Whats the deal with "Vitamin" A?
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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
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@Kvothe That place has decayed into one large advertisement for Garrett Smith. Every sentence written by the three power users is an attempt to steer him clients. Its a very transparent marketing scheme that betrays all of Peat's work. And the fact that they're very happy and eager to do that is all the more heinous and deplorable.
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@jwayne I'm still not 100% sure whether this is all a business deal or just Charles' boundless stupidity. You should never make the mistake an underestimate how remarkably stupid and gullible Charlie really is. I can definitely imagine him believing all this nonsense. Stupidity, combined with religious dogmatism, and a rotten character can result in all kinds of unexplainable behavior.
If it was all just a scheme to direct clients towards good guy Garrett Smith, then Charles should be able to see that his behavior and religious messages will put most people off even if they are curious about the idea. But again, this presupposes a normal level of intelligence which I doubt Charles posseses. -
I just had a small improvement in health from eating small bits of liver each day. Charlies detox 'program' really did a number on me. Fkin stupid. I must of had a copper deficiency from all those stupid supplements.
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@questforhealth What supplements were you taking?
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Zinc, molybdenum for 'copper toxicity'. My spine started to hurt....
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@questforhealth That sounds terrible! But I'm pretty sure it was just a "retinol detox event". <sarc>
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@Kvothe Charlie now mimics Garrett Smith like a clone personality. And has learned to take pleasure in slandering Ray Peat ("The Peat Diet feminizes men.", "...ruins lives", "..is toxic", " ...destroys the liver."). And then adds further remarks everyday ("The carrot diet is a suspect" [in cause of death.])
I would allow attributing the religious viewpoints to lack of intelligence whereas the hatred of Ray Peat is moreso a lack of psychological introspection.
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Maybe.... Haha...
What I find funny is Charlie never talks about having spiritual experiences, synchronicites, or anything like that at all. Despite all this talk of god...
I log onto the forum and in my feed there is almost always the answer to what is on my mind currently... Strange world.
