https://ggenereux.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/extinguishing-the-fires-of-hell2.pdf
Chapter 5 The Real Experiment I would like to claim that I conducted that thought experiment to get to this point.
However,
I did not.
I took a far more direct approach.
I conducted a real experiment.
First,
I need to put this in the context of my own health conditions at the time.
In the fall of 2013,
I started to experience some rather severe fatigue.
It was getting worse and more or less turned into unrelenting chronic fatigue.
In the years leading up to this time,
I was in generally good health.
I did have some minor health issues creeping up on me that I had just assumed were due to aging.
These were mostly joint pain in the knees,
and dull,
blurry vision,
and several other minor things.
One other weird thing started happening to me around this time.
For most of my career,
I had been cycling to work,
both during the summers and winters.
I’d go at a good speed and wasn’t shy of hitting bumps and “shooting” off curbs etc.
But now,
even small bumps or even just dropping down off a six-inch curb hurt my brain.
As the bike slightly impacted the road,
my arms impacted the frame; and my brain ever so slightly impacted the inside of my skull.
It was quite noticeable and moderately painful.
I just assumed I was coming down with the flu.
That flu never did develop.
I didn’t think at the time that I had inflammation of my brain.
Of course,
I’d been sick before,
and naturally,
I always recovered.
So I was just expecting the same would apply to the fatigue.
It did not.
It only got worse.
I went to see my doctor multiple times regarding the fatigue.
He had no clues or answers for me.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 50 Just to quantify the severity of the fatigue,
I needed 12 hours of sleep per day.
On top of that,
I was trying to get a mid-afternoon nap each day.
I was just completely wiped out.
I was forced to quit my job over it too.
So,
I was typically going to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
and waking up about 8:30 a.
m.
A lot of mornings after waking,
I felt no better than I had before I went to sleep.
Sleep provided no relief.
That may sound strange,
but it’s true.
More consultations with my doctor resulted in no answers.
Around February 2014,
I started to develop a rash on the backs of my hands.
I made several visits to my doctor and was diagnosed with adult eczema.
At this point,
I had only a vague understanding of what eczema even was.
I thought it was just a rash.
My doctor explained to me that I now had an autoimmune disease.
I thought: “Oh,
that doesn’t sound good”.
I had almost never even heard the term autoimmune disease before.
He explained that my immune system was now being extra- aggressive and attacking my own skin.
He went on to explain that there was no known cause and no cure.
Furthermore,
he told me that for adults my age,
it’s just going to get worse.
Being a good doctor,
and wanting to put all the cards on the table,
he also explained to me now that I have gotten one autoimmune disease,
I’m probably going to get more.
He said that it’s nothing I’ve done wrong,
implying that it is just more or less bad luck.
I thought: “Oh,
great! That was not exactly the news I was hoping for as I headed into my retirement years.
But the reality is what reality is”.
My doctor prescribed steroid creams and told me that I’d be using these for the rest of my life.
He told me to go easy on them because there are long-term negative side effects.
I’m thinking: Hmm… I’ll be using these for the rest of my life yet there are long-term side effects? How’s that going to work out? Does this imply that long-term might not translate into a long-time? The Real Experiment Chapter 5 51 I thought: “Okay,
we’re dealing with modern medical science,
and if that’s the best it can do for me,
then that’s fine.
I’ll just have to live with that.
Oddly,
I had not made the connection between the fatigue and eczema conditions.
Neither did my doctor suggest that they were connected.
Overall,
my health had declined into a very bad state.
I will go into a lot more detail of this decline in a later chapter since there are some very important clues there.
By July 2014,
the bank account was draining,
and I was considering trying to get back into work.
I was joking with my wife that maybe I could find an employer who would let me have mid-afternoon naps.
Being realistic about my chronic fatigue,
it was clear to me that my life would now be nothing more than work and sleep,
at best.
Also,
I had band-aids on most of my fingers,
like permanently now.
By this point in time,
I had gone through thousands of band-aids.
It was going to be kind of tough getting back into work looking like this and having some creepy clear fluid leaking from my skin.
I was fortunate to find another job with a start date of August 11 th .
From the very beginning of my eczema diagnosis,
I had this feeling that I had somehow done this to myself,
even though my doctor assured me it was just bad luck.
