Vitamin A or Methionine adverse reaction?

[shucknchuck]

This is a Simple explanation, tested on myself.

For over a month, I restricted the high vitamin A foods dairy and liver, while continuing to supplement idealabs' synthetic vitamin A supplement, Retinil - which created no reaction (after testing with/without). If I had so much as a small glass of milk, I would feel extremely tired/depressed/irritable, with bad digestion, etc. I would also feel this if eating potato in any form, which curiously has no vitamin A. I also react the same way to any serotonergic food, mostly nightshades.

For about a month of low vitamin A foods, I was faithfully microdosing t3 in efforts to improve my thyroid. When I reintroduced dairy and liver in significant amounts, I then had none of the prior symptoms for dairy, and the symptoms, while persisting extremely mildly, are so little for liver as to be almost gone.

Methionine happens to be high in typical high vitamin A foods.
Methionine is a major factor for Ray Peat in metabolic health. Methionine raises serotonin. Serotonin is implicated in hypothyroidism and gut issues. Lowering methionine has been shown to increase metabolism. Perhaps there is a problem where one would want an adequate metabolic rate to handle dietary methionine.

I see no sense in the anti-vitamin A advocacy, given it has been consumed in far higher quantities by people living into their 90s/100s with no discernable metabolic issues, and its well studied necessity in genetics, androgen production, anti-estrogen activity, and anti-cortisol activity. So, maybe don't consume 50k IUs of vit A from a supplement, and give yourself vit E deficiency and nervous system problems, but return to balance?!

For the record, I have increased my supplementation up to 40,000 IU's + increased Vit E for these summer months, and do way better in summer heat/sun in Texas.

 

[youngsinatra]

I don’t see a clear line in your experimentation. At first you abstain from high vitamin A foods, but take retinol and you feel bad after eating certain foods. Then you take T3, and you feel good after eating certain foods. So it‘s likely the T3 that improves your wellbeing and digestion and has nothing to do with either vitamin A or methionine.

I can only say that I deeply regret taking vitamin A supplements. Only took me one year of 50K IU/day to completely destroy me. (Even with protective factors like vitamin E/D/K2.

It felt extremely good in the beginning (androgenic AF), until my liver got so full of it (which takes months to years depending on intake) that it started to overspill and then ***t really hit the fan.

If I could change one thing about my past, I would definitely undo my vitamin A self-poisoning.

Some of the negative effects of preformed retinol can already be seen and objectively measured at RDA levels (around 3K-10K IUs per day)

There are quite a lot of studies on that matter. It‘s quickly becomes detrimental to the bones for example.

 

[shucknchuck]

I don’t see a clear line in your experimentation.

Sorry, I did a suboptimal job describing myself; let’s see if I do better here:

I felt toxic vitamin A symptoms, until I removed high vitamin A foods. However, symptoms identical to symptoms with high vitamin A foods also persisted for ALL HIGH METHIONINE AND SEROTONERGIC foods, as well. So, I had to remove high methionine foods, which included but was not limited to high vitamin A foods. Ironically, vitamin A itself in the form of a synthetic supplement gave me no such reactions.

I was clearly improving thyroid for the duration of my time avoiding all above foods, and could then tolerate high-methionine foods again (as well as high vitamin A foods).

I am positing that the high vitamin A was clearly not my problem, but the high methionine, and improved thyroid would likely resolve this for most people.

AKA Ray Peat right again.

Any nutrient found in a study Damaging bones doesn’t necessarily tell me that it damages bones but that it requires more dietary calcium. Vitamin D does the same, and Ray has said to take calcium when taking a vitamin D supplement to mitigate the parathyroid surge that leaches calcium from bones.

With all due respect, your story doesn’t tell me every potential factor, and while I believe you have very real problems in tandem with increased vit A use, I don’t know if that was due to hypothyroidism either already present, or made worse by either taking too much vitamin A, or something else entirely.
I actually got worse vitamin A symptoms, and hypothyroid symptoms, after a year of taking NDT (natural desiccated thyroid), and it took at least 6 months to reverse it with red light and t3. What was possibly happening was that I was creating reverse t3 on such a high t4 source, while also taking too much (NDT is something like 4:1 ratio of t4:t3). A bunch of factors can do things counterintuitive to what we think, with the compromising factor being what we actually don’t know.
I could’ve been very easily sucked into the anti-vitamin A crowd based on what I was experiencing. I had to avoid liver for almost year. I retried it, couldn’t handle it, so then I took the vitamin A problem more seriously, and stopped dairy too, for well over a month. This was toward the end of the 6 months of healing my liver/thyroid, I regained ability to eat vitamin A rich foods.

