Grant Genereux is a chemical engineer turned health researcher and advocate, known for his work exploring the role of vitamin A toxicity in chronic disease. After resolving his own health issues by eliminating vitamin A from his diet, Grant began sharing his findings through self-published books and public interviews. His research challenges conventional nutritional wisdom, offering a provocative perspective on the potential dangers of vitamin A consumption.
Grant and I explore the controversial topic of vitamin A toxicity and its overlooked role in modern chronic illnesses. We also discuss the science behind his elimination diet and the radical improvements in health that many have experienced after cutting out vitamin A. Be sure to watch the full interview to learn more.
0:00 Intro
2:38 Who is Grant Genereux?
6:53 Signs of vitamin A toxicity
9:10 How much vitamin A is safe?
18:45 Synthetic vs natural vitamin A
23:04 Thoughts on too many organ supplements
29:05 Is vitamin A really essential?
32:15 Foods high in hidden vitamin A
36:07 Chronic illness link to vitamin A
42:56 Should you stop milk and eggs?
48:49 Why cod liver helps
56:51 Vitamin A’s link to cancer
1:05:21 Should you test vitamin A levels?
1:07:17 Grant and Judy’s motives for sharing
1:14:54 Where can people find Grant Genereux?
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EPISODE RESOURCES
– Website: https://ggenereux.blog/
– eBooks: https://ggenereux.blog/my-ebooks/
– Forum: https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/
– Obesity Causation 2.0: https://ggenereux.blog/2024/11/12/obesity-causation-v-2-0/
– Tackling the Detox Setback: https://ggenereux.blog/2023/06/03/tackling-the-detox-setback/
– NwJ Liver and Risks of Vitamin A Toxicity article: https://www.nutritionwithjudy.com/liver-and-risks-of-vitamin-a-toxicity
– First interview with Grant Genereux: https://youtu.be/7OC4dwGp8Q0
– EFH Low Vitamin A Guide: https://empowerfunctionalhealth.com/product/low-vitamin-a-guide-risks-of-excess-animal-liver-consumption/
– EFH SpectraCell Micronutrient Test: https://empowerfunctionalhealth.com/product/spectracell-micronutrient-test/
– EFH Complete Wellness Panel: https://empowerfunctionalhealth.com/product/complete-wellness-panel/
– EFH Personalized Health Plan: https://empowerfunctionalhealth.com/product/personalized-health-plan/
– EFH 1-on-1 Wellness Plan: https://empowerfunctionalhealth.com/product/1-on-1-wellness-plan/
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*DISCLAIMER: This content is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. It should not replace professional medical advice.
#vitamintoxicity #eliminationdiet #chronicillness #nutritionalhealing #rootcausehealth #toxinfreeliving #guthealth #autoimmunediet #healfromwithin #inflammationreduction #detoxprotocol #bodyreset #dietexperiment #chronicfatigue #naturalhealing #bioindividuality #foodasmedicine #lowtoxlife #holisticwellness #healingjourney
a few years ago I shared for the first time about vitamin A toxicity especially when it comes to consuming beef liver as well as cod liver and cod liver oil While some people were appreciative of the information there were many people that did not agree and were actually angry for the information I was sharing about vitamin A toxicity I now eat a lot of meat and so do they If you want to thrive you need to eat meat Meat is required Hey guys my name is Judy Cho and I’m board certified in holistic nutrition and I have a private functional medicine practice where we focus on root cause healing and that often starts with the carnivore cures all meat elimination diet Today I had the pleasure of bringing back Grant Generoo We had an interview many years ago about the risk of eating beef liver or any liver animal liver and the risk of vitamin A toxicity In this conversation we talk about his ventures into a low vitamin A diet He’s been eating almost zero vitamin A for the last 10 years And when it’s an essential vitamin or essential nutrient meaning that we need to get it from outside sources of our body why is he not sick we talk through what he eats why he decided to go low vitamin A and the results he’s seen and from his community of eating low vitamin A There’s actually a lot of information and research on hypervitaminosis A or vitamin A toxicity but no one really talks about it In fact in the wellness space it’s always about the low risk of vitamin A and how we need to source more vitamin A for optimal health But just like there are certain things that no one should talk about such as vaccines vitamin A is actually an area that if people or researchers share the risk of over consuming or exposing yourself to people are also shunned about vitamin A And whenever there is shunning or censorship you always have to wonder why Could vitamin A actually be more toxic than it is beneficial we are taking supplements for vitamin A or eating foods rich in vitamin A But could these foods and supplements actually be toxic for us if you have poor liver function it could be a higher risk We get into a lot of this conversation why I even shared about vitamin A toxicity what it might do to human children and even pet health and who the people are that should try a low vitamin A diet Let’s get right into the interview Hi Grant I am super excited to have you back on my channel I think we I I thought it was only two years but I think you’re saying it’s closer to four years maybe that you were on my channel But for the people that didn’t watch that episode I will put it in the show notes They should watch it But if you can introduce yourself to the people watching and listening Sure My name is Grant Genu Um actually now a retired professional engineer Was never really interested in the health space or the medical space just 100% focused on you know other things until I got sick and then I became very very interested in the health space and uh why I had gotten sick and why so many other people have gotten sick So basically looking now investigating root cause of chronic disease I love it I love it And last time we had you on you were mentioning that all these things about vitamin A uh and and then I went down that rabbit hole for a bit I know back then you were doing a low to no vitamin A diet are you still doing that and if you could share a little bit about your update Sure Yeah So I’ve been following an extremely low vitamin A diet I would say as low as humanly possible I used to call it a zero vitamin A diet which technically is not exactly precisely correct but definitely splitting hairs Like I’m down to you know two or three international units per day where the RDA is about 3,000 So I’m a thousand times lower than the RDA of just you know on this mission to absolutely not have any vitamin A in my diet And so I’ve been doing that for 10 years now I just well last August I crossed the 10-year threshold on doing that So and it’s my personal experiment u to test the theory that vitamin A is essential or not And that’s that’s what I’ve been doing Okay So and then in terms of diet so if you don’t mind sharing what do you typically eat in a day then what I typically eat is uh beef and rice I’ve really expanded my diet So I’ve included apples now So um but that’s pretty much it Um black coffee um on and off on the coffee but that’s it So beef and rice are my primary foods and water From your own journey of 10 years you do not believe that vitamin A is an essential vitamin not at all Exactly the opposite I think it’s a toxin and only a toxin That’s I’m very thoroughly convinced of that So since our talk what have you seen any changes in awareness of vitamin A toxicity oh yeah it’s become very um I don’t know popular is the the word but it’s far more widely acknowledged and a lot more people are participating I think the last time we talked it was like maybe four or 500 people that I’ve kind of had contact with or is aware of But now I think it’s it’s probably closer to about 10,000 people worldwide So it’s it’s growing quite a bit Unfortunately I think it also has a very high dropout rate And I don’t track it I don’t have statistics I just follow the people that sign up on my forum you know kind of the user count on my forum and the activity there So that’s how I’m kind of gauging it And then there’s some very popular you know bloggers that are talking about it on I don’t know if that’s blogger is the right word I’m not even I don’t even go on X very much but there’s a quite a bit of uh talk on X and there’s a forum on Reddit and so yeah it’s it’s gaining a lot more interest and I would say five years ago when we talked about this at that time it was considered just you know crazy uh flat earth type of theory but now it’s far more widely kind of accepted as is something reasonable like this is not this is no longer crazy you know there’s definitely something here and I think in summary quite a People are definitely recovering their health I get a lot of updates from people that I call them testimonials but they’re just email from people updating me on their progress and a lot of good progress reports It’s progressing It’s growing It it’s it’s gaining traction It’s gaining popularity both in North America and quite a bit of interest in Europe too So I get a quite a few contacts from Europe So the Europeans are picking it up tiny bit in Asia So yeah it’s it’s growing kind of worldwide too right it’s uh it’s not just North America Yeah that’s awesome I I will tell you that so we get emails through our customer support and although I don’t talk about vitamin A a ton now obviously I always say I don’t generally recommend consuming liver or um certain organ meats on a carnivore diet and then the question always becomes why and and or our carnivore diet food pyramid has no liver on it and then people will say hey it’s missing liver and we’re like no it’s actually intentional and then we’ll cite our articles that we’ve written and obviously you’re cited in those articles and and then we’ll get emails of thank you so much for bringing up the vitamin A conversation because ever since removing most of the vitamin A especially liver cod liver oil my health has improved and we get it occasionally So it is something that I definitely see expanding and I really wanted you on to see one if it’s an essential nutrient then you should be dead by now with 10 years of not eating vitamin A And so I thought it would be just cool to see you come on And and then as we were revamping some of our carnivore elimination diet you know we we started this ebook and