On August 8 th ,
I decided I just had to try to do something to get this eczema condition under control.
Clearly,
the steroid treatments are a dead-end.
Also,
I’ve been told not to use them on my face.
My face was somewhat red with inflammation,
and I felt that it could break out with the eczema rash at any moment.
There was no way I was going to be able to keep this new job if I had a flare-up on my face.
That was just going to scare people I work with.
Okay,
at this time,
I knew next to nothing about eczema.
I started to do a bit of research about this nasty condition.
Let me now take you through that discovery process.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 52 The first surprising thing to discover is that there are over 20 million people in North America with this nasty disease.
In the U.
K.
it is around 6 million cases,
in Canada it’s around 3 million,
and in Australia it’s about 3 million too.
Wow,
that’s totally shocking! I had no idea.
At least,
I’m not alone.
About 20% of young kids in North America now “get” eczema.
It has increased 42% in just five years in the U.
K.
21 and has increased at least 300% since the 1960s.
There are similar rate increases currently happening in the United States,
Canada,
and Australia too.
More and more adults are picking up eczema in their fifties.
So,
we have this U-shaped pattern in the incidence rates.
It looks something like this.
Figure 9 Pattern of incidence rates of Eczema in the USA After doing an intense amount of research,
umm,
for about 30 minutes,
the other thing I discovered is that there’s a very well documented list of trigger foods for this condition.
They’re not cited as being the root cause of the condition.
They are just foods that make it worse or that can cause you to go into “flare-up”.
Flare-ups are periods of intense inflammation,
and the skin breaking into lovely little lesions.
The various lists of trigger foods mostly include milk,
dairy,
eggs,
tomatoes,
bell peppers,
citrus fruits,
fish,
and peanut butter.
21 Eczema cases rise dramatically http://news.
bbc.
co.
uk/2/hi/health/7955312.
stm The Real Experiment Chapter 5 53 Well,
that’s an interesting list.
I’m a bit shocked to see my old friend milk listed.
I have been drinking milk all my life—and lots of it,
and maybe an unreasonable amount of it too.
I’ve never had a problem with milk.
Yet,
here it is on a list of foods that can make my condition worse.
How strange.
Has my old friend turned on me? Has my overconsumption of it caused me to have some intolerance to it? What the heck is in milk these days? I go to the fridge,
pull out the milk jug and read the label.
It proudly states vitamin D and vitamin A added.
Okay,
those are vitamins; those are good for us,
right? Could I be getting too much of one of these? I do some intensive research about vitamin D,
umm,
for like 15 minutes.
Oh,
isn’t this surprising? Vitamin D is actually used as a rat poison.
I used to shoot rats on the farm when I was a kid.
I did not like these animals one bit,
but I did have a ton of respect for how tough they were.
If you don’t know it,
these are incredibly tough and resilient animals.
Yet,
we are able to kill them with vitamin D overnight? Why is this substance in our milk? Are we really,
really sure it’s safe? More importantly,
are we really,
really,
and absolutely sure that it’s safe over a long period of time? How about for 100 years of consecutive daily consumption? Well,
we had better be! Coincidentally,
there has recently been a quite a bit of news about everybody being low on vitamin D,
and it has apparently somehow happened all of a sudden too.
This is all strange,
new information for me; and I am not sure what to make of it.
Okay,
the next question I had was: what other foods in that list of trigger foods contain vitamin D? Almost none do; just the fortified dairy.
So now,
after another 30 minutes of my intense research,
I cross vitamin D off the suspect list.
Next,
I move on to vitamin A.
The first question I have is how many of the foods on the trigger list contain vitamin A? Isn’t that interesting? It’s almost all of them with the exception of peanut butter.
The other The Real Experiment Chapter 5 54 interesting observation is that all of these trigger foods actually have quite high levels of vitamin A too.
Doing 40 more minutes of intensive research,
surely there have been studies ruling out vitamin A as a factor in eczema? But no,
I can find no research whatsoever linking these two things.
At the least,
I expected to find some research that has considered this and has ruled it out.
But,
I can find nothing.
Okay,
there’s tons of research about vitamin A itself.
I have no knowledge about the function of this vitamin whatsoever.
I quickly find myself on the NIH (National Institutes of Health in the USA) site,
reading about vitamin A toxicity.
