00:00
This is Elwin Robinson, creator of Genetic Insights, author of The Rejuvenate Blueprint. And in today's episode, we see the return of Grant Gennarou. Grant Gennarou is the author of various books, including Poisons for Profits and
00:18
Grant generally is someone I'm a big fan of. He's someone who is an original thinker, who kind of questioned orthodoxy, someone who's healed himself of a very serious health problem and a lot of others. And he's someone who works really tirelessly to spread his message with zero compensation for himself. So I judge him to be a man of integrity and a very great person.
00:44
And so this is part two. We already did an episode of him before. And if you haven't watched that, I recommend that you do. We'll put the link in the show notes. But spoiler alert, if you haven't seen it, in that episode, Grant talks about his theory
00:59
which is that vitamin or vitamin A is not really a vitamin. It is actually a poison. It's not necessarily going to hurt you if you have it once, but it's something that is a cumulative poison, which most poisons are in that they build up in the body. And in fact, because it is fat soluble, it is something that does build up in the body. And the more that there is of it, the more toxic it becomes and the more toxic the effects on the body can become.
01:27
And so that was a very popular episode. We had a lot of people watch it. But out of all the episodes I've done, it's probably had the most people underneath saying that they would really love a debate with Grant and someone else. And I said kind of repeatedly in the comments and my general policy was, uh,
01:48
I'm totally up for that, facilitating that. It's never easy to coordinate people and to get them to agree to a debate because I guess innately it's a kind of hostile thing or that's how people perceive it. If and when I do debates on this show, which I would really love to, I will not make it hostile. I'll make it very congenial. And in fact, maybe this episode is a bit of a pan for that, so I'll talk about that. So I said that anyone who,
02:13
who I ever invited on to debate Grant, if he was even open to that, had to have been someone who had A, read his books, ideally especially Poisoned for Profits, I would say that's his main one, and second of all, had read them with an open mind. And if they had read Grant's book with an open mind and still were sure that he was wrong or there was some aspects of it that he was wrong about,
02:37
then I would be happy to have them on either just as a guest of mine or, you know, maybe even to debate him. And honestly, this point now, I don't know how long it's been, nine months, something like that, since he was last on the show. I haven't come across anyone who's met that criteria. I came across a couple of people who were kind of like trying to debunk him, but it was very obvious from their perspective, like they didn't go into it with an open mind. They came into it like already wanting to disprove him. And so I wouldn't,
03:06
subject grants for that so i was like you know what i do understand everyone's kind of uh desire though to see that conversation that back and forth between someone who really believes in this position the vitamin A is a poison and someone who doesn't so i was like why don't i steel man that argument steel man being a i believe a debating term meaning where you
03:28
you see the strongest version of the opposite perspective than what you had. So I thought, okay, let me listen. Let me gather what I think are the best arguments against Grant's theory and then maybe present them to him in obviously a non-confrontational way and just, you know,
03:49
hear what he has to say. So you get a bit of that back and forth. So that was my goal with this episode. We didn't only talk about that. The original reason I invited him on is because it's actually been 10 years that he's been doing this 100% extremely low
04:04
vitamin A diet so we talked about that initially as well but that's probably the most the bulk of the episode it's not a pure interview even though I might refer to that as the actual recording if I look back at it it's probably more of a conversation I think because I got into that mode of debate-ish-ing I give my you know opinion a few times more than if this were probably an actual interview so forgive me if you don't like that that's just what ended up happening but
04:31
I think despite that, I hope I have addressed and fulfilled your desire to hear that kind of back and forth, to hear some good counterpoints to the theory of vitamin A is a poison and for you to have that debate back and forth. So I hope you enjoy it.
04:52
Make sure you watch all the way through to the end. Hey, so I'm thrilled today to be joined again by Grant Gineroux. Thank you so much for coming back, Grant. My pleasure. Thank you. So the first episode with you, which I definitely recommend people watch, was very popular, stirred up a lot of conversation, and I think it
05:12
opened a lot of people to this theory, which you have dedicated a large portion of the last 10 years to. And in fact, it is just…
05:24
It's been a 10-year anniversary of following through on the… Some people question that it's impossible to have no vitamin A, but as low as possible vitamin A diet, right? Yeah, that's right. So I started August 11th, 2014. So I've passed the 10-year threshold. And yeah, virtually…
05:43
you know no vitamin a in my diet you know yes there is like no four i use per day maybe um but i also do the plasma donations on pretty frequent basis so that offsets any of that you know uptake uh i believe i could actually do the math on it prove that out but um
06:00
Yeah, 10 years. So here we are. That's very interesting. Well, let's get straight into it. So I think the purpose of today's interview is, first of all, to talk a bit about your experience over the last 10 years. And then, you know, as this theory has become more and more popular, and it really has, there are some people, you know, looking to argue with it or debunk it or whatever we might call. So what I want to do is maybe bring up, you know, not the…
06:27
not the most crazy elements of that. And I'm kind of bored of people just sharing the mainstream perspective as if it's a debunking. It's like…
06:37
But I want to share maybe a few questions that have come up for me, a few questions that clients have asked, like honest questions or challenges to the theory, and then get your take on it, if that's okay. Sure. Yeah, you bet. Fantastic. All right. So first of all, 10 years of vitamin A, of course, the fact that you have done that is to some degree a –
07:01
what's the word, a debunking or discrediting of the mainstream theory in and of itself, right? Because it shouldn't be possible for you to be as healthy as you are. So in fact, let's talk about that. Would you mind just for, you know, and I do recommend everyone watches the first interview before watching this, but just for those who maybe to refresh their memory, what was your experience? What was your state of your health before you stopped
07:27
pretty much all of vitamin a and what is the state of your health now yeah well you know way back then it's kind of 10 years ago um a little bit before that actually um i was in a in a state of uh extremely poor health uh
07:42
And actually, in my nine-year update, I put a chart of kind of, you know, kind of a sketch, really, of kind of my health progress and where I started from. And in that nine-year update, I actually showed that the state of health goes from, I think, negative 25 to 100%, you know, good health. And…
08:02
probably in January of 2014, I actually showed the line dipping below the zero axis on the state of health. And I did that for a specific reason. I was curious if anyone would kind of catch that or notice that, but nobody has. But in my worst state of health, I was so near death, a little bit beyond that. I don't want to talk about that. I'll get emotional. So I was in extremely poor health, very much near death.