we never finished it And so we just started going through it And then it just reminisced of all the how how much vitamin A there is in beef liver and then even chicken liver and all the livers and especially cod liver and cod liver oil and and then how quickly you can have the recommended daily allowance of vitamin A and then even the tolerable upper limit which is saying that even these governmental bodies are saying this is toxic beyond that and I think for children even over half an ounce is exceeding that amount and it’s really concerning and so I love the work that you do just because of that What are some of these symptoms because maybe somebody hasn’t seen our old video but what are some of the symptoms of vitamin A toxicity of having excess in your body well I think you know the primary cited symptoms are dry skin dry eyes hair loss bone pain you know osteoporosis is well documented as a symptom of vitamin A toxic being caused by vitamin A toxicity dry mucous membranes uh general fatigue depression anxiety Those those are some of the kind of top documented symptoms but there’s actually you know hundreds of symptoms of vitamin A toxicity Yeah And that’s that’s one thing I love about this whole vitamin A diet or the low vitamin A protocol it’s just it’s such an easy thing you can try right so if you suffer from any of the things that you mentioned if you go on a low vitamin A diet if you find improvement maybe there is something to this And I think it’s such a simple thing to try But you know I just mentioned the recommended daily allowance and then the tolerable upper limits Do you think you can sort of explain or clarify the amounts and what that really means maybe any foods The RDA which is the recommended daily amount for an adult is uh 3,000 international units I think that was 900 micrograms of R A which is retinoid activity equivalent So it’s 3,000 international units So how much is that i’ll state it this way You know the the much more important thing that I’m focused on is chronic vitamin A toxicity So uh for your viewers or listeners that are new to this topic and it’s kind of you know coming from left field it sounds probably very strange like what is this guy talking about so there’s two categories or categor is categorizations of vitamin A toxicity One is called acute That’s where you take you know a massive large dose of vitamin A so much at once that you have um a disease response to that or you have a toxic response to that So that’s acute vitamin toxicity which I’m really not concerned about personally I’m not focused on I really don’t care about it Yes it does happen Some people go way overboard on consuming too much in a very short period of time and they get themselves exposed to that situation The other scenario is chronic vitamin A toxicity This is where over time you accumulate more and more and more and as that bioaccumulates you end up with more vitamin A in serum and that vitamin A is causing you a disease condition So both those scenarios that I’ve just described are super well documented That’s not speculation You know that’s not me summarizing or making something up You can go to the medical literature and just search for those terms Acute vitamin A toxicity and chronic vitamin A toxicity So my concern is not so much what people would eat in one day Don’t don’t really care about that What I care about is the bioaccumulation of that over a long period of time And what do I mean by a long period of time decades for adults So for adults children are in a different category They are much more susceptible to vitamin A toxicity That’s also in the literature That’s well established in the medical literature that children are more uh susceptible Now for adults in my generation I think it affected most adults kind of by age you know 70 80 90 you can see old people in their succumbing to diseases like osteoporosis and dry skin and blurred vision these are symptoms of vitamin A toxicity and hair loss is another symptom that’s what I’m much more concerned about is this bioaccumulation over a long period of time it’s really hard for people to get their heads around this I think because normally I don’t I think people have a way of thinking in those long periods of time You know I come from a scientific background where you know I took a lot of my early years in science was in geology where you’re kind of forced to think about periods of long pe long long spectrums of time way beyond any human is capable of But at least you try at least you try to think in these long time frames as a geologist And then kind of as a mathematician also you think about the accumulation and is you know this classic calculus area under the curve kind of doing this math So the concern is this accumulated vitamin A over a long period of time becoming toxic and overwhelming your liver and body storage capacity and moving into this scenario where now you end up with too much vitamin A kind of on a daily basis being in circulation and that’s going to cause you the same disease condition as that acute vitamin A toxicity would have if you had taken a very large dose in one day because now you’re effectively regardless of it let’s say it’s five eggs a day or four cups of milk or whatever you’re drinking whatever source the vitamin A is that’s much more dangerous now because you don’t have the capacity in your defensive mechanisms primarily your liver and other defensive mechanisms to safely store that away Hopefully that makes sense to people After I interviewed with you I dug deep into the research because all the car members were mad at me that I was talking bad about liver right and we’ll we’ll talk about that in a second But just to paint a picture um I made an image and maybe I’ll throw it on this video here but so we talk about the accumulation a long time ago they believe that vitamin A was such a deficiency So they started fortifying cereal so it’s in Cheerios and all the grains You fortify it in your milk and and then in our dairy products you said it’s in it’s also in butter it’s in eggs and then obviously in the organ meats And even if you don’t eat organ meats it’s in all of the foods we talked about which most of us grew up eating a lot of So you get a lot of fortified vitamin A in your system And then you’re saying it gets stored and and then we maybe use retinoid products or retinol products And then you know like the Accutanees where then that might also get stored And then I think there’s a lot of other ways to get vitamin A So then we already uh before we even eat a more animal-based diet we are already inundated with a lot of vitamin A And now people are then eating organ meats and especially beef liver which I think one ounce is nearing the vitamin A upper limit Um and for children it’s again past that upper limit So now it’s are you getting sick and we have definitely seen many N equals 1 cases where they said I started eating liver and I noticed I was getting more sick The question then for you is like how how long does the vitamin A stay in your system how long does it accumulate and how quickly do does our body detox any of this excess vitamin A hey guys just a really quick break Nutrition with Judy’s private practice is now called Empower Functional Health I started as a nutritional therapist but we have become much more all-encompassing At Empower Functional Health we do functional medicine chronic illness autoimmune gut health environmental illness such as SERS mold illness lime Regardless of all these names the goal for us is always to get you root cause healing answers And of course carnivore the all meat elimination diet is always on the table Food the right food is always medicine We offer functional tests prescription meds and really everything to get you closer to root cause where you can just eat the meats you enjoy and live the life that you are meant to symptom free The goal is to get off meds supplements and everything else that your body no longer needs support in Our practice whether it’s nutrition with Judy sharing podcasts and free content or our private practice Empower Functional Health our goal is to support you guys in the barbell theory We give a lot of free content our evidence-based research We don’t use Substack We give all our stuff away for free And we interview with the best and make it super tactical so you have clinical pearls that you could walk away with and try in your own healing journey And then we work with some people and a smaller subset one-on-one to provide that level of personalized care And as we heal these people that are chronically ill we find these clinical pearls and golden nuggets that we can share then more publicly so that we can make wellness for all Hopefully the content and the guides and the free stuff we give out is enough for you to heal But if it’s not you can always come and work with us in our private practice so that you can get more personalized care If you want to learn more make sure to check out empowerfunctionalhealth.com That’s that’s a really good question Um my general assessment is um you know many decades So vitamin A is going to stick around in your liver for probably for life unless you do something to try to expel it It’s it’s a it’s a one of these forever chemicals And there’s a really good paper by uh Sher going to mispronounce her name Teman Gerald on the acute and chronic effects of vitamin A toxicity And they talk in that paper about these very long-term scenarios for detoxifying vitamin A They basically say it’s going to take a very long time It’s it could take decades to to reverse it I guess is if that’s your question Yeah I would just make a comment You know since the last time you and I talked I’ve had a lot of people contact me a lot of carnivores that were eating liver reporting exactly what you stated is that they they were started on the carnivore diet added liver and this is very interesting to me that you know initially they report feeling great they’re doing fantastic and then slowly over time their health became really bad In some cases extremely extremely bad two people have reported being near death um on carnivore diet eating liver but you know probably gonna say about probably around 50 people have contacted me from the carnivore community who included liver became very very sick so you know thank you for that interview because it has definitely saved a lot of people well I think the numbers so that’s why I love talking numbers even though you don’t focus on the acute it’s if you standard care generally