Isn’t this strange? There is something like 20 documented symptoms of vitamin A toxicity,
and I personally had about 19 of them! Wow,
that is surprising.
The one symptom I don’t quite yet have is death.
Reading a bit more about vitamin A toxicity,
it is documented that you need to consume what appears to be massive doses of it before you get into a toxic state with it.
The cited classic case is of someone eating polar bear liver.
Well,
I sure have not been eating polar bear liver.
Okay,
maybe there’s no connection here.
Doing a bit more reading,
though,
I discovered that the body stores the vitamin A you consume.
That’s an interesting little detail,
and that little detail changes everything.
I’m an engineer; back in the day,
I loved integrals.
As a geologist,
a human lifetime is a mere micro-blip of time.
Time,
integrals,
and stored consumption leading to a toxic state,
hmm; it’s at the least a possibility.
Could it be that a lifetime of consumption has actually turned into a condition of vitamin A toxicity? Yet,
there is no research I can find linking this potential condition with eczema or any other autoimmune disease.
Most importantly,
there is no research ruling it out.
That’s so odd to me.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 55 We have tens of millions of people with autoimmune diseases,
and the symptoms of the autoimmune diseases are a perfect match for vitamin A toxicity.
Okay,
the next question I have is how many foods have vitamin A.
I do an inverse search: How many foods have zero vitamin A? Just to be clear,
this is not foods that are just labeled as having 0% RDA,
it is foods with zero molecules of vitamin A.
I expect to find hundreds,
if not thousands,
of foods.
I have no idea how many foods don’t have any vitamin A since I had no prior knowledge whatsoever about it.
If I had to make a guess,
I would have guessed that only about 5 or 10 percent of our foods contain some vitamin A.
My reasoning is that it must be a small number of foods because we are supplementing our milk and dairy with what is documented to be a micronutrient.
Surely,
we are doing this for a very good reason,
right? There must be a substantial risk of not getting enough of it,
right? Well,
it turns out,
there are about five foods of any substance that have zero amounts vitamin A.
So,
the inverse of this is that nearly all foods we consume can have at least some vitamin A content.
Amazingly,
that is like 99.
9% of all foods have some vitamin A,
or what is called a vitamin A precursor.
Okay,
almost all foods contain some vitamin A.
The more popular foods such as eggs,
milk and low-fat dairy products,
many fruits,
tomatoes,
tomato based sauces,
bell peppers,
fish,
cheese,
pizza,
yams,
sweet potatoes,
many spices,
carrots,
etc.
are very high in vitamin A.
Now add to that just the abundant volume of food consumed per person in North America.
If vitamin A is considered to be a micronutrient,
how the hell could anyone in North America be deficient in it? It’s well known that the body stores and accumulates it.
If you accumulate too much of it,
you will get extraordinarily and painfully sick.
So,
in the face of all that,
we are supplementing the national milk supply with it.
It’s not voluntary on the The Real Experiment Chapter 5 56 part of the milk producers either; it’s mandatory by legislation.
We have legislated a potential toxin into the national milk supply.
Why? Why the hell would we do that? Could it be that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions? Moreover,
in the United States,
many wheat flours and breakfast cereals are supplemented with it too.
I just have to be missing something here.
Surely,
the experts know what they are doing; right? I just have to be missing the obvious because this just does not add up at all.
Legislation mandating this substance into the North American food supply since the early 1970s? Once again,
why? Okay,
this is just vitamin A,
let’s not get too alarmed about it.
But,
the vitamin A added to our low-fat dairy is actually no ordinary vitamin A.
It is called vitamin A palmitate.
This is the retinol (the regular alcohol form of the vitamin A molecule) combined with palmitic acid.
Palmitic acid is a fatty acid and a major component of palm oil.
The vitamin A palmitate added to our milk synthetic manmade molecule.
Of course,
this combination is used to keep the retinol stable in milk,
and also greatly facilitates the uptake of it by the body.
Now,
isn’t this a dirty,
sneaky little trick to play on the body’s cells.
Cells will be taking on what appears to be a lipid,
but this lipid now has a tag-along toxic molecule.
Brilliant! How,
and why was this fateful decision made? Did they have any long-term history of using this combined molecule in the human body? No,
of course not,
because it is a synthetically made molecule.