08:31
Some of the things, of course, I had failing kidneys. I was peeing blood routinely in the mornings. My skin was disintegrating. I was incredibly weak. I could barely make it up a flight of stairs when it's all weak. Lots of cognitive issues. I was really near death. And so for me to make the recovery that I've made is, I think, pretty dramatic.
09:00
and completely unexpected. I did not at all expect this to happen. I thought it was even myself when I first started that, this is just crazy. This is, you know, there's no way, but it actually turned out to be, be accurate. And so just to clarify, so did you have chronic kidney disease where you were at the point of kidney failure, uh,
09:16
Yeah, in 2006, I had been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. And the prognosis was I had about four or five years, let's say five years remaining was the prediction. It was, you know, the guy wasn't wrong. He was incredibly, you know, accurate by, you know, 2014 or 2013. You know, I was in serious, serious bad shape from the kidney disease diagnosis.
09:39
But just by pure coincidence, you know, my one of my first interviews with the nephrologist, he revealed some information to me that just shocked me. And I decided I'm never going back. And I never did. You know, my wife, you know, was kind of begging me, oh, go back, go back, you know, and I just said, no, I'm not going back there.
09:55
So I was kind of letting nature take its course with the chronic kidney disease. And then kind of, you know, 2013, I had developed this body-wide, you know, adult eczema. So, you know, clinically, you know, doctor diagnosis to, you know, incurable, irreversible chronic conditions, which I have reversed.
10:15
And I have, you know, I jinx myself when I'm saying for sure, you know, cured myself from the eczema, the kidney disease. Yes, all indications are that I've fully recovered from that. But overall, my overall health is improved dramatically, I guess. My joint health was incredibly bad back then. I was, you know, every morning it was just severe joint pain, pain.
10:39
And crazy things were happening. Like my fingers were actually curling up at the ends of my fingers. And it's like, uh, I guess arthritis, right. It would be arthritis and in the joints in my, um, in my wrists were swollen. And so, you know, clearly early signs of, you know, pretty serious arthritis and that's reversed. Um,
10:58
Also, way, way back now, I don't know, probably over 20 years ago, I had been diagnosed with scoliosis of the spine, you know, a curve in my spine and a bulging vertebrae in my spine, which I could easily see. You know, take my shirt off and look in the mirror. I could see this bulging vertebrae in my spine. That's reversed.
11:18
So a lot of health conditions have reversed. Now, I'm still chronologically, you know, I'm 10 years older, but, you know, I'm in much, much better shape. And my strength and my endurance is pretty much, I'd say, the best it's been in my adult life.
11:35
yeah for sure you know i'm you know stronger today than i was in my 20s now and my endurance is is really good like for cycling and stuff like that i can you know i'm like a never ready battery kind of thing that's um so overall really big improvement in my health my vision you know so one of the one of the key claims of vitamin a is um
11:57
Well, you know, there's kind of multiple claims for vitamin A, but one of the key claims is it's essential and necessary for vision, not only for the vision cycle, but for, you know, the health of the eyes. And if you don't have vitamin A, you will develop what's called synerectomia, the drying of the eyes, and eventually a disintegration of
12:16
of the lens of the eye and the cornea and you know you'll go blind without vitamin a you know then the prediction in the medical literature is you know relatively quickly um no it hasn't happened my vision is is excellent my eye health is excellent um
12:30
So, yeah, I think I've completely debunked the theory that vitamin A is essential for human health. Very interesting. I know just one of the things you, I think I read one of your updates, and one of the benefits you talked about was interesting. It's not something that people normally talk about, but you said that, like, you very rarely got too cold or overheated anymore. Yeah, it's quite amazing. Yeah.
12:53
So, you know, 10 years ago, like here in Canada, we go skiing in the winter. And, you know, one of my, you know, curses, I suppose, I was always sweating a little bit of this kind of background sweat, you know, all over my body kind of thing. Nothing crazy, but just a little bit, you know. But if you get sweat in your boots, in your winter ski boots, that sweat just, you know, that moisture just sucks in the cold or, you know, so…
13:19
By noon on a day of skiing, I was done. Not because I was totally fatigued, but it's like my feet are just getting freezing cold. And now, no problem at all. And if I go out in the winter, I just, I don't know how to explain it, but I'm, you know, of course I dress properly in the winter, but, you know, kind of wearing the same kind of
13:39
clothing that I would have worn, you know, a decade or two ago to go out into the winter weather, I would still be cold. Now today, if I dress properly, I'm not cold at all. And same with the summers. I just don't, you know, I don't mind the heat at all. I don't mind the direct sunlight at all. If I go, you know, I typically try to do about 20K when I cycle. And, you know, of course, there's the wind and stuff, so you're not sweating too much.