doesn’t prioritize human health or the individual human health They just have these recommendations So the daily allowance or the daily aotment is if you just want a general level of health you should at least hit these numbers And then the tolerable upper limits it’s basically if you surpass these numbers then you will likely possibly get hypervitaminosis A or other toxicities And then when you look at the beef liver amounts it is undeniable that if you eat for children it’s not I think it’s like a quarter ounce of liver If you eat that you are surpassing the tolerable upper limits assuming you’re not having any dairy any eggs any grains which most kids already have So now you’re really surpassing that And so with adults it’s the same thing So a lot of the carnivores will also eat egg yolks and dairy or some form of dairy whether it’s milk or cheese And so then you have to wonder how many of them are having people are already going on a carnivore diet for better health and now you’re actually poisoning yourself when we think of liver as this superfood and not ever questioning that hey actually liver is really nutrient-dense in certain nutrients but sometimes even in excess including copper and we’re not even talking about copper right now but it’s just that the nuance is not shared about liver and so when I interviewed with you I dug into it and just the numbers show it can be toxic even just based on tolerable upper limits But there is such a big market where people are selling liver capsules And so all of those people got really really mad at me and then started fighting back saying “No no it’s just the synthetic vitamin A It’s nothing to do with liver.” And it’s totally not true because retinol from the liver is more bioavailable than the you know the biotic version So maybe more that I’ I’ve heard that argument before about synthetic versus you know natural vitamin A and that’s completely a false argument Like I’ve got a background in science and chemistry and engineering You know I know chemistry and like I’ve worked in a chemistry lab I’ve done analytical chemistry Sure it was 40 years ago If you went to a professor in chemistry and you say you know tell me the difference between synthetic retinol and natural retinol he’ll look at you like you’re nuts because it’s a molecule It’s a molecule composed of atoms with a certain geometric structure to it It’s it’s it’s there’s no distinction between quote synthetic and natural And I think even what we might infer is synthetic you know vitamin A being packaged and put into pills its original source is going to be coming from a plant source that’s gone through some process to to split up that beta carotene molecule into quote a retinol molecule vitamin A molecule So that that whole argument of what synthetic versus non or natural holds no credibility with me Now with regard to the safety of eating liver sure you can get away with it for a good long time you know or maybe good long time maybe I don’t know 6 months 3 years maybe more maybe even a decade but it bioaccumulates And that’s what’s so important for people to appreciate is this stuff bioaccumulates And you know if you go out to the National Institute of Health site and just search up vitamin A they’ll clearly state that vitamin A is stored in the liver and it bioaccumulates So from that point in time you just need to think like a mathematician and say “Oh it’s going to bioaccumulate There’s a certain physical capacity of the liver Some point in time you’re going to exceed that And now what?” You know that’s what people need to understand And I I can totally get that people that haven’t spent any time looking at this or thinking about it would kind of jump to those conclusions Oh this is kind of crazy talk It doesn’t seem reasonable I guess is what I’m you know trying to say And I I totally get that I’m fine with people having that response but I think if they just spend enough time looking at it and investigating it you know and objectively looking at the evidence and the facts I think they’ll better appreciate you know the concern that I’m trying to raise Yeah And I mean I I love using common sense So besides the numbers the tolerable upper limits I know some people say “Well how do you even trust those numbers?” But if you think about an animal that’s maybe 600 to 1,000 lbs their liver is maybe 16 pounds I believe And if they were to split that amongst the tribe or however they want to argue that again it’s a very few and far between meat source that you would get Yet we see carnivores saying if if it’s healthier you should just eat more and more frequently And so I would see stories and I would see social media posts where people are eating like half a pound of liver and on subsequent meals of like look I’m going to be so healthy and then everyone supporting that as if that’s a good thing but in reality so where where I started seeing the vitamin A and copper toxicity was really in hair mineral test and we started seeing okay wow there’s an imbalance and where is this coming from and chromium was the other where chromium is also high in beef liver and so we started asking these people what do you eat and the common food was liver and in excess So it wasn’t just one ounce and it was multiple ounces and then they were trying to get in more So they would take the capsules and they would take this and that And the concern is even with all the organ capsules So now they have like a variety of like this is for your gut health and this is for your adrenals And if you look at the underlying organ because liver is the biggest organ all most of these supplements the base is always liver So you’re just getting excess liver Yeah So even if the brain health one there’s always some form of liver in it because it’s just a marketing Yeah Okay It’s just a marketing thing to kind of categorize it into these these uh claims Okay Yeah I understand I I don’t really know what to say to that or respond to that other than uh you know given enough time this is going to catch up to these people right there’s there there’s no there’s no uh fooling nature right like we are part of nature and you can maybe get away with this for a while but eventually it will catch up to you and that’s a few years ago I was getting an email maybe once a week kind of tapered off but then you know I get more emails and you know had a very dramatic email and a follow-up call with somebody a few months months ago Maybe we can talk about that because he he is a person that you just described He just went super gung-ho on uh on eating liver and he he became you know incredibly sick to the point where he was near death But I’ll tell you you know vitamin A toxicity is well known to cause the stunting and mal malf for bone growth So osteoporosis and bone growth And I once read a a study of researchers going through you know grave sites in I think Norway graves that they had dug up in you know the 1500s or something and they’re diagnosing vitamin A toxicity in these skeletons based on the malformed bones So why am I talking about that because this fellow that contacted me about you know eating all this liver young man in his 30s he said he actually lost two inches of height Wow Yeah So it’s shrunk his bones Other people that have contacted me who’ve taken Accutane it’s it’s quite common for these people to say it’s deformed their bones If people think that this is a game you better think again because this will catch up to you and the consequences could be extremely severe So that’s my warning Okay So let me I mean I I know the answer but I’m going to ask anyway I think even aside from vitamin A just to say my last soap box about liver even though I know everyone thinks it’s a nutrient-dense food you have to think about it in context So if it’s nutrient-dense get all the nutrients look at it within its RDA versus the tolerable upper limit See what else it’s missing and then the balances of it So for example because it’s really high in copper it is not high enough in uh zinc and zinc and copper fight against each other You need zinc to make enough uh stomach acid You also need it for immune function So if you are depleting yourself of zinc because of the excess copper again what about that it also is not balanced in all the fats soluble vitam vitamins And I was going to ask you about that You know that’s one of the arguments of well we need to balance all the fats soluble vitamins with and liver is really rich in vitamin A but it’s very deficient or very low in vitamin D E and K But what do you say to the general nutritionist or you know the recommendations that fats soluble vitamins must be balanced and vitamin A is one of them well you know I I disagree with that but my general opinion is that you know the two primary fats soluble vitamins would be vitamin A and vitamin D and vitamin D actually counteracts the toxicity of vitamin A So vitamin D bonds to or binds to the same uh receptor as vitamin A So you could temporarily mute the toxicity of vitamin A by taking vitamin D but vitamin D is also toxic in my opinion I think it’s well established in the literature too So you know over time that could catch up to you also So yes there’s some validity to someone saying okay if you balance vitamin D and vitamin A uh the toxicity might not be quite so bad And there’s a research paper from the 1940s where they actually did that So they were doing a toxicity study once again on rats But they gave the rats you know a certain dose of vitamin A and they gave them that same dose of vitamin A with vitamin D and a low dose of vitamin D the vitamin A toxicity was definitely blunted But then when they added more vitamin D the vitamin E D toxicity plus the vitamin A toxicity was even more devastating to these animals So you know you have to be really careful with that And I think it’s crazy like this is supposedly a hundred-y old science but still you know there’s a lot of new discovery to be made about or a better understanding to be had here So yeah I just you know I have such a strong opposition to anybody thinking that liver is acceptable I just you know no it’s not That’s my opinion Well we also work with the chronically ill that are super sensitive to many other things And so even without considering vitamin A or any of the excess nutrition if that that’s what I’m arguing it’s also really high in purine So if you have a tendency to get gout it’s not ideal in that way And so if you also have poor kidney function you’re not going to release the purines as quickly