Thoughts:
my grandparents and their friends/family, did fine drinking milk every day with a serving of liver every Friday, living into their 80s and 90s, none getting obese. I think the humble middle of the road, is to look for more factors than the vitamin A, as to the supposed problems of vitamin A

 

[orangebear]

I'm most active in the vA toxicity thread. Since finding it and trying it I can say I have found the most effective bandaid for my health issues so far. That said, while I believe Grant Generoux has done some phenomenal research into vitamin A, I don't think his conclusion that vitamin A is a poison bar none. I think a lot of factors can lead to vA metabolism impairment, from genetics to environmental factors to diet and medications. The thing is that once someone develops vA metabolism impairment, they can accumulate dangerous levels of vA without consuming that much of it. To solve the issue, they certainly need to find out what is blocking their vA metabolism and fix it. This can take years depending on how bad the problem is and how much excess vA they may have accumulated. Vitamin A supplementation can compound the issue greatly as well. However, until they solve the underlying issue, a low vA diet is a reasonable bandaid in order to avoid the toxicity getting worse.

 

[shucknchuck]

I'm most active in the vA toxicity thread. Since finding it and trying it I can say I have found the most effective bandaid for my health issues so far. That said, while I believe Grant Generoux has done some phenomenal research into vitamin A, I don't think his conclusion that vitamin A is a poison bar none. I think a lot of factors can lead to vA metabolism impairment, from genetics to environmental factors to diet and medications. The thing is that once someone develops vA metabolism impairment, they can accumulate dangerous levels of vA without consuming that much of it. To solve the issue, they certainly need to find out what is blocking their vA metabolism and fix it. This can take years depending on how bad the problem is and how much excess vA they may have accumulated. Vitamin A supplementation can compound the issue greatly as well. However, until they solve the underlying issue, a low vA diet is a reasonable bandaid in order to avoid the toxicity getting worse.

I can respect that position even if I may disagree.
While I don't have enough time to research points made to agree or disagree enough to rebut in a proper volley of ideas, I will stick to where we agree: whatever the mechanical path is, we both agree that vitamin A has been shown in some studies, to compete for the thyroid pathway, and that's an important point to remind anyone of while they're improving their metabolism and health, and that it competes with vitamin E, supplementation or adequate diet of that vitamin, is certainly necessary (as well as a generally nutrient dense diet due to the higher demand via increased sex hormone production load vitamin A affords). cheers

 

[shucknchuck]

@youngsinatra
If I may,
I'd like to summon your comment you made elsewhere:
You claimed in another thread that you poorly handle eggs, as well. I understand eggs are high in vitamin A, but I checked, and they are also high in methionine. 100g of egg white contains 2.8g of methionine, while 100g of lean beef contains 1.1 grams of methionine.
Again, virtually all high vitamin A foods, seem to be high in methionine.

So, it would be cool if you tried egg whites for a few days, to see how you react, as they have no vitamin A.

 

[youngsinatra]

@youngsinatra
If I may,
I'd like to summon your comment you made elsewhere:
You claimed in another thread that you poorly handle eggs, as well. I understand eggs are high in vitamin A, but I checked, and they are also high in methionine. 100g of egg white contains 2.8g of methionine, while 100g of lean beef contains 1.1 grams of methionine.
Again, virtually all high vitamin A foods, seem to be high in methionine.

So, it would be cool if you tried egg whites for a few days, to see how you react, as they have no vitamin A.

I eat 600-800g of meat per day without problems, so I highly doubt it’s the methionine.

 

[shucknchuck]

I eat 600-800g of meat per day without problems, so I highly doubt it’s the methionine.

My point was that that was pretty low for the beef, and high for the egg white. almost 3x more for egg white

 

[youngsinatra]

My point was that that was pretty low for the beef, and high for the egg white. almost 3x more for egg white

Oops I see!

 

[shucknchuck]

Oops I see!

all goodly bro :)

 

[Highserotonin90]

I see that methionine is involved in liver detoxification processes as well as feeding a correct methylation cycle... but above all it would be difficult to have a medium-high protein requirement and stay low with methionine even consuming gelatin (glycine) which is its antagonist.

 

[shucknchuck]

I see that methionine is involved in liver detoxification processes as well as feeding a correct methylation cycle... but above all it would be difficult to have a medium-high protein requirement and stay low with methionine even consuming gelatin (glycine) which is its antagonist.

no disagreement here, neither from Ray, as it's impossible to go "low methionine diet" without a lab.

However, milk and liver are considerable higher in methionine, so I believe that the sedative effects, and other symptoms, can show thru if consuming both in Peaty amounts (for some).