14:00
too much the wind is actually taking a lot of the moisture away but uh compared to other people i'm i'm bone dry after after 20 kilometers on my bike in in the summer right it's like um so yeah that's that's a big difference um you know back in my 30s you know i was wearing this kind of standard you know my standard uniform is a white t-shirt underneath the shirt and um
14:23
20 years ago, after about six months of wearing one of these, of course, changing it every day, but within about six months, the shirt was done because the underarms would be yellowed. You cannot wash it out of the cotton shirt, so you throw out the shirt. Now, today, there's no yellow steam. So, yeah, that's a whole bunch of surprises. Yeah.
14:46
no but yeah that's that surprised me of course i had no expectation that anything like that would happen yeah very interesting um yeah the way i would explain it would be that you know there's an excellent um balance and regulation of your thyroid and your adrenal glands because they're really the things that are you know regulating your temperature and that is quite fine tuning of health you know so to me that shows a relatively high level of health if someone's
15:12
adrenal glands and thyroid are optimized that they can really adapt to very easily any environment so yeah it's definitely a good sign that's kind of why i picked up on it okay interesting this is fantastic oh let's just talk about the lab test results um as well so so did when was the first time you actually tested i guess serum retinol is the only type of vitamin a that's you know easy to test right yeah so i got that test i think i got the first one in 2018 second one in 2019 and
15:40
2018 and 2019 were both 0.1 millimole per liter. And I just had another test here, and it was 0.3 millimole per liter. So I don't know what to make of that. There are some explanations, though. I did this niacin encounter, which may have resulted in that.
16:01
I also did some reading. It sounds like, you know, there's one lab apparently in Canada that does the vitamin A test. So, you know, I'm in the Western provinces and when they take a sample or they send it out to Ontario to actually be processed in a lab. But I've read that some of the labs have switched to using ELISA tests rather than HPLC. So there is some approximation also in the interpretation of that result. I don't know that for sure. I don't know exactly what they do. So I will try to get another test soon.
16:27
you know, with an HPLC process, it would be much more accurate. So we'll see. There was also, I know, Genova Diagnostics. I think that's available in Canada. They do not only retinol, but they can also measure beta-carotene with them. That might be interesting at some point as well. Yeah, if you can, you know, I did check for online labs in Canada. I could not find a single one that did vitamin A. And I'd be curious,
16:51
We can talk about that maybe separately, but yeah, sure. Check it out. Yeah. Yeah. Genova. I mean, there might be in the U S you might have to ship it there, but I think it's possible. I know. Cause I did it a few years ago. I did, um,
17:02
Both my beta carotene and my retinol was very high when I tested them back in 2021. Okay, so yeah, very, very interesting. So you didn't do a test before you started this experiment, so we can't see the reduction, but obviously it's so low that it would be classed as a subcarotene.
17:23
severe deficiency by any normal mainstream perspective. Yeah, as a matter of fact, when I got the results back from the lab on all three tests, there's this warning, you know, state of severe deficiency, you know, supplementation is recommended. So yeah, I'm technically been in a state of severe deficiency for at least six years now. So here we are. Yeah. Yeah. So
17:48
That's very interesting. And so that is your own lived experience. That's irrefutable for you, obviously. And so, um,
17:58
Let's address some of the potential objections which I've heard about this, which perhaps make some sense to me. I'd love to get your take on them. I think the first thing is that the diet that you ate to minimize your vitamin A was mainly beef or bison, beans, I believe, black beans. Is it some breads occasionally, but then you stopped?
18:24
Yeah. So, yeah, for, for, for most of the last 10 years, it's been rice. So currently I'm, you know, I'm back on white rice. I did do that experiment with bread for eight or nine months, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster for me. Um,
18:38
So, yeah, primarily, you know, those three foods. So beans, rice, beef. Yeah. And, you know, some days I include apples. Quite a few days I include apples. I peel the apples. So, you know, I'm still being, you know, extremely diligent on, you know, having the most minimal vitamin A intake possible. Cool.