And then finally it has a lot of histamine So if you’re sensitive to histamines it also is not an ideal food And then if you get it encapsulated in supplements it’s even far worse But with all that said why is it then if vitamin A truly is more toxic than beneficial why did we consider it a vitamin and then do you believe that anyone should be consuming maybe it’s not as far as eating liver but you know is it safe enough to eat dairy eat eggs what are your Well yeah I think Okay why is this considered a vitamin let’s start there So early researchers back in 19 kind of starting around 1913 1825 there was a lot of interest in discovering uh vital substances in food called the vital amines and there’s a lot of prestige and money to be had if you could discover one of these vitamins and uh especially a vitamin that was declared essential then you’re going to make a boatload of money if you can synthetically produce I’m going to say synthetically produce it market it and sell it to you know billions of people We’re talking a very big money industry and the vitamin industry you know since that time has always been a very big money industry for the pharmaceutical sector So there’s a lot of money being made in vitamins So my assessment of the determination of vitamin A being a vitamin essential vitamin uh looking at the original research that was done on that is is very flawed And I’ve written about that in my ebooks I’ve got an updated blog post on that So I think that science went very wrong and so that’s um a position where I think that’s not valid On the flip side we have been dealing with vitamin A as humans for ever like for thousands of years and we are well adapted to consume vitamin A in a reasonable amount Okay so if you if you consume vitamin A in a reasonable amount imagine some western prairie farmer from you know the 1800s they lived a good ripe old age but they didn’t get taken out by something else In that scenario where you’re eating you know high let’s say moderately high vitamin A foods very seasonally in the fall maybe you’re eating some pumpkins or something but yeah this is no concern I have no concern about that So in a reasonable amount even in butter and eggs etc if you didn’t have this high consumption in the past then that’s going to you’re going to be fine right i think you’re going to be fine for a good long time So going forward though what’s happened is we’ve had a lot more vitamin A in our food It’s bio acccumulating and that’s that’s raising the concern I’m not advocating for everyone to try to do what I’m doing eliminate all vitamin A I think that’s kind of crazy Well it is kind of crazy Uh you don’t need to do that but just stay away from the big ticket items is what I think So what would you consider the big ticket other than liver and cod liver and all the livers uh what what would you consider other big ticket well the other big ticket is some of the some of the plant sources like sweet potatoes spinach uh pumpkin you know carrots are maybe medium Mangoes actually those would be some of the big ticket items And you know some of the some of the sea uh what they call sea vegetables like kale and stuff like that I think are very high Some of the spices are incredibly high in vitamin A Now fortunately with spices you don’t lose a lot of it but the concentration of vitamin A and some of the spices is just off the charts Um what are some of those spices so chilies are very high in vitamin A Some of the other some of the peppers like the jalapeno peppers the chipotle peppers So a lot of the peppers that are used in in in South America very high in vitamin A So you have to be aware of that from animal sources Actually you know the real only big concerns are are liver and also kidneys So I know some people are advocating for eating kidneys but kidneys can be high in vitamin A and also high in retinoic acid which is the most toxic form of vitamin A So I think organs like kidney and liver should not be on the menu ever for anyone It’s my opinion right and I I’m on the same page with you and we work with chronically ill and the people that we see healing we don’t even advocate for them There will be occasional people that will be low in maybe copper and and so we’ll say maybe and so maybe even after this call I won’t say it but we’ll say maybe half an ounce every like once every few weeks but maybe even that they don’t need it It’s just sometimes we’ll see the need but like you said it’s just the vitamin A is so high and if it if they already have poor liver function let’s say they’re insulin resistant or they have other things that their body is trying to detox such as mold then their liver is already inundated And then add to that the insult of vitamin A storage and then if they’re taking a lot of vitamin D supplementation that is also not ideal for them So it’s it’s just knowing your case obviously but this whole more is better notion was the whole point I wanted to bring up okay this conversation because more is not better in this situation And I and the more I research the more it’s proven that it’s not and it’s just there are such great markers out there saying liver is so good for you And sure from a nutrient density if you do so the general uh nutrient facts they do 100 grams per 100 grams So of course compared to 100 grams of steak versus 100 grams of liver the liver will look more nutrient-dense but you have to think of context No one eats 100 grams is about three and a half ounces of meat No one eats three and a half ounces of meat They might eat 16 ounces and no one eats three and a half ounces of liver for the most part It’s about half an ounce So then the information gets skewed And then what about all the other nutrients i think people just see oh look there’s like six nutrients that are super a lot in liver and so therefore we should eat liver But it’s actually really really strong marketing And you bringing up sweet potatoes reminds me So we just got a puppy and I was looking at all the non-grained non-grain dog foods And the third ingredient is always liver And then there’s multiple livers And of course I know it’s because liver is cheaper and and so I can’t even feed my puppy any of the raw dog foods because there’s so much liver And then they add vitamin A and copper as a nutrient in it And wow they will also add sweet potato So it’s just I wonder what it’s doing to our dogs And I don’t think anyone is looking at this Oh I know I know Yeah Yeah I I I know And you know so many people with pets these pets are getting the same horrible chronic diseases that we’re getting You know like scal problems at a relatively young age and cancers You know things are not going well for our pets It’s absolutely the food Yeah I agree Do you think that some of our chronic illnesses are stemming from vitamin A i mean you mentioned something I know your book shares a lot and I’ll put it all in the show notes but you know sure insulin resistance um even diabetes these areas what does it have to do with vitamin A toxicity or excess vitamin A you know most of the autoimmune immune diseases are being caused by vitamin A toxicity and and a lot of others I really focused on Alzheimer’s and dementia in my uh ebooks and you know a lot of psychiatric diseases depression anxiety etc So there’s a long list of things that I would attribute to vitamin A toxicity with diabetes and insulin resistance Uh I’ve looked at that quite a bit I’ve written a updated blog post on that somewhat recently called obesity causation 2.0 So I think in the diabetes community and let’s call it you know the health space that you’re working in the carnivore health space or the you know keto health space insulin resistance is being blamed for you know a lot of the chronic diseases right and the further claim is that insulin resistance is being caused by carbohydrates and prolonged elevated insulin I don’t think that’s correct and I’ve add some pretty good evidence in my blog post on why I think that’s not correct I think that actually vitamin A is actually the root cause of insulin resistance and all the complications that come from that Does it really matter what the very root cause of insulin resistance is i think it does Nevertheless you know the carnivore community and keto community who are taking this position that you know carbohydrates are kind of the root cause of of these disease conditions is you know I don’t think that’s correct but it’s very very valid in a scenario where people want to lose weight So if you want to lose weight then you know low carbohydrate diet leading to low insulin low prolonged insulin uh that’s definitely going to bring down the obesity and and weight gain But the very root cause of insulin resistance is malformed either insulin receptors or other proteins that are being malformed by the overload of vitamin A So that’s in my blog post people I I really you know I’d love for people to read that chime in give me any criticism or feedback but uh so that that’s my take on it Yeah Okay So if I understand you correctly and I will go and read that blog post and I’ll put it in the show notes so people can see your citations and the explanation but just the super summary is that in it’s not that because you’re eating carbohydrates which raises your blood sugar and then there’s excess insulin and then your insulin just sort of becomes numb or doesn’t work enough and that’s how you become insulin resistant Rather than that model You’re saying that with excess vitamin A it can impact the receptors of insulin and then do damage in that way Yeah that’s that’s what I think and I think it’s um and there’s different versions of vitamin A correct it’s not just like retinol is the only version Beta carotene is the only version that gets converted to No Yeah there’s I think technically there’s like vitamin A is a generic term for you know any molecule that has vitamin A activity Okay And I think just from memory I think there’s like 26 different okay um you know vitamin A active molecules that are in the retinoid family So there’s a there’s kind of a in the medical literature you know they don’t really use the word vitamin A so much they talk about retinoids which are you know retinol and retinol aldahhides and these have a very specific you know molecular structure you know each one that has this vitamin A activity and depending on that molecular structure the uh intensity of that vitamin A activity is variable so u yeah there’s lots of different types of vitamin A and retinoic acid is claimed to be the