Yet,
someone made the colossal assumption that this was going to be safe for everyone.
After all,
what could possibly go wrong with unnaturally combining one of the most fundamental hormones in biology with a fatty acid and putting it into the nation's milk supply? I needed to delve into this subject just a little bit more.
Was there some great outbreak of vitamin A deficiency that happened in the late 1960s in the USA? I was not able to find any history of that having happened.
So why not provide just an optional milk choice with the supplements for The Real Experiment Chapter 5 57 consumers that had an explicit need for the extra A & D? After all,
vitamin A and D are powerful hormones.
How could anyone assume we should all start adding this to our everyday diet? To use an analogy,
imagine that you’ve inherited a beautiful,
and extremely expensive gold watch.
The watch has a fantastically intricate and complicated set of gears and related mechanisms.
The watch is working absolutely flawlessly.
The watch is the epitome of the perfect blend of mathematical science,
art,
craftsmanship and style.
Then,
just on a hunch that you can make it better,
every day you crack open the back case and drop in one grain of sand.
One grain of sand might not harm it,
but adding more over time will absolutely destroy it.
Now,
why on earth would anybody do this? The answer is that they wouldn’t! When something is working perfectly,
the golden rule is DON’T mess with it.
Yet,
I believe that this legislation has done precisely that with the supplementation of the nation's milk and dairy products.
Once we reach the tipping point,
everyone's beautifully functioning bodies will be slowly destroyed,
and with one molecule at a time.
Clearly then,
our elevated levels of vitamin A consumption should be a prime suspect in the epidemics of the autoimmune diseases.
I think that there is no way in hell that this has not been extensively researched.
Yet,
I can find nothing linking vitamin A toxicity with autoimmune disease.
Moreover,
it’s very high in this list of trigger foods too.
I did find some websites recommending vitamin A to combat,
or treat,
an autoimmune disease.
However,
there is very little research supporting these recommendations.
What research there is,
it looks to be very new.
What are the chances that this potential connection has been overlooked? The obvious scientific question here should be: in these lists of cited autoimmune disease flare-up trigger foods that universally include milk,
dairy,
eggs,
tomatoes,
bell peppers,
citrus fruits,
fish,
(peanut butter being excluded because it’s a well-known allergen),
what are the The Real Experiment Chapter 5 58 common chemical compounds they all share,
other than H 2 O? After all,
the chemical culprits we are looking for is very likely shared by all of these foods.
For example,
what chemical compounds are common to both orange juice and fish? I’m guessing there are only a few compounds,
and that one of them is vitamin A or one of its precursors.
Of course,
we should not guess,
so we will go through this analysis in a later chapter.
Okay,
the total amount of time of my intense research has been about four hours.
I asked myself the simple question: what if I eliminate vitamin A from my diet for a while? From what I’ve read,
I have at least a year’s worth of storage built up.
It can’t do any harm,
and I have nothing to lose by doing it.
However,
I’m realistic,
so the chances of anything coming of this are about one in 6 billion.
Once again,
I trust the experts,
and therefore,
I just have to be missing something.
It’s totally crazy,
but I decided to conduct that exact experiment.
First,
I reduced my consumption to low and then near zero vitamin A.
My diet was now almost exclusively rice and beef.
That’s three meals a day,
seven days a week.
The same two-course meal three times a day is rather monotonous.
So,
some days I spice it up to a four-course meal by adding salt and pepper.
I started this experiment August 9th.
I went cold turkey off the steroid cream treatments for my eczema-affected skin.
And,
no,
I’m not recommending that you do this 22 .
Within three days,
I notice a significant drop in my overall body-wide inflammation.
It is a remarkably quick change and very noticeable.
22 http://www.
huffingtonpost.
ca/2015/05/15/steroid-cream-addiction_n_7236986.
html The Real Experiment Chapter 5 59 For the next three weeks,
there is a little bit more progress,
but very subtle,
and I could be easily judging it wrong.
There is very little,
if any,
improvement in my fatigue condition.
Around day 18 of this experiment,
I’m thinking this is probably not working and is just foolish.
Most of the progress was in the first three days,
and I’ve seen very little since.
That early improvement was probably just a natural cycle.
I’m about to give up.
However,
I decide to give it three more days.