19:01
you know and do you track like uh how much your calories are coming from you know like fat versus protein versus carbs i didn't uh a year or two ago i was using one of those uh calculators on my on my phone um i wasn't actually looking at the ratio of of proteins to carbs etc i was just kind of using to track my overall calories and what i noticed was my calorie intake was you know it's it's very low it's like
19:28
1500 calories per day kind of thing and of course i've noticed that in my food consumption when i first started this um my appetite was like i don't know appetite my food consumption was about 2x of what it is today so my overall calorie consumption on a daily basis is about one half of what i was taking in before so i thought that's really interesting it's like you know
19:52
I just find that kind of fascinating. Like I say, if you have plenty of energy and you're not feeling cold all the time, which obviously you said you're not, then the natural conclusion I would come to first and foremost is probably that your mitochondria become more efficient at creating energy or ATP from that food, right? Must be. And I'm not losing weight. I've been really steady on my weight for, jeez, I don't know, quite a few years, like probably…
20:18
eight years now my weight is you know within plus or minus two pounds so i'm not losing weight even though i've cut my calorie consumption half which is now it's just what it is right it's like i think
20:29
I find it interesting. So, all right, I've got several points on this. Let me go to the first one that I was originally going to make. So a lot of people are saying, well, you're on like a very strict elimination diet where you are cutting out a lot of stuff. Could it be that the benefits you're receiving are from cutting out something else rather than vitamin A? Sure. You know, sure, there's always possibility. How
20:56
Have you looked into that? Is there any other, you know, potential culprits that you're looking at as like, oh, this is possible? Well, I haven't really specifically looked at that. But, you know, my encounter with niacin, which I thought was also very fascinating. So when you reduce your diet down to three foods, like what I've done, and then you introduce a single other food and you can, you know, detect a reaction to it, it's like, I think that's
21:21
For me, it's almost a scientific method. You change one variable at a time. When I tried to switch out the rice for sourdough bread,
21:31
uh you know i had this encounter with nice and i don't think i would have ever detected that if i was on a kind of you know much more varied diet i know it took eight months when you're saying encounter with niacin do you mean that you also had supplemental niacin or just that there's more niacin in the bread than the rice just so what i had done is i switched out the rice and i was concerned about um you know arsenic which is kind of well known to be
21:54
in rice, lead arsenic. Um, so I switched out the rice for sourdough bread and I got an organic, you know, locally grown, um, uh, wheat flour, uh, here from a producer here in Alberta, uh, which was glyphosate free. And I thought, okay, I'm good. So for eight months I started, you know, I had changed to eating sourdough bread in place of the rice. Then what happened almost, you know, abruptly over kind of a three day period kind of after the eight months was, uh,
22:23
I encountered, you know, incredibly dry, uh, dry skill, you know, amazing amount of, uh, of dandruff and the rest of my skin was okay. There's a few dry spots on my hands, but yeah, so that was niacin. I am firmly convinced that that was niacin. It's actually the documented symptom of niacin toxicity is drying of the skin. And so, uh,
22:44
For the last eight years, I've been limited almost all niacin in my diet, other than maybe what comes from beef or bison. There is another culprit that I wasn't aware of. Sure, there are other culprits. Fortunately, here in the city I live in, for the last 20 years, we've been fluoride-free. They're just reintroducing it now. Fluoride would be another concern.
23:10
There's obviously other toxins in our environment, but I'm thoroughly, 100% convinced that vitamin A is a toxin, not that vitatoxin. Most of my health recovery is due to the elimination of vitamin A versus other things. I think this is proving out with…
23:29
the carnivore diet, you know, people on the carnivore diet that are, you know, purely muscle meat, or even if they are including, you know, eggs or some dairy, you know, they're doing overall, I think they're doing pretty well.
23:41
just happens to be another good you know you know almost like if you're pure muscle meat um carnivore almost the perfect you know vitamin a elimination diet so um not just me you know so you know i think it's it's and we're getting more and more testimonials so um i think it's becoming more conclusive yes there is something to this vitamin a theory yeah definitely and i want to get into the the science ball but i'd like to talk a bit more about personal experience first um
24:08
So, um, yeah, you mentioned the carnival. That was the other thing I was going to ask about your diet. So we're not going to mention any names in this cause we're not trying to, you know, create any controversy or anything, but, but there is a, um, uh, kind of person in the anti vitamin a camp who, um, sometimes quotes you were saying that, you know, maybe a carnival diet is actually superior to the kind of diet that, you know, um, that you've been following and,
24:34
In terms of cutting out carbs. And so that's partly why I was interested in like how much of your calories in the last 10 years have been coming from carbs as opposed to just from meat, which would be only protein and fat, right? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to say, you know, probably 50% of my calories is from carbs. Oh, so it's quite a lot then. Oh yeah. No, no. I've never been on the carnivore diet. But now based on what I know, I think, oh, the carnivore diet might actually be better in some ways.
25:03
situations or some circumstances, especially if you want to lose weight. So if you're, if you're, you know, chronically diseased with what I think are, you know, vitamin A toxicity symptoms, and you want to lose weight, then the carnivore diet is probably, you know, the best strategy. I think also, I've got to clarify that in the short term, I don't think it's, I don't think it's the ideal diet in the long term, because I do think the body is, you know, conditioned and, you know, adapted to use glucose as a fuel source.
25:32
But if you want to lose weight, you've got to get the insulin down. The way to get the insulin down is, you know, by reducing carbs. So, but interestingly enough, you know, I did not at all reduce my carbs. And if anything, I was probably high on carbs from a racial point of view. And yet I still lost weight. It took about two years for that to kick in. But I think I can explain that. I've got an upcoming blog post. About…
25:58
It was back in 2018. I did a blog post on obesity causation. And I'm going to update that with kind of my current thinking on the connection between vitamin A, insulin, obesity. It really kind of ties it together. So that's kind of why I was thinking the carnivore diet. Also, I think the higher fat content of the carnivore diet would be a factor. But, you know, I'm just speculating also. I need to be super clear. You know, I'm just speculating. Also,
26:27
You know, looking at, you know, some of the success stories that are published in that carnivore diet community, they're pretty, pretty, pretty dramatic and quite a lot of them and success rate seems to be really high. Now, are they fudging the data or just, you know, highlighting the success stories and minimizing, you know, the success?