active form that actually influences the metabolism of proteins and lots of other things in in the cell Crazily both claim to be the vitamin activity and also the toxic form of vitamin A if you’re going to get something like chemotherapy or Accutane It sounds like vitamin A functions more like a well maybe not a mineral because minerals are more like spark plugs but it sounds like it’s more like a hormone and it can trigger things to turn on and off or act or behave in a way that maybe not be ideal for us Yeah I think uh my definition I guess from memory of a hormone is anything that has the ability to cause signaling between different cells and and glands or in the endocrine system So yeah it definitely functions as a hormone but it’s far more sinister than that One of the fundamental claims of vitamin A it’s needed for uh regulating protein synthesis And this comes back to why I make the claim that vitamin A is actually the root cause of insulin resistance So the claim in the literature is that vitamin A is regulating protein synthesis And this really gets to the core the fundamental core of how and why vitamin A is a toxin So vitamin A regulates so-called regulates protein synthesis And what that means you know all the cells in your body every day every hour probably every minute are producing proteins And those proteins get their physical composition from DNA So DNA produces an RNA molecule The RNA molecule goes into the ribosome Ribosome is going to weave together protein based on those very specific instructions So it’s a blueprint So the DNA is transcribing this blueprint into the messenger RNA Messenger RNA is used as a template like think of it as a little weaving machine a little loom that’s weaving together uh a protein structure Now case of vitamin A it binds into that DNA or binds into the RNA I’m using that kind of too loosely It’s there’s there’s another interface there But vitamin A attaches to it and now you’ve got this this foreign molecule stuck inside your DNA or stuck inside an RNA molecule And when the ribosome goes to weave together the protein that’s in that instruction it gets this messed up molecule this vitamin A molecule in that instruction and weaves a defective protein So now when the cell needs to generate you know the gluteor receptors or the insulin receptors it’s weaving that together It’s it’s assembling that protein step by step molecule by or atom by atom to to assemble that molecule But now it’s got a foreign entity stuck in the blueprint and so it’s generating incorrectly formed protein So this is kind of the very fundamental biology mechanism or cellular biology you know the weaving and manufacturing of proteins If that’s not happening properly you’ll have defective proteins And that’s my my okay kind of summary of why I think causing insulin resistance So a whole bunch of other horrible things Sure So if I understand you correctly if somebody’s doing a carnivore diet and they’re still suffering from insulin resistance because we do see that right we see people’s blood sugar go up and they’re not eating any sugar and their insulin resistance is still sort of high right when they’re having their fast and insulin fasting insulin run So then why going back to your recommendations of well not everyone has to get off of the milk and the eggs why not if if truly vitamin A well I’m I’m just trying to be uh reasonable and and uh you know realistic I guess you know like like going on the extreme low vitamin A diet that I’ve been on is is you know I call it you know it’s crazy like nobody should do this I’m not recommending my diet to anybody What I’m doing is an experiment So for me to say okay you can be on carnivore and eggs and and milk are fine Um and they should be u because you know the amount of vitamin A you’re getting is okay there’s a certain amount there but it’s still in that reasonable category right i’m not concerned about that However depending on someone’s age and their state of health even that small amount of vitamin A could still be messing them up right if they’ve if they’ve kind of reached the threshold of liver storage liver capacity and they’re adding you know six eggs a day and a you know whatever amount of butter you know that’s that’s definitely enough vitamin A to keep you in that in that toxic range With regard to the insulin resistance you know why are people on a carnivore diet let’s say a low vitamin A carnivore diet still insulin resistant i’m going to say it’s going to take three to four five years to reverse that So nothing happens quickly It’s it’s just it just takes a long time I also think that if you have any liver imbalances that will also slow the process So especially if you get your labs done and your ALT A is high it could also be why people aren’t also able to tolerate a lot of fat So if they are also with excess vitamin A issues or their liver function isn’t doing well that will all impacted I think the the data is something like 80 million Americans have fatty liver disease And so yeah if your liver is already fatty and compromised it cannot be functioning you know efficiently So yeah I totally agree What do you say to the people that are like low vitamin A diet this is not true Vitamin A is necessary because that’s what all the practitioners say What what do you say to the people that I guess are skeptics uh I think it’s just a matter of time I don’t know how much more time but um maybe I don’t know five 10 years for them to come around I don’t think you know they probably haven’t looked at this deep enough or close enough and they’re just kind of going with the established thinking and the established you know literature on it and they don’t want to move out of their comfort zone and stretch the boundary there a little bit You know if you look at the literature you know vitamin A accumulates in the liver It bioaccumulates and there’s got you know references on my on my various blogs of studies showing that vitamin A accumulates in the human liver over decades And then you look at the literature and say okay uh chronic vitamin A toxicity is you know here are all the symptoms of it looking at these graphs and charts of vitamin A bio acccumulating over decades Why is this a hard concept for people to get i I’ll give them more time I think also it’s what you said very early on um in our initial interview vitamin A toxicity also looks like low vitamin A So it’s the you know when people say here are the deficiency signs of vitamin A it’s oh that’s but it’s very mirroring what vitamin A toxicity looks like including that eyesight stuff you were talking about Yes Yeah And so that goes back to what I called the flawed original studies Okay So most flawed original studies the low bal canal one specifically my thesis is that this wasn’t really well we know now it wasn’t a low vitamin A diet but what it was was a very toxic vitamin A um diet with with retino acid That’s my assessment And so what they looked at is all the horrible things that happened to these lab animals being exposed to this vitamin A deficient diet which was exactly the opposite was a very high vitamin A diet And they looked at all these horrible conditions say okay these are the things that happen to you on a low vitamin A or with vitamin A deficiency and zerothalia you know lack of epithelial formation and you know just the classic symptoms of what’s in the literature for vitamin A deficiency then yet when you go look through the literature on vitamin A toxicity they’re exactly the same and so that just kind of validates my assertion that that original study proved nothing more than the toxicity of vitamin A but that’s people can read my my book and my my blog post on that So can you share a story or two of people that have gone on this low vitamin A and I know it takes a while maybe even yours Yeah And having some health improvements Yeah So I get um you know I get like I said I get an email about once a week and generally people are pretty general about their health improvements like overall just a better sense of well-being I don’t know for whatever reason you know women seem to talk about improving their cognitive health or mental health resolving anxiety and depression I’ve had two other people besides myself saying that they recovering from chronic kidney disease Uh lots of people are saying that their skin is improved Couple reports of people reversing their their liver disease quite a few people uh saying that they’ve recovered from eczema or eczema and psoriasis I think most commonly I get a report from people saying that they’re just feeling a lot better in their overall health Same with same with us So our context will always be I went on carnivore started feeling better but then I I was also eating liver and then I just started feeling really bad Some of them would just vomit um that was like one thing that they would share and over time though as they went on the low vitamin A they started feeling better so the general symptom is just better wellness um that’s a big one that I hear but let me ask you so some people will say well I am on cod liver oil and that has made all the difference in making me feel better other people will be on I think it’s called Trenton noan I think and or some type of Accutane version of the retinoloids and they’re like look at my skin it’s so much better And I actually stay very far away from all of those and I have decent skin But why is it that some people by eating cod liver oil which is even higher than beef liver and vitamin A levels feel better and and also with the skin so I’ve had you know multiple reports from for whatever reason mostly men um and they’re I’m going to say generalized these are men in their probably 30s with a very common theme So they started eating liver and they felt absolutely great They say you know I I felt the best I felt in in a long time My health was just zooming when I was eating the liver and then kind of from there it went to I’m not feeling so well All of a sudden I’m getting you know it’s it’s starting to reverse and then catastrophic you know decline in their health Uh like I said two two men it’s actually funny They’re both about probably 30 years old I’m just judging said that they were on their deathbed with you know they thought they were going to die That’s how severely poisoned they were by the liver So now why why is that happening i have a very good theory and I think it’s well founded in the science of what’s happening So probably there’s other you know benefits like glycogen or