Per Karen Hurd, ingesting them without much fat is important, otherwise they bind to fat instead of toxic bile.
- Eat more rice. Best is rice from Thailand (rice from Asia in general is also good I think) due to low arsenic concentrations. Rinse rice in water and cook in excess water to reduce arsenic further. Rice from the USA is often contaminated, due to the history of arsenic-based pesticides, and should be avoided.
- You can eat potatoes if you tolerate them. While they do contain toxic solanine, and are part of the problematic nightshade family, they also offer some benefits, including large amounts of potassium. Use only fresh potatos without black parts, green colored skin and shoots. Discard the skin to reduce solanine.
- Eat apples for the pectin
- Eat more bread and pasta
- Eat more beef
- Karen Hurd used physillium husk powder to bind toxic bile when people were unable to tolerate beans. There's a product called Sunfiber that has a similar function, it consists of soluble fiber. You can also take a small dose of activated charcoal (100-200mg). I can't tolerate it so I take bentonite or zeolite instead a few times per day.
- If you are a smoker, don't force yourself to quit, rather look into organic tobacco. Smoking tobacco is helpful for reducing the liver stores of retinol, and has other benefits. You can stop smoking when you don't need it any longer.
This is basically all that's needed. At this point you will still have most of your "Peat diet" - fruits, meats, gelatin, dairy, well-cooked vegetables, but you will stop ingesting retinol in amounts that border on acute toxicity. Your retinol intake will probably be around 40-80% of the RDA, depending on the amount of dairy you consume. You will also gradually reduce your copper burden. Years of chocolate and liver consumption will often lead to chronic copper toxicity. If you stop here, you will likely get a lot of benefits, depending on your current state of toxicity, without having to change your entire life and all of your routines. You can even keep your dairy goats.
Stopping dairy and eggs (beyond maybe 1 per day) would then be the next move, this will reduce your vitamin A intake to around maybe 200-300mcg. A calcium source can be important during the first 1-2 years of vitamin A detox, because the body uses calcium to buffer the acidic retinol. This can be high calcium water (>300mg/L) or eggshell calcium. If you depend on milk to feel well, one or two glasses of low-fat milk could be an option, but milk is very problematic, the heat and homogenization treatments make milk toxic, by turning the retinol into retinoic acid. So if you need milk, raw or gently pasteurized milk.
If you feel well on this transition diet, you can move to a low-toxin diet, which puts more emphasis on avoiding foods that are not toxic in a strict sense, but put a burden on the body.
Low Toxin Diet - Low "vitamin A" & Low Toxin Diet Food List
Here is a good starting point for a low "vitamin A" and low toxin diet. A slow transition is always best, it took me awhile kick my fruit juice habit, it was literally the last thing I dropped and then saw the greatest advance in healing. If you jump in all the way be aware of detox events that...
Note that it is possible you feel worse at first. Stopping caffeine alone is a pretty large step, and your nervous system will probably need a couple weeks to recover from chronic stimulant abuse.
Once you lower your toxin intake, and stop toxic supplements, you will gradually realize that your body is highly intelligent and tells you everything you need to know to make decisions around foods and supplements. In my experience, even small amounts of beneficial supplements like zinc, niacin or egg yolks taken only for 1-2 days can lead to lasting changes and benefits. You will feel toxins leaving the body, and that you get closer to becoming who you really are, beyond the layers of toxicity. You should always feel better afterwards. Supplements should never be used as a crutch, if you don't feel better after taking something for a couple days and then stopping, it's not helping.
Optional stuff
- There are some supplements that are often used, but they are optional at this transition stage and could be necessary when seriously starting a low toxin diet. These include regular flush-niacin (nicotinic acid), electrolytes/minerals, B1, B2, B3, folate and trace minerals like zinc. Taking niacin seem to help many people, 200-300mg on an empty stomach will lead to a therapeutic flush.
- Use a high quality activated carbon water filter, reverse osmosis or water distiller. Beware of cheap reverse osmosis systems used for things like fish tanks with low quality filters.
- Look into using an air purifier or ionization device if you have bad air quality.
- Consider the use of infrared sauna, CO2 baths, and ozone if available in your environment, but don't stress over it if not available for you or too expensive to set up. Health does not require complicated technology and expensive devices beyond the basics.
- Look into taping your mouth at night, if you tend to breath through your mouth. Chronic mouth breathing is dangerous. There are some videos about this on Youtube.
Resources
- To read up on the dangers of chronic overconsumption of vitamin A, you can read the free e-books (My eBooks) and the blog by Grant Genereux, who discovered that there is a worldwide "epidemic" of vitamin A toxicity: Ideas, Concepts, and Observations.
- His forum contains many interesting threads: Discussion
- Youtube Interview with Grant
- Dr. Smith: Nutrition Detective | Research-Based Vitamin A Toxicity & Liver Health
- Karen Hurd: Karen R. Hurd Nutritional Practice
- Paolas Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepowerofozone
- This thread contains a large amount of information: Low Toxin Diet - Grant Genereux's Theory Of Vitamin A Toxicity
- This forum section contains all the threads related to the low toxin lifestyle and toxic bile theory: Forum list
This post will probably be expanded, the idea is for this post to collect all the relevant information for people to start from. I just wrote this down as a first quick attempt to help people here make sense of the sudden transition of this forum, which may have alienated some members, but it is a pretty courageous decision by charlie and will help many people find true health.
Last edited:
and went for a jog