Remember that I’m now going to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
and usually waking up at 8:30 a.
m.
and waking up still totally fatigued.
? Day 20: still go to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
I wake up at 5:30 a.
m.
and strangely it actually feels as if I slept okay.
? Day 21: I wake up at 3:30 a.
m.
I feel pretty good,
and I actually feel refreshed.
I think to myself,
how strange is that? ? Day 22: I wake up at 1:30 a.
m.
and I’m feeling really good.
I’m feeling totally refreshed.
I stretch out my arms,
weird,
no joint pain! No stiffness.
I wiggle my legs,
weird,
no joint pain,
and no stiffness.
Wow,
I think I’m feeling really,
really good.
The other thing that is super-noticeable is my thinking clarity.
It’s crystal clear compared to what it was just a week ago.
Fatigue,
totally gone.
Joint pain,
totally gone.
I ask myself: “what the hell was that?” Very surprisingly,
one word instantly snapped into my head.
It happened in less than a millisecond.
It was a German name.
It wasn’t a name common to my daily vocabulary either.
For the next several weeks,
more out of habit than anything else I was still going to bed around 8:30ish.
I was routinely waking up at 1:30 or 2:30 in the morning and being totally refreshed.
This was not insomnia; it was that I just did not need the extra sleep.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 60 Sometimes,
I’d force myself to get more sleep.
Others,
I just waited awake until 6:00 a.
m.
to get ready for work.
I went to work and worked all day with no fatigue whatsoever.
Not even a mid-afternoon lull.
I started to shift my sleep cycle back to going to bed at 10:30 or 11:00 p.
m.
Now,
after six or seven hours of sleep,
I was totally refreshed.
My thinking clarity was still completely clear.
In the mornings,
I was hopping out of bed with absolutely no joint pain or body stiffness whatsoever.
Okay,
this is really interesting.
What just happened? Had my bad luck just changed? Overall,
my health was starting to make a big,
but slow,
180-degree U-turn back to normal.
At this point,
I could have just decided that this whole bad experience was nearly over and that I should move on with my life.
However,
two really important things were troubling me.
The biggest one I needed to understand is what happened with my thinking clarity.
It was not just a stunning turnaround,
but quite scary.
Had I just dodged a bullet? I could not just gloss over this possibility that that strange German name had a big meaning to it.
Did I just stumble upon something really important? Has there ever been anyone else with an autoimmune disease that has gone to a zero vitamin A diet like this? It’s pretty unlikely actually.
I still had the eczema skin condition; so I wasn’t out of the woods just quite yet.
No,
more like not at all.
Still riding my bike to work,
I decided I should extend my experiment a bit.
There is a very big staircase down an escarpment in the park on my way into the downtown.
It has about 160 steps on it.
Rather than taking the bike path down the hill,
I decided to ride my bike (no suspension) down those stairs.
That’s 160 drops of about seven inches each.
What happened? No brain pain! The inflammation on my brain was now magically gone! The Real Experiment Chapter 5 61 Okay,
I needed to dig into this some more.
My personal experiment was maybe an interesting little case study.
However,
what we really need is a big clinical trial.
How about we do a 5 million-person study and conduct it over the next 20 years.
We’ll reduce the vitamin A consumption in this 5 million-person group and see if it results in a reduction in autoimmune diseases.
Then we’ll form a committee of experts to study the results for another 10 years.
How does that sound? It should sound completely ridiculous coming from the guy who was earlier proclaiming we need to move fast and furious on this.
Fortunately,
effectively and quite inadvertently,
that exact study has already been conducted for us.
It also shows a dramatic result that needs no committee of experts to interpret.
Next,
let’s look a bit back into history,
and see if we can learn a new lesson from Charles Darwin.
He left us some more important clues.
hapter 6
A New Lesson from Charles Darwin
After dealing with my own eczema
for a few months, I wondered whether
any noteworthy names in history had
this disease. My curiosity was really
twofold. First, I just wanted to get a
feel for how long this condition has
plagued humans. Is this a recent
“modern” disease, or has it been
around for a longer time?
Second, maybe some historical figure
kept a food diary that would provide
some clues as to what’s causing it.
Maybe there is something we can spot.
Well, I quickly discovered that Charles Darwin had this disease, and
more, actually much more. He had chronic eczema from before 1836 and
suffered from it for the remainder of his life—for over 40 years.
