Whats the deal with "Vitamin" A?
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Is it good or bad?
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@OrpingtonClose Probably bad for you. But for a normal, healthy person with a functional thyroid - who would have enough brains to at least search the forum before asking this question - then it's perfectly fine.
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It's good for you and being deficient in it gives you severe mentall illness (look at Charlie for an example)
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@OrpingtonClose you need the right amount for how active your thyroid is. more active => more A needed.
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@OrpingtonClose said in Whats the deal with "Vitamin" A?:
Is it good or bad?
I think that getting it from food sources is safer than a supplement. Eggs have vitamin A, and also choline, which protects the liver from NAFLD. I think it's too easy to over-do it using a supplement of vitamin A.
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-the supplements are probably shit quality now. Ray has an interview, I think with Roddy where he talked about his experiences with it. He mentioned a study where something weird was happening to supplemental vitamin A and the researchers stopped whatever was happening to it by adding vitamin E
-you have to be careful with it if you are hypothyroid it can suppress metabolism
-its not intrinsically 'toxic' and the people claiming so have OCD
-carotenoids aren't vitamin A and are harmful
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@OrpingtonClose "probably bad for you" ? Same question I ask everytime : Breast milk contain vit A, does it mean nature make baby drinks "bad thing" ? No. So here is the answer : Natural vitamin A is benefic and part of the normal evolution like magnesium, calcium etc... When something goes wrong and your thyroid is low, you can have trouble with too much vit A (supplementing vit A is not useful when you have hypothyroidism). Tribs consumming relugar liver animals and tons of milk and never had any problem with so called "bad vitamin A". Next topic.
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don't think it's bad but honestly I never saw any discernible benefit from it, except maybe less sebum
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It appears that retinoic acid is used by the body as a type of "chemotherapy." What are the long term effects of A restriction? No one knows for sure, but I think hypothyroidism and ultimately cancer aren't outside the range of possibilities.
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@OrpingtonClose very good!
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Night blindness and childhood blindness can also be caused by a vitamin A deficiency.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.44.7.648It would seem to be important to be mindful of night blindness if you choose to go the low vitamin A route.
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It's bad. Gets you banned from raypeatforum.
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I've been taking 10,000 IU daily and it improved my skin quality significantly, and raised my resting body temperature.
Supposedly it's androgenic.
Whether it's good or bad as a whole.... that's a controversial topic. As others mentioned in the thread, it's definitely bad if you have hypothyroidism.
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I've been taking about 90,000 units when I also supplement things that lower cortisol and increase androgens. If i don't take the vitamin A when i supplement these things i pretty reliably break out in acne.
I have not had any problems. According to the anti-vitamin A crowd I am just storing this in the liver and eventually it is going to get overloaded or something and dump into my body and kill me.
I'm very skeptical and I trust people like @haidut then the cultists of the anti-vitamin A movement
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@Verdad said in Whats the deal with "Vitamin" A?:
According to the anti-vitamin A crowd I am just storing this in the liver and eventually it is going to get overloaded
What is the alternative? It should be reasonable to assume that the body is not going to be able to metabolize ~30 mg of vitamin A a day, nor get rid of it at that rate, in which case we would have to ask: where does it go? And wherever it goes, we must also ask: can it keep going there forever? It seems unlikely for anyone to be able to take >10x RDA doses of fat solubles for years on end without eventually running into a problem of one kind or another.
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Seen some evidence that vitamin A and iodine are synergistic. More A consumption = more Iodine needed. Iodine suppresses the thyroid when you have insufficient A but if sufficient A exists iodine actually causes more thyroid activity.
Anecdotally, this seems to be true.
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@TheSir I recall on the Ray Peat forum the discussion of a study that showed people who had supplemented 100,000 IU a day for a prolonged period of time who had no issues.
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What I have never fully understood is why when i take things that boost androgens that if I don't take vitamin A I get bad acne, this also happens when I take thyroid. I think it is because androgens and thyroid increase cell turnover so the neeed for vitamin A also increases.
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Found the study on high dose vitamin A. It was posted by Haidut on ray peat forum
"This is a human study and as you can see it used up to 500,000 IU vitamin A daily for months for acne treatment without any serious signs of toxicity. Most doctors will warn you that vitamin A will cause liver issues, but as you can see this was not the case here."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6453848
"...Oral vitamin A (retinol) is generally not considered useful in the treatment of acne vulgaris. We conducted a study which showed that retinol was indeed ineffective at the usual doses of 50,000 to 100,000 IU daily. Retinol was highly efficacious in doses of 300,000 units for women and 400,000 to 500,000 units for men, toxicity was slight and limited mainly to skin (xerosis) and mucous membranes (cheilitis). The danger of hypervitaminosis A in this dosage range has been exaggerated. Retinol is a valuable drug for treating stubborn, severely inflammatory acne vulgaris. It is administered until the disease is brought under control, usually within three to four months. Then the dosage is progressively reduced relying on conventional drugs to keep the disease in abeyance."
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@Verdad most likely the simplest explanation, because androgens increase sebum production and vitamin A reduces it