26:46
the non-success stories possibly but overall i think you know the data is you know it's it's turning out that you know yeah it's it seems to be working for a lot of people now is it sustainable over the long term i don't think so but um you know for the short term probably yeah and could this depend you know i i don't we haven't really thought about what i do but you know one of the things i do is um i look at people's genetics quite often and so
27:11
Now, I understand, for instance, when I'm on other people's podcasts, often they say, is genetics the cause of obesity? And I always say, look,
27:20
100 years ago, hardly anyone had obesity. Now, most people do. So obviously, no, it's not the cause. But it is a contributing factor as to why when some people get poisoned, they become obese. And some people, when they get poisoned, they lose weight, you know, even like myself, for instance, right? So, you know, so genetics do play a part, even if they're not, you know, the main cause.
27:42
cause of various different things and sometimes they are you know the main cause there are certain conditions where genetics are more and you know even for you right that you had kidney disease as opposed to something else or eczema as opposed to something else that could be a genetic predisposition towards that once your body became you know toxic enough or whatever the root cause was we think toxicity obviously based on your experience and
28:01
So I guess one question I have would be, do you think that biochemical individuality could play a part in it as well in the sense that, like, all right, so let me give you an example of this. I quite often see where people, like one of the things we do in our system is we look at nutritional needs and like for every health
28:23
Every amino acid, every type of fat, every type of vitamin and all the major minerals, some people have an increased need. Now, this is correlative based on the SNPs that they have. But basically, all we're saying is people with certain SNPs on the same diet, they will tend to have lower levels than other people. So that would be what we class as an increased need.
28:48
And so I often see that people, when they have that increased need, that they feel a lot better when they have that nutrient, even something as simple as like an individual amino acid or a mineral or whatever it might be. Okay, so let's just, you don't have to believe me, but for a second, just assume that all of that is the case. So if that's the case, one thing that we see less in that system, like I see some people who have like an increased need for,
29:17
vitamin a now to be honest when i see that i'm like you're probably just someone who um his body is better at processing and eliminating vitamin a which is why the correlative studies would show that people with your snip would have lower levels of vitamin a i don't know if that's a bad thing is what i'll say to them that might actually be a good thing and i
29:38
you know, and the people in the repeat world, right. Uh, they believe serotonin is bad. And I see some people who, you know, have increased need for tryptophan and low serotonin. I say, maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, right. That, you know, that you, you have that low tendency. So anyway, as you know, like a lot of, uh, in, in science, uh, you know, genes control enzymes. And a lot of what enzymes do is they like a lot of the function of how well the body works and all kinds of different areas is how, uh,
30:07
fast or slow those enzymes function, right? How quickly or slowly they do that chemical conversion from one thing to another.
30:15
So do you think there is a possibility that some people are just more efficient and effective at breaking down and eliminating vitamin A than others? And so therefore, for some people, the effects of it are significantly more toxic than other people. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
30:41
Yeah. And, you know, there's the classic, you know, I think the classic piece of data there is, you know, that, you know, people with an Asian background have, you know, this flush reaction to alcohol. You know, those I think those people would be much less likely.
30:57
efficient at processing vitamin A and in the very extreme, you know, out to the very extreme. I actually, you know, I was looking at cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia and I think both those conditions are conditions of people that are not able to deal with vitamin A
31:14
pretty much at all so i think those are are you know hyper hypersensitive people to vitamin a toxicity so yeah for sure you know absolutely no question that genetics plays a role and you know we're all different you know for sure totally agree yeah uh you know i've had a big issue of lead toxicity that's been the thing for me like they found very high levels of lead in my blood
31:35
No recent exposure. My wife, who had the same environment and food and supplements and everything as me, roughly for over 10 years, had almost no lead in her blood. I had lead in my blood 10 times the maximum reference range for the 97th percentile. And I hadn't suspected it until I'd seen my genetics because I'd had hair mineral analysis and urine analysis before, and there was a negligible amount of lead in my hair and urine.
32:01
And so when I had the genetic test and it said your body is poor at processing and dealing with lead, I was like, well, that makes sense. It just stays in my blood. My body's not kicking out through the hair like it should be. It's not kicking out for the urine as it should be. And it's probably not a wild guess to say it's not kicking out for the bile and through the liver either like it should be. And it's just building up in the blood. And so, all right, so we're agreeing on all of that and that makes sense. This is just a hypothetical, but so is it possible that,
32:30
um that vitamin a does have some function and some benefit but the problem is that first of all most people are having way too much and then some people can't process it at all so even by the time they're maybe 20 they've already like saturated like a lifetime supply of all the vitamin a they're ever going to need um and anything they get beyond that point is just more and more because
32:55
Because it's like, is it a nutrient or is it a toxin? Like, iron is an interesting one that, you know, there's a lot of talk about, including in the rape community, ironically, even though a lot of them really resist this talk of vitamin A potentially being toxic. You know, there are some gurus out there, again, I won't name them personally, but, you know, who claim that iron is the cause of all disease, unbound iron specifically, right? I don't know.