But, eczema was only one of his conditions. It would appear that he
suffered from multiple diseases actually. It looks as if there’s been some
interest from the present day scientific community in correctly
diagnosing Darwin’s disease(s). Here’s a link to a 2005 paper from two
researchers, Anthony K. Campbell and Stephanie B. Matthews at the
Wales College of Medicine entitled Darwin’s illness revealed 23 .
23 http://pmj.bmj.com/content/81/954/248.full
A New Lesson from Charles Darwin
Chapter 6
63
Their conclusion is that Darwin had suffered for these 40 years from
Lactose Intolerance. They state: “Darwin’s symptoms match exactly
those we have described for systemic lactose intolerance.” Bingo! There
you have it; puzzled solved.
Well, I am not a doctor, and I have absolutely no medical experience
whatsoever; and I have never had any Lactose Intolerance. But, I think
these folks are completely wrong in their diagnosis. They (and we) have
missed some bigger clues that Darwin left us.
Here’s a list of Darwin’s symptoms from their paper.
Chronic fatigue and exhaustion
Severe gastrointestinal problems, including pain
Nausea
Frequent vomiting
A swimming head
Severe headaches
Trembling
Insomnia
Joint pain
Rashes and eczema
Mouth ulcers
Boils
Tooth and gum problems
Heart palpitations
Poor resistance to infections
Depression
The authors claim this is a perfect match for lactose intolerance. Wow!
That’s a pretty horrible sounding condition. All of that from drinking
milk? How could that be? The actual documented symptoms I found for
A New Lesson from Charles Darwin
Chapter 6 64
lactose intolerance are more like abdominal cramps, bloating, gas,
diarrhea, and nausea 24 .
The reason lactose intolerance is the wrong diagnosis is obvious. First,
and fore-mostly, this is the Charles Darwin we’re talking about. Let’s
give this man a wee little bit of credit. This guy was an amazingly
observant and intelligent biologist and geologist. Of course, that does not
make him immune to lactose intolerance, but it does tell us he wasn’t
completely daft, either. What about the diarrhea symptom? It isn’t on
Darwin’s list of symptoms. Isn’t that like the key symptom of lactose
intolerance?
A few years ago, I had a guy putting a new roof on our house, and he
told me one day about being lactose intolerant. He was about 40 years
old, and he said that this condition developed in his 20s. I asked him how
he knew he was lactose intolerant. He explained to me that it becomes
abundantly clear that there’s a big problem, and that most people will
make the cause and effect connection. He stated that if he drank a glass
of milk, he’d be heading to the toilet in about two hours to deal with it. I
don’t think he had a medical diagnosis for this condition. It sounded as if
he just figured it out on his own, as most people probably do. This guy
was in great health and worked all day long, up and down ladders, etc.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He just couldn’t drink
milk or eat dairy products. No problem at all, life was just fine, as it is
for most people with lactose intolerance, once they know what it is.
So, if this man and thousands of others, can fairly quickly make this
connection between drinking milk and soon thereafter needing the toilet,
then there’s no way in hell Charles Darwin would not have figured this
out in more than 40 years.
24 http://www.healthline.com/symptom/lactose-intolerance
A New Lesson from Charles Darwin
Chapter 6
65
The second and equally obvious clue is that Darwin was suffering from
very bad health while on his famous Beagle voyage. This was a voyage
in the hot tropical sun, and much of the time he spent aboard ship. Of
course, there was no refrigeration in 1830, and there would have been no
way to preserve milk or dairy products aboard a ship. Therefore, these
symptoms were simply not from lactose. No way, nearly impossible.
But Darwin did leave us some very big clues indeed. First, specifically
regarding eczema. It’s interesting to know that eczema was somewhat
common in the 1830s, especially among the upper classes of English
society. This means that today eczema is probably not being caused by
modern day toxins, such as herbicides, pesticides etc. However, these
modern-day toxins may still play a bit of a role.
Darwin sought out some of the very same therapies used today to relieve
his eczema symptoms such as hydrotherapy. He also had chronic
inflammation on the face and grew his beard to hide this. Even more
important than that, he had eczema as a teenager and suffered outbreaks
of eczema on his face and lips 25 . The only time he was really able to put
it into remission is when he went on trips to Russia.