something like that in the liver So there’s probably some other beneficial thing in in the liver that maybe is accounting for that but I think it’s actually mostly the vitamin A So So how is it that vitamin A in the short term is making you feel so good and then eventually catches up to you and makes you you know feel so bad And let’s talk about the isotrretin and the retina creams especially you know a warning for women So the reason women are using these retina creams is to improve their skin I think is the primary reason right so what happens is their skin maybe is not feeling or looking as kind of plump as they would like or they’re getting wrinkles or whatever it is but they want to improve their skin and so they get the retina cream and sure enough it works It works And the what the reason it works is actually poisoning cells on the epidermis but also further down into the skin And as these cells get poisoned and die they release growth hormone And that growth hormone goes down into what’s called the basil membrane of the skin and kind of excites or promotes the replication of stem cells So mechanism is the retinoid is poisoning these cells It causes damage to those cells And a lot of women will report inflammation and burning on their skin when they’re taking the retinoid creams and they get their skin peeling off but the quote the layer that comes off the lower layer that kind of comes off is rejuvenated and looks so much better Sure Because what’s happening you’re releasing enough growth hormone to spur the you know the rapid replication of your stem cells And this is completely thoroughly documented in the medical literature This is one of the the great claims of vitamin A activity is it’s used to regulate stem cell uh replication and the rate of stem cell replication So you expose your skin or any other organ tissue to vitamin A it’s going to release a growth hormone and cause that effect So why isn’t that a good thing well the reason it’s not a good thing is because it’s a deal with the devil And eventually you’re going to run out of the supply of stem cells in the basil membrane of your skin or any other tissue in your body that has this uh stratified epithelial or endothelial And once you deplete those stem cells your skin is going to become so damaged and probably permanently damaged that you know you will never recover So it’s a deal with the devil short-term gain for massive long-term pain And I’ll just talk about I just had another email from from somebody who contacted me They’ve taken Accutane for a good long time Uh of course they took it for acne They had acne and they took Accutane They said “Yeah and I have so many reports from people like this Took Accutane their acne cleared up for two or three months or six months or maybe even a year but it always comes back and comes back much worse.” You know the same process is playing out You take Accutane what it’s actually doing it’s killing the stem cells most quickly in the sebaceous glands of the skin And so now the sebaceous glands of your skin are not producing sebum and that’s not you know feeding bacteria and your acne is going to clear up because you don’t have as much you know fat and sebum being released onto the surface of the skin and it’s going to look great problem is it actually you of often burns out the stem cells the sebaceous glands and your skin can never produce the proper amount of sebum or lubrication like maybe for the rest of your life but this one fellow that just just emailed me I don’t know I think two days ago it’s just a devastating story his health so he took Accutane you know over a decade ago and he’s still suffering like a decade later his health is still destroyed and this is one of the common things that we see you know there’s so many people in my forum there’s an actual sectional my forum for um just for Accutane and you know so many people are you know reporting these 10 year decades long complications from taking Accutane sometimes even once you know that’s the mechanism mechanism of action for these retinoids they cause cells to grow really fast replicate really fast uh but in doing that they’re actually damaging the tissue and sometimes permanently damaging the tissue you know people need to be aware of that I I think these these products should be taken off the market I think So if I’m hearing you correctly it sounds like just to make it super simple if you use these creams they work or even the consumption of liver or cod liver because they’re basically killing off whatever cell or stem cell that was there and then they’re basically creating a new version very quickly But long term you might be using up all the cells and then long term you may get impacted But logically my brain goes well can’t I just you know stem cells are becoming super popular Couldn’t I just inject myself with other people’s stem cells well you could but you it might be super popular but it’s also super expensive apparently I wonder if they use vitamin A in those stem cells too to ensure that it functions properly just based on what I haven’t heard that Um but you know you might want to you know research you know the origin of those stem cells You might be shocked on where it’s actually sourced from Um I think that would be kind of crazy for somebody to consider that as a as a as a remedy for you know damage from retinoid treatment because there’s going to be nothing like your original stem cells to maintain your bodily tissues These these are you know integral super important part of your body And the thing that they don’t tell you that these companies selling the retinoid creams and the Accutines what they don’t tell you is that this isn’t just destroying stem cells in your skin it’s destroying stem cells throughout the body And so you know this is what’s important for people to understand The epithelial or endothelial this is a very common tissue structure used in every organ gland um you know so many tissues in the body and that vitamin A molecule or retinoid is killing these stem cells and that’s a pretty steep price to pay for short-term kind of benefit in my opinion Is is that where you think that cancer has something to do with the retinoids and the vitamin A yeah it is I have you know I’ve written that little ebook on cancer causation mostly looking at that from the kind of epidemiological kind of evidence proving or suggesting that you know vitamin A is very much a big factor in causing in that case you know particularly breast cancer and there’s lots of medical research I shouldn’t say a lot but quite a bit of medical research saying that you know vitamin A is implicated in the causation of lung cancer so if you go to the national institute of health again just look up the carrot study some other ones about beta carotene and you know these studies that anyway you can find them where they actually you know had to stop some of the studies early because it’s causing too many instances of of lung cancer and death So yeah vitamin A is very much implicated in in the causation of cancer I do believe it’s exactly what you describe is that it’s initiating that rapid growth of of a of stem cells and that’s that’s what we know about cancer It’s a rapid uncontrolled growth of cells and that’s you know cancer tumor So yes I think vitamin is definitely implicated in cancer So I I know that we’re trying to be realistic and so maybe not everyone needs to go super low vitamin A but as a practitioner I can’t help but hear from everything you’re saying and the riskreward is so the the benefit of going low is it could be extremely beneficial So if you’re suffering from insulin resistance if you’re suffering from some of the cancers you just mentioned if you’ve also taken Accutane and you know your health has declined I would almost argue that you should try a low vitamin A because it’s an easy it’s an easy protocol that you don’t have to get a doctor to try And the only reason I’m saying that is because when we were making our guide for the different versions so we’re doing 25% vitamin A levels of the RD RDA 50% and then 75 Your vitamin A adds up so quickly in a day And we were not using liver at all in that was diets Yeah Yeah You can easily hit the RDA on a regular meal no problem at all without any of these big ticket items Right now the reason I’m hesitant to to kind of do that is because things are not going wonderful either in this low vitamin A community There’s you know there’s this whole phenomenon of what we call this detox setback So the scenario is it’s playing out quite often is people take on the diet they feel great for you know one or two or three months and they start to slip backwards very much what like what you’ve described with with carnivorous maybe you know on liver but we’re seeing something similar with people going on a a very aggressive low vitamin A diet and what’s happening they go into this regression where their health can actually get worse or you know back to where they originally started so they lose their progress So this is I think the biggest obstacle to this low vitamin A diet really catching on because it’s it’s not predictable and it’s not reliable enough It’s not I guess not predictable and reli reliable enough for my liking And so that’s why I’m hesitant to promote it Not that I think it’s wrong I think we just have to figure out you know a safer way to to manage this And there are some ways to do that So the here’s the problem when people take on this low vitamin A diet and lots of people have been reporting their their serum vitamin A levels and so you know they it’s gotten enough interest now where people are proactively going out and getting a vitamin A serum test before they start they take on the diet two or three months later they go back and get another test and six months later and get another test and what’s happening even though they’ve got virtually no vitamin A intake in their diet their serum retinol levels their serum vitamin A levels are actually going up quite substantially sometimes doubling or tripling So what’s happening is the liver start starting to detoxify itself and by doing that it’s spilling out more vitamin A into the bile and into the serum and people are getting sick So we know why people are getting sick So you have to have a strategy and an upfront plan for mitigating that and it’s pretty you know there’s some pretty good things that someone could do to mitigate that or reduce that risk but I think people need to be aware of that So that’s that’s the primary reason