Ray Peat on Vitamin A Toxicity
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Turns out he addressed the topic in 1985. A friend of mine ordered the Townsend Letter for Doctors back issue and shared it with us.
https://twitter.com/ibuybooks/status/1786536716615991794
Editor: You printed a letter to the editor regarding Vitamin A; I've been tracking down Vitamin A scare stories of ryears, and when I wrote to the researcher mentioned, he denied working on Vitamin A.
In 1974 there was a well circulated rumor, in Washington and Oregon, that Vitamin A had caused blindness. I traced the story to a professor at the University of Oregon Medical School, but she refused to talk to me about it.
I think the symptoms associated with moderate amounts of Vitamin A in susceptible people are the result of temporary supres-sion of thyroid function, which can result from an excess of any unsaturated oil. Vitamin E, which spares Vitamin A, has a powerful effect in preventing toxicity from large doses of Vitamin A. In traditional diets, people who ate fish livers also ate fish thyroids.
The three big dangers in the U.S. diet are iron supplementation, excess of unsaturated oils, and sodium restriction. If you would like a review of research on these dangers, I would be glad to write it up.
Raymond Peat
P.O. Box 3427
Eugene, OR 97403 -
@brad said in Ray Peat on Vitamin A Toxicity:
In traditional diets, people who ate fish livers also ate fish thyroids.
Would consuming fish thyroids also compensate for their high PUFA content? I've always wondered how people in traditional fishing communities, along with those living in polar and subpolar regions, managed the metabolic problems caused by high PUFA intake; especially as these conditions would require even higher metabolism than most humans.