Darwin also made the connection between eating foods and worsening
conditions, but he couldn’t pin down an exact cause. Of course, Darwin
was limited in his resources and didn’t have modern science or Google to
help him. He also suffered from significant periods of psychosis and
severe social anxiety. In addition to the above-documented symptoms,
Darwin also determined that he was quite sensitive to sunlight and
avoided the sun.
He did make an amazing, and I’d like to say a brilliantly amazing
observation. He determined that his only really safe food was raisins. At
25 http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/darwins-enigmatic-health
A New Lesson from Charles Darwin
Chapter 6 66
one point, he lived on nothing but raisins for something like five weeks
straight! How the heck did he figure this out? Of all the real foods on the
planet, there are about five of any substance that has zero vitamin A, and
one of them is raisins.
However, once again, this raisin-only diet was aboard ship. I don’t know
if he repeated it once back in England. So, maybe the raisin-only diet
was not a brilliant feat of elimination but made much simpler because he
had a very limited selection of foods available. A much bigger question
is if he ate the liver of fish while aboard the Beagle. Did he eat the organ
meat (liver) of other animals such as the turtles? What we do know is
that he ate Atlantic saltwater fish, which is generally high in vitamin A
by itself.
So, what were Darwin’s symptoms really of? I think it was chronic
subclinical vitamin A toxicity. If you really must give it a named modern
disease, then Celiac or Crohn’s diseases are good possibilities.
Source 1: http://www.healthline.com/health/hypervitaminosis-a#Symptoms3
Symptoms of acute vitamin A toxicity include:
drowsiness
irritability
abdominal pain
nausea
vomiting
increased pressure on the brain
Symptoms of chronic vitamin A toxicity include:
blurry vision or other visual changes
swelling of the bones
bone pain
poor appetite
dizziness
nausea and vomiting
sensitivity to sunlight
oily skin and hair
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itchy or peeling skin
cracked fingernails
skin cracks at the corners of your mouth
mouth ulcers
hair loss
respiratory infection
confusion
Source 1: http://livertox.nih.gov/VitaminARetinoids.htm (NIH)
severe headache
nausea
vertigo
blurred vision
muscle aches and lack of coordination
followed by skin desquamation and alopecia (hair loss)
dry skin
cheilosis (fissures in the corners of the mouth)
gingivitis
muscle and joint pains
fatigue, mental dullness
depression
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Let’s match these symptoms with Darwin’s.
Table 2 Darwin's Symptoms and Vitamin A toxicity
Vitamin A Toxicity Symptoms Darwin’s Symptoms
Skin desquamation Eczema
Fatigue, mental dullness Chronic fatigue and exhaustion
Abdominal pain Severe gastrointestinal problems/pain
Nausea Nausea
Vomiting Frequent vomiting
Vertigo, mental dullness A swimming head
Severe headache Severe headaches
Trembling
Commonly documented with
eczema
Insomnia
Bone pain Joint pain
Skin desquamation &
alopecia
Rashes and eczema
Mouth ulcers Mouth ulcers
Gingivitis Tooth and gum problems
Heart palpitations
Respiratory infection Poor resistance to infections
Confusion, vertigo Social anxiety
Sensitivity to sunlight Sensitivity to sunlight
Depression Depression
Now we have a near perfect (and realistic) match on these symptoms.
Maybe if I looked a little more, I’d find trembling and heart palpitations
on the match list. Actually, vitamin A toxicity is still a bit of a superset
of Darwin’s symptoms. The mouth ulcers were a very big, and early,
warning sign of this toxicity (firsthand experience).
Let me tell you without any doubt whatsoever, and also from direct
firsthand experience, and as documented above, eczema on the lips is
none other than vitamin A poisoning!
In my personal experience, I slowly built up to this subclinical toxicity
level of vitamin A over a period of five to 10 years. I did it on a perfectly
normal diet, too. I know about most of these symptoms firsthand, but
they built up very slowly over time, so slowly I really didn’t think about
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it too much. However, there’s no question about it. When I adopted my
vitamin A elimination diet, almost all of the symptoms receded very
quickly. It was then hugely more obvious that I was suffering from most
of the above-documented symptoms.
I also noticed a bit of hand trembling while being in this toxic state.