I’m not advocating for someone to go ultra low in vitamin A because I think there’s this potential for this blowback So if you go on a low vitamin A diet your liver is not going to be so aggressively detoxifying I think you’re going to have a better chance of long-term benefit and you won’t suffer that you know medium shortterm decline in your health Sure And as a practitioner we actually see it often in everything So it’s not even just vitamin A Uh we’ll see it where people are trying to detox mold and then all of a sudden the body’s like oh there’s like not a lot of mold coming in so let me start detoxing and then all of a sudden they crash and they’re they’re living in the same house eating the same foods but it’s because the body we’re trying to use binders and bofilms to start releasing and it’s too much and it’s they often sometimes call that a herxheimer reaction and you’ll hear it online with the oxalate protocols where people go too low oxalates and then they’re like dumping as well So if people understand that if they if this whole vitamin A toxicity sounds like that’s what they’re suffering from and they want to go low vitamin A they have to ensure that their detox pathways are you know working really well So they’re sweating daily they are having bowel movements every day And if they’re not in that camp then they probably will have a reaction when they go low vitamin A So they probably want to go a lot slower hit the RDAs and vitamin A levels at least and then just slowly tyrate down And well I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say sorry I wouldn’t say hit the RDA I’m going on one10enth the RDA but don’t don’t go to absolute zero And okay I’m just throwing out that number onetenth You know I think the RDA is insanely high Um you know whatever it is you know less than half the RDA at least you know Okay No I think that’s fair And and we we do see that We do see that when the body I mean your body tries to protect you as best it can and it’ll store things in the liver even though there’s people that say the liver doesn’t store but it’s when you process an animal no I know it totally stores I know but there are people that say that and uh but but even if it let’s just say in the wildest situations it doesn’t store which it does but if it didn’t store even when you process an animal how do you know what part of the processing it’s in when it’s clearing any toxins so for sure there’s something in the liver But beyond that I think it’s if your liver is or your body is not able to detox well you just have to be careful when you are trying to try these new protocols And that’s for anything Any new protocol you try even trying a carnivore diet if all of a sudden you stop eating carbohydrates and your body is highly dependent on carbohydrates it’s going to take some time to get used to that Yeah very good point Yeah I totally agree Go ahead I was going to just throw out some of the go-to kind of precautions that people are are using in the low vitamin A community One is activated charcoal you know it’s a binder and it it very effectively binds to vitamin A That’s in the literature I think if somebody’s really hitting a serious detox setback vitamin C so there’s some good literature saying that vitamin C is actually quite effective in blunting vitamin A toxicity So that would be a short-term remedy I think I have a blog post on tackling the detox setback So maybe people could look at that Okay And the other thing is so no strenuous exercise So you know there’s emotional stress and you know mental stress but also physical stress If you go out and think “Oh I’m going to get in really good shape I’m going to lose a lot of weight I’m going to go on this low vitamin A diet I’m going to start exercising like crazy.” Wrong You’re going to get in trouble because that exercise will stir up a lot of vitamin A in out of the liver and you will get sick And so uh you know unless you’re younger if you’re in your 20s or something you probably get away with that But if you’re in your 40s and 50s and 60s you know someone jumping into this and thinking “Oh I’m feeling great I’ll start exercising really aggressively.” That would be a mistake So stay away from uh you really strenuous physical exercise Stay away from mental stress Say that the body the body stores a lot of its toxins also in the fat And so when people lose fat they will also start releasing and then they feel worse I think that’s one of the reasons why maybe when people start a low carb diet and they start losing weight they say “Oh this diet doesn’t work for me.” And they feel worse It’s because they’re actually releasing toxins Does vitamin A get stored in the fat at all oh yeah Yeah Absolutely Yeah Yeah Absolutely Yeah And that’s that’s why human fat is yellow Oh interesting Okay Uh what’s what makes sense about the activated charcoal is there’s also studies that it also releases some level of heavy metals So I think you know we because we will use it also in mold toxicity It doesn’t remove all molds but it will remove certain ones that can support the overall healing but they have to go slow So for example somebody that’s constipated we can’t put them on activated charcoal super quick because if they’re more constipated then they’re going to just recirculate that toxic bile and it’ll get them sicker Yep Yep Yeah For sure Yeah Totally agree Y I I know you brought up vitamin A testing We find that if people just do the like they go to lab core and quest and test vitamin A it’s all over the map It’s not always what’s really in the cell Sometimes we see it We have seen actually in Spectra cell testing where people will test their the vitamin A levels in their cells and we’ve seen it high We’ve actually seen him high several times It’s not always the case I know it’s not perfect but do you recommend testing at all or do you go by symptoms what do you recommend no I I think testing is it it’s actually well documented in the literature that vitamin A serum levels are not at all indicative of of storage vitamin A in the liver So it’s a disconnect there and it really depends on how much protein is in the diet and a whole bunch of other factors So vitamin A and serum is almost always bound to this retinal binding protein In order to have enough retinal binding protein to move vitamin A into serum you need protein you need zinc and a bunch of other things So if you take on let’s say you’re on a low protein diet low zinc diet all of a sudden you start eating more protein more zinc well your vitamin A serum level is actually going to go up So testing is it’s I don’t think people should do it other than if you’re curious you know if you want to some people are right they want to track their progress And I think that’s that’s that’s good but I don’t think there’s any medical benefit in actually testing for it It’s just like go go go by how well you’re feeling is a much more important measure Well I appreciate all the work you do Your ebooks are free and it’s you do all this work for free So obviously there’s no like hidden agenda in the work that you’re doing and so I just one appreciate that you’re just sharing your experience and then all the work that you’ve done you’re just sharing it for free because you’ve learned that vitamin A actually can be toxic and some of us that are eating more liver it’s not a good thing Why are you sharing like wh why not just do your own experiment and you know go away in a sense of okay well I’ve cured my chronic kidney disease and I’ve learned that vitamin A is a toxin and I’m just going to live my life with a better health condition Why why don’t you care h that’s that’s going to well maybe I’ll try to give you a medium long answer You know when I was very very sick back in 2013 um you know not only with chronic kidney disease but also you know eczema you’re not nobody’s going to die from eczema I shouldn’t say nobody but most people won’t die from it Uh quite a few people do commit suicide over it But um I was very very very very near death as close as a human can get uh without actually dying When I somehow recovered from that or started to recover from that I felt I had been given a second chance So I thought okay you know you know I have this obligation to pay it forward Like I you know I just not in good conscious could I just go on with my life and say okay there’s nothing here And more importantly it’s crystal clear to me that the science of vitamin A is completely flawed if not a massive massive massive fraud And I’m kind of more leaning towards the the fraud aspect of all of this And the consequences of us having too much vitamin A in our diet is I believe the root cause of a huge amount of chronic disease in our society and globally And so I think people have a right to know that Um I think it’s very uh I’m going to say dishonest but you know it’s really kind of diabolically evil that this is not being uh shared more widely and uh there’s a lot of people organizations that are hugely massive massively profiting from this So you know I have one this this sense of obligation to pay back this debt that I have for being given a second chance but also I think this is a you know a massive crime against humanity Whether it’s flawed science which you know could be or it’s malevolence we have to we have to expose this This is so important It’s so big that you know we have to somehow get to the bottom of it and expose it for what it is So that’s that’s why I did this Thank you I I can relate on so many levels So thank you so much The work that you do is so important And if if I hadn’t fallen into your work because of some of the lab testing we were doing on our clients and patients then I wouldn’t have been able to share this And for so long because I was looking at the nutrient density of certain meats and just based on 100 grams without looking at context of hypervitaminosis the upper limits I was sharing that all children should be eating liver pates hide liver this way eat it that way And then when I figured all of this out there was a really big burden on my heart and I was like I’m not going to share it Like I am not going to go against the carnivore community and share that their most beloved meat product liver is may not be ideal for you And I don’t even have such hard proof from you know N equals one patients that this is even hurting them And yet every night I would think about it and I just finally decided to share And you know the community wasn’t so loving There were some people that were open to it but for me it was the children It was that I had young boys that would eat it and now they never touch liver But I would think of all the young children that were being fed the liver pates where you’re using butter and lots of butter and then lots of liver and then just one scoop of that could be past this upper limit And I just felt this I know that I could be hurting even one child and if I am then I need to share that because I don’t want that on my conscience and so I should absolutely yeah absolutely and you know I don’t know if you know this but you know the World Health Organization distributing vitamin A you know around the world in like I didn’t know that in 110 countries you know there’s the vitamin A supplementation program going on you know globally you know hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on you know fortifying are dosing up kids all over the world uh with vitamin A It’s far worse than that anyway So there’s you know there’s a lot of children If I’m right about this and I have zero doubt I have no doubt that I’m right about this I’ve been looking at this for 10 years You know there are a lot of children being harmed and nothing but harmed with vitamin A around the world So this is this is a very very big deal We’ve got to get to the bottom of it You know what’s crazy is even though you’re saying that the WHO which obviously they have lots of things that I don’t agree with but if they’re giving vitamin A because they say it’s a deficiency why in America just I think it was uh maybe a year ago maybe it was four years ago actually they removed it from the nutrition facts So there is no more vitamin A listed on the nutrition facts because they said that it is no longer considered a deficiency Yeah Yeah Well I know when you when you start to look at the the legitimacy of this it’s absolutely absurd If you remember when I talked early on about the high vitamin A content of chili so chili is hugely popular in India and so are mangoes right mango is the official fruit of India Absolutely impossible impossible for anybody in India to be vitamin A deficient like from from the scientific literature right unless you’re only eating white rice but nobody does that And you have the WHO supplementing these kids you know in India And there’s a reference in one of my one of my books an analysis of vitamin A supplementation going on I don’t think it was Indian but another country And the analysis was uh looking at kids that they had dosed up with vitamin A versus kids that they hadn’t doeds up with vitamin A So the control group is no vitamin A The other group was kids that had received vitamin A The death rate between the ones that had no vitamin A and the ones that were supplement with vitamin A the vitamin A group was 17 times higher Not 1.7 17 times higher And that was like 30 years ago So they’ve known that for 30 years and they still go and push this stuff Like you could tell I’m getting kind of a little fired up but um so the insanity of what’s going on with vitamin A is just that It’s it’s insanity It’s just crazy Well if you hadn’t done your work I would not have found it and then been able to share So thank you for the work you do I promise you in the next version of that book there will be a section on vitamin A and talking about the anti-benefits of liver Um so thank you Thank you for the work you do because I I think of it as maybe not everyone will get hurt by liver but if one person can we should put that nuance right we should put that asterisk next to if you think liver is a superfood Here’s some just like any medications has risks in of certain people should not be taking this med medicine or vaccine or whatever the thing is Well we should have that for liver So we cannot only think of it as a nutrient-dense food We should also think of it as here are some people that should not be eating this and here are the risks of it But there is none of that And so without your work then I would not have been able to share So again thank you Thank you for Yeah Thank you and thank you for helping getting the message out and that’s you know hugely appreciated Thank you Okay Well if people wanted to read your blog and your ebooks where can they find everything so it’s still out on my uh my blog which is general So ge neux.blog That’s where all my content is Okay And your group you mentioned a group Can they access the group from there yeah there’s a forum There’s a forum a discussion forum on my blog It’s it’s openly accessible to everybody You don’t have to sign up or anything to to read it If you want to post comments and you do need to you know sign up Uh it’s completely free There’s no there’s no charge for any of it I don’t charge for any of this That’s it Well thank you Is there something that if someone watched this and they’re like maybe maybe I’m suffering from vitamin A toxicity or excess vitamin A Where would where should people start or what is the first step that you recommend people to do i think the first step would be um go out and you know read as much as you can on the symptoms of vitamin A toxicity and there’s a lot of different research papers that you could look at but research papers are very hard to read for a lot of people you know if you don’t have a scientific background it might be kind of too uh tough for people to get through that but there’s lots of kind of summary lists of vitamin A toxicity so I’d say go and look at that list of vitamin A toxicity and evaluate your health condition against that uh that list of symptoms and then from there probably you know reading my blog that’s been you know I’ve been publishing it up there for like 10 years and all kinds of different aspects on it’s primarily focused on vitamin A so it’s you know reading reading my work would be a good place to go you know reading my forum seeing what other people are doing yeah that’s that’s what I would say one of the thing I was going to say about you know people you know eating liver and thinking that this is a superfood and you know it’s going to whatever what people need to be aware of it’s very very difficult to detoxify from vitamin A toxicity It it takes a long time and making a full recovery can often be very problematic So you know there’s no quick fix right there’s not a there’s not a quick fix but if you’re in trouble you you’re better off starting today than a year from now So you know get going on it Yeah And awareness is key So that’s why you know we do the things that we’re doing right now So thank you Okay All right Well next time well I’ll have to have you back on again and see where you are and what your what new findings you found Okay great Thank you Judy I really appreciate it All right see you When I interview people and I’ve interviewed I think nearly 300 people that are experts in their field you sort of get a vibe from the person When it comes to Grant there is zero monetary incentive for him sharing what he does He does the research of 10 years on vitamin A toxicity and is even more certain that vitamin A is causing a lot of imbalances specifically the retinoic acid and if you watch our first episode he talks about the nuances of vitamin A and retinoic acid if there is a lot of truth in this vitamin A causing autoimmune lots of the skin conditions and other imbalances it’s pretty simple to try a low vitamin A diet now of course you have to be careful careful if you will have a Herxheimer reaction or if you’re detoxing too quickly for your drainage pathways So you have to be careful of that But it’s an area that if you are not healing enough that you may want to consider But for most people or most anyone I don’t know if vitamin A from liver beef liver chicken liver cod liver oil and cod liver or all the other liver and kidneys are beneficial in eating There’s that saying in standard care where the dosage matters And I think when it comes to nutrient density the dosage also matters There is such a thing as too much of a good thing And so while liver may be nutrientdense maybe it’s just too nutrientdense that it’s actually more harmful than it is good Of course you have to go through your own journey to figure this out But for my community for my children and for my family we do not eat liver Now occasionally after a hair mineral test especially someone is super low in copper we may recommend liver half an ounce on occasion but this interview itself has reminded me that maybe no one should actually be consuming vitamin A And in fact if they do need copper maybe they should be eating foods such as oysters I really hope that you consider the conversation and then do your own research because there is so much research on vitamin A I’ve actually written several articles on just the number side the tolerable upper limits as well as the recommended daily allowance You can see the numbers and then as they say numbers don’t lie If you’re consuming a lot of organ meats especially liver and kidneys or taking those capsules you may want to consider if that is one of the reasons why maybe carnivore or a ketogenic diet is not working enough for you Maybe by removing those nutrient-dense foods you may have more healing than you even expected If you look at the stories of all the original carnivores that have been part of that zeroing in on health group such as Dr Lisa Weedman or Amber O’Harn they almost never eat organ meats never eat liver and Charles Washington as well who was the founder And could it be that maybe they had healing and thriving of health because they actually weren’t eating the organ meats lots to consider I hope you look into our articles and look into all the research that Grant Generoo has done and even look at his community and the conversations that his community has Again all his resources are free His ebooks which are hundreds of pages with sources and citations are all free And if you want to look at or consider a low vitamin A protocol you can find our very detailed guide in the show notes Again I am all for root cause healing and wellness for all And so if one person can get better with this information about hypervitaminosis A or excess vitamin A then I will always share that nuance because maybe for you you can consume liver and be okay but maybe for another person it will impact them And if there’s one person that would benefit from the information I share I will always share that information All right guys Make sure to eat a lot of meat Take care of your bodies because it’s the only place you have to live I will talk to you later Bye guys [Music]