33:18
No, I don't know either. But the point is that theory exists out there. So there are some people saying that iron is really toxic and really bad for you. And there are some people saying that obviously the mainstream perspective is really important. If you don't have enough of it, you're going to get anemia and all these other serious health problems. So do you think there's any chance that it could exist in that continuum where yes, most people do have too much of it. And especially those people who have the genetics for it, um,
33:45
really suffer from having too much of it but it does have some kind of role it's just that you know we're way over saturated with it overall as a culture i think it's a bit of an academic argument because really practically speaking there's no way you're going to completely eliminate this from your diet so with the body's well adapted to deal with some but my position is no there's no there's no
34:05
positive benefit function of vitamin a in the human body whatsoever and maybe um you know maybe i'm a little bit biased because i have a kind of a serious hatred towards this molecule but in the literature in the literature there's there's understandable given the degree of healing you've had from not having it so yeah and you know and yeah we could talk for a long time but um
34:29
In the literature, I was looking at one of the lab techniques, anyway, for doing testing of vitamin A. And in that particular paper, they actually cite vitamin A as being too toxic to be in serum outside of the retinol binding protein. So it's clearly known to be toxic. And then in some cell studies…
34:48
You know, just exposing cells to vitamin A, you know, in vitro causes the cells to become inflamed incredibly quickly. So directly causes inflammation. In one of the studies, I think on my blood pulse and diabetes, there's a new study that shows that vitamin A is actually fracturing the DNA. So not in all cases, but in some cases causes the fracture of DNA. So when a molecule fractures your DNA, I'm pretty sure it's a toxin.
35:18
Then another study I actually cited in my e-book on breast cancer. Sorry, just to go back. Is there any other nutrient or something identified as a nutrient that fractures DNA that you're aware of? I don't know. You know, maybe. I don't know. I don't know either. I'm just asking. Yeah, I don't know. But you can imagine.
35:37
Yeah, there'd be other toxins that would be capable of doing that. Like mercury can do it, for instance, right? Sure, yeah. Lots of serious toxins could do it. And then in another study, I referenced this in my e-book on breast cancer, what they showed was really quite fascinating was taking, you know, in a cell culture again, and yeah, cell cultures, you know,
36:00
They're not great because they're so short-term, but in cell cultures with immune cells, what they found was it induced some stress condition on cells, and the immune cells will come in and start to do their work. With that same kind of study repeated, the same kind of scenario repeated, with vitamin A, it causes the immune cells to completely stall out and not do their job. So, you know, like…
36:29
clinically proven i suppose you want to call it that you know or you know in vitro you know vitamin a is causing your immune cells to stop functioning like how bad is that you know like so if anyone wants to claim that this has some vitamin aspect to it um
36:43
you know you know prove it as you do the study you know like redo the study like we've got one kind of study from 1926 that you know came to the conclusion that this molecule was a vitamin which i you know call complete bs on and if anyone wants to claim that it is a vitamin redo the study prove it you know show me the data i don't want to hear the arguments anymore kind of like i've heard them for 10 years and it just they're just being repeated and recycled over and over i'm just like
37:09
Bring me the data. Show me the data. Well, speaking of studies, so this was another claim I had someone make claiming that they got it from you that I would like to clarify. So the original experiment, it kind of…
37:25
Just to remind people of the original experiment that proved vitamin A is a vitamin and essential, they gave rats this very unnatural, isolated diet with certain ingredients, and then they changed one variable, and then the rats with the original diet
37:44
Recipe all died of horrific deaths and the rats with the new recipe were all fine. And so the one variable that they changed is they replaced the lards with butter. Am I correct so far? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So that's obviously the key variable, the thing that makes the difference. So I guess my question would be,
38:08
Is there, is it, so, okay, first of all, let's talk about that claim I heard. So I heard someone claim that your position that the problem with lard is that it's high in retinoic acid, that you weren't basing that on anything, that you were basing that only on like your own experience with eating pork. No, no, no, no. Yeah, so I wanted to debunk that one. Yeah, yeah, no, and actually there's a reference in my e-book on that, I think, yeah.
38:36
Maybe you had two references. So, no, there are studies showing that lard does contain what they call, what do they call it? Vitamin A.
38:48
activity, I guess I think is maybe the term. So in the late, whenever that was done, I think it was in the 1950s, they wouldn't have known about retinoic acid because it was discovered in 1960-ish. But there are studies saying, hey, you know what? We can induce the same effect of vitamin A toxicity with lard. And so completely acknowledging there's some vitamin A factor in lard. So, you know, lard is, you know,
39:17
just the way it's processed right you're taking you know pork fat you're heating it in steam you know you know the oxidation process of converting retinol to uh retinoic acid is you know high temperature oxygen you're going to oxygenate oxygenate that carboxyl group on the end of that molecule it's going to convert it into you know at least some of it into into retinoic acid might not be very efficient but it's going to you know it's going to cause some um
39:47
But yeah, there's a lot more. Has it ever been tested that there is retinoic acid in that type of lard, that high heat treated lard? I don't know. I didn't, you know, do any kind of follow up, you know, research on that. But, you know, the kind of more important, I guess, fundamental claim of, you know,
40:05
Why I think that study is flawed is because they use heated casein, and casein does. There's new studies, modern-day studies, that shows that casein has actually, in the one paper that I referenced on my updated blog post on this topic, it's a one-to-one ratio. So for every casein molecule, you've got a retinol molecule and retinoic acid in casein. So the claim of that original study being a vitamin A-free diet is completely invalid. No, it wasn't. It was false.