However, I don’t think I experienced heart palpitations. But I could
easily see heart palpitations happening as part of an anxiety attack.
How did Darwin get into this condition? The same way I did. And the
same way the 30+ million people with eczema, and the 700,000 people
with Crohn’s, and 5+ million people with Alzheimer’s have today.
Diet! Mostly, ordinary diets, too. It just takes lots of cold saltwater fish,
or milk, and brightly colored fruits and vegetables, etc. That’s all you
need.
Since Darwin had such severe eczema at an early age, he had to have
done something really wrong. I believe it was probably due to regular
liver consumption. Organ meat was popular with the well to do in
England at the time. Darwin was a self-proclaimed glutton, who prided
himself on eating the entire animal. There was an interesting newspaper
article from this era with a bit of a prophetic warning. A doctor who had
treated the king of England for his eczema wrote it. He described the
king being bedridden, with his hands constantly wrapped in bandages
and sometimes even bound to prevent scratching. The doctor’s basic
message was: don’t be too envious of living like the king, and his diet
rich in soft organ meats. If you live like the king you may die like the
king too, and it isn’t a pretty way to go.
What I personally now know, and what Darwin documented; is that once
you saturate your body’s store of vitamin A, it’s extremely unlikely
you’re going to randomly get out from under it. He now had chronic
diseases that plagued him through to the end of his life.
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Modern medicine labels eczema, Crohn’s, lupus, arthritis, etc. as
autoimmune diseases. I don’t think that makes any sense whatsoever, for
all kinds of reasons. These are really auto-poisoning via chronic and
subclinical toxicity to vitamin A. Oddly or not, I have little doubt that
Alzheimer’s is a member of this illustrious autoimmune disease club too.
The myth in the medical literature is that you need massive doses of
vitamin A to get into this state. The bigger myth is that you’ll quickly
recover after you stop overdosing.
Well, no you don’t, and it depends. It’s mathematical. That vitamin A
you’ve accumulated is not going away. Once you’ve accumulated too
much, you reach a tipping point or a threshold. And then you more or
less fall over a cliff into serious disease from this deadly toxin. A better
metaphor might be to call it a trapdoor.
You’ve saturated your body’s storage capacity. Once you’ve fallen
through that trapdoor, there’s almost no getting out. Even a few
micrograms of vitamin A consumption are enough to keep you in a toxic,
or near toxic, state. You’ll continue to be in this toxic state for the rest of
your life if you don’t take evasive action. You need to go to zero, or near
zero, consumption. But, instinctively, and based upon current nutritional
advice, you’re probably going to do just the opposite. You’re now sick,
so you’re probably going to eat even more healthy foods. Please pass the
raisins Mr. Darwin, thanks very much.
Naturally, I have a ton of respect and admiration for what Darwin
accomplished. I have little doubt that if he were alive today, he would
have been able to determine the true root cause of this scourge quite
quickly. Sadly, it has been almost 200 years since Darwin documented
his symptoms and his struggle with eczema. Modern medicine has not
even begun to solve this disease. It has only just become far more
prevalent in our society. Something is indeed hugely wrong.
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The lessons I think we can learn today from Darwin are:
1. He was really suffering from subclinical vitamin A toxicity
for most of his life.
2. He stayed in this state for 40 years and without modern-day
supplements, it was just diet.
3. He had resulting eczema as a symptom of this for most of his
life too.
4. Eczema is not a specific autoimmune disease at all; it’s most
likely just another symptom of subclinical vitamin A toxicity.
5. Eczema is not caused by a modern day toxin; or pollutant.
I don’t want to call this Hypervitaminosis A. That isn’t the case at all.
Hyper implies very high doses of vitamin A being consumed. This
situation is much different. It’s really getting into the state of vitamin A
saturation and then remaining slightly or moderately above that level.
Therefore, the term Insidious-vitaminosis A seems more appropriate.
Why do so many young people experience Crohn’s and other
autoimmune diseases at around 20 years of age? There’s something
special about this number. It is not a coincidence. It’s obvious once you
understand what’s really going on here. Yet, it’s also somewhat
complicated, too.
Aside: Ironically, I think there is something absolutely stunning about
Crohn's disease that it would have startled Darwin. So much so, that it
may have altered his view of evolution too.