40:32
clearly vitamin A in the diet. So for them to claim that these animals have died from a vitamin A deficiency is completely, you know, garbage science because no, Casey has vitamin A in it.
40:44
The rats that had horrific deaths with the lard and the rats that were fine with butter, they both had casein, right? So that wasn't the variable that changed. But you got two variables there. It's not just the retinol and the butter. It's the extra fat. Well, that's what I was going to get to. Yeah. Is it possible that there was something…
41:05
beneficial in the butter which oh yeah yeah so tell us about that please it's it's the higher fat content and there is a study i've referenced this other one in my ebook and i think from 19 i want to say 1918 um mori so a researcher in japan looking at kids uh young kids with um
41:28
this chronic disease condition, forget the name, I had a Japanese name, but he ameliorated those disease conditions in a study reasonably well done just with butter. So just by giving these kids a high butter diet, you know, reverse their disease condition. It's the fat, it's the extra fat. Sure, it has some vitamin A in it, but the extra fat offsets that. And if you have extra fat in your diet, you're going to be eliminating more
41:55
vitamin A in your bile. So yeah, it's, it's, that's what I think it is. It's the extra fat in the diet. When you say extra fat, uh,
42:04
isn't there a same amount of fat in 10 grams of lard as 10 grams of butter oh no i'm talking about the mori study where you know i'm not going to pronounce it correctly where you know kids you know young young and young kids i don't know in japan living off with kind of standard japanese diet let's say rice and fish and by adding butter to their diet um you know that's the extra fat in that in that scenario um
42:30
that ameliorated the disease condition. Now, in the Wolbach and Howe study from 1925-26, switching out the lard for butter, well, also, the fat composition of lard is different than the fat composition of butter, right? So they didn't change just one variable. There's at least two being changed there. But regardless, there's just absolutely no way, like any sensible person,
42:58
you know, would know that an animal is not going to die in some horrible disease condition in 8 to 12 weeks from a deficiency. Sorry, it's just not
43:07
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45:20
Well, yeah, before we get to the animal ones, which I know you did your own experiment and that's very relevant, but let's just talk about – sorry, I want to clarify this thing about the difference between rats having exactly the same diet except for one of them had lard, the other one had butter, the lard one's horrific death, the butter one's healthy and fine, right? There's something significant about that to me, and it's worth –
45:42
If, if people claim that you're wrong about the vitamin A thing, um, then I would like them to answer, okay, what is the difference? Why is lard so toxic that it kills these rats and butter is totally fine. Yeah. That is interesting. Yeah. It would be interesting from, yeah. You know, from a scientific point of view, just that of course, it'd be very interesting to understand that difference. Um,
46:08
But just so you know, you know, there's another person that repeated a small animal experiment. His name is Michael in Australia. He is mice. His mice lasted for a year.
46:19
So, you know, not eight to 10 weeks, one year, 52 weeks, I think 51 weeks. But, you know, for any of these doubters, you know, repeat the experiment. It's not going to cost you more than a hundred bucks, maybe tops $200. Repeat the experiment. Okay. Let's talk about what that experiment is. Sorry. So just to go back, like with the,
46:38
So the butter has some retinol, right? As you say, the lard also has some vitamin A activity. I'm not 100% clear on what it is, but it's some vitamin A activity.
46:48
um so the butter also has something called old chain fatty acids is that something that you've come across i don't remember uh but yeah yeah the fat content content of butter is different the composition is different than lard so you know i forget that since they're quite unusual um called old chain fatty acids which there's some research showing that it's very protective so i am wondering if we're assuming that you know
47:13
the vitamin a is toxic i wonder if it's the protective effects of the odd chain fatty acids in butter which kept those rats healthy despite both of them having vitamin a and if it's not that i'd like to know what it is um is butter something you recommend given you know that it had those benefits i you know for me you know the ideal thing would be like a vitamin a free butter if someone wants to bring that product to the market i think it'd be fantastic um in uh
47:42
I was speculating that, you know, yes, some butter might be beneficial. Uh, some people in my forum had tried that not with a positive results, but I'm, I'm not convinced either way. Like I kind of feel like my own diet is, is too low in fat. It's, you know, probably far too low in fat. I just haven't found a safe form of fat or what I would consider a safe form of fat. Um,
48:09
Now, the risk benefit of butter, I don't know. It might depend on the person. I'm personally not going to experiment with that on myself, but, you know.
48:19
that people can. I just think it's interesting. It made such a huge difference for those rats, you know, as you said. Yeah, so interesting about the fats. You feel like you should be having more fat. So, you know, as you know, there's another school of vitamin A toxicity that recommends to go very low fat in most situations, not all. I don't quite understand the thinking behind that because to me, I would think
48:43
If you have a low-fat diet, you're going to reduce the amount of bile being excreted, and so you're going to slow the whole process of detoxification down. Now, I think their argument is if you're consuming more fat, that…
48:54
But you're also going to have more of the absorption of the vitamin A within the bile, which may also be true. But still, overall, I would think that cholestasis, so where the bile stops flowing to the point that it becomes a problem, is much more likely to happen on a low-fat diet. So every person's different, back to that genetics thing. So I do recognize that. But I don't see that purposefully limiting fat in order to detoxify vitamin A really work.
49:24
it's like it makes sense. So it's interesting that you say that you would like to have more fat in your diet. So can you explain that for us a little bit more? Well, exactly that thinking, right? I'm thinking, you know, you're compromising
49:34
you know, um, bile production. And of course, you know, just generally the emulsification of any vitamin a, uh, that does end up in circulation. You want to, you want to emulsify that in a fat and hopefully, you know, get it captured by the liver and, you know, excreted with bile. So I think a low fat diet, extremely low fat diet is, uh, not great. Now just so happens. I chose bison as my, you know, meat source because it is, uh,
50:04
The lowest vitamin A content meat that I could find, and the reason it's such a low vitamin A content meat is because it's very low fat. It's extremely low fat compared to beef. I kind of think that was a mistake. If I could do it over again, I think I might have been better to go all beef, white fat and beef would probably…
50:27
speculating you know would have made a made a made a difference for me um i don't know that i can't retest it uh so you know even though i've done pretty well with with the diet i did choose i think it could have been improved and yeah so if someone if someone when you and wanted to follow in your first steps you might recommend to them to use beef instead of bison too yeah i think i would yeah actually and it's it's more readily available uh it's less a little bit less costly um
50:53
Yeah, I think I would. What about if someone wants to add more fat? There's a lot of talk about the benefits of coconut oil over the place. Is there a reason that you wouldn't use coconut oil? I believe it's very low vitamin A, right?
51:05
Oh, yeah, I think it is. Technically, you know, zero, zero vitamin A. So it might be really good. It's just, I was concerned about the processing of it. Like, how is this actually processed and, you know, packaged and all? So I never really investigated it. Yeah, in theory, it would be a, you know, a good source of fat. I just don't know. I just didn't look at it.
51:26
any detail. Okay. But you're open to the possibility. Again, not for you, but for someone else. Okay. That's interesting. Right. Let's talk about the experiment, as you've mentioned a couple of times. Let's go to that. Anyone else could do the experiment, as you said. So,
51:42
People trying to debunk you, I think there's a lot of focusing on the details, but they do miss, as you just said, this key point, which is if you – sorry, can you tell us a story about your own experiment that you did? Let's start with that. Yeah, so I attempted to redo that Wobock and Howell study, I guess. So I had two journals. I'm in Alberta. You're not allowed to have rats in Alberta. Yeah.
52:04
So I used two gerbils and I got them very young. I think they were four weeks old when I got them. And I put them on an extremely low, you know, hopefully close to zero vitamin A diet. You know, it was rice, um, um, think a little bit of oatmeal, water. I don't know. Maybe not much else. Anyway. So my, my choice or roll cooked rice, cooked rice, cooked rice. And, uh,
52:31
they lasted for 34 weeks so you know the Wolbach and Hull study uh their animals died in 8 to 12 weeks my animals died at 34 weeks but also there is this mitigating factor where I was keeping him in a garage and um had the windows open in the garage because in the summer you know it's pretty hot here and we have a house not cheaper and uh
52:54
There was a break-in in the house next door. She got panicked, and she went and closed all the windows. And the garage shot up to like 40 degrees, 40-some degrees Celsius, maybe higher. And animals died from heat exhaustion. They both died, well, within the same two days. And they were perfectly healthy until then. And then, you know, with that, you know, closing in the windows and the garage getting incredibly hot, they died. How long do gerbils normally live? About a year, I think one year. Oh, wow.
53:23
Okay, so they're already past or off their life point anyway. Yeah, but anyway, by the time they're 34 weeks, they're perfectly healthy animals. I did a weekly video recording of them. They're still up on YouTube. People can go watch those videos and watch the one at 32 weeks or 30 weeks, and you tell me those are sick and diseased animals. No way. They're perfectly healthy. So they're, I think, that healthy.
53:48
you know, goes a long ways to debunking the little walk-in-house study. And then, like I said, there was another person in Australia who repeated it with, with mice and his animals lasted, let's say 51 weeks. Um,
53:59
And I also made some mistakes in my small animal experiment. I had two males in the same cage. Shouldn't have done that. Should separate them into separate cages. But nevertheless, you know, it's a simple experiment. Anybody can repeat it. And, you know, I hate to call it an experiment because it sounds like you're experimenting. You know, just consider it, you know, keeping pets and just see how long you can keep these pets alive on a restricted diet.
54:25
Yeah. Just repeat the experiment. Yeah, yeah, very interesting.
54:32
Yeah, I'm tempted to do it myself. I forgot about that you actually had gerbils because I wouldn't want to have rats in the house. But I think I had gerbils as a kid. I think they're reasonably good pets. Yeah, they're nice little fun animals, actually. I have too many cats, so that might be a problem. But maybe I could find a room for them. But yeah, I would definitely encourage anyone to. And you didn't say you had 100% certain about what you fed them. So just to clarify. It's in my e-book.
55:01
Okay. It's in the ebook. It's in my ebook. I documented the exact date. I think it's maybe peanuts or something. Did you say occasionally? I don't know. I might've, but then I switched to giving them academia and that's which they really liked. Uh,
55:14
And yeah, I think it was rice, some oatmeal. So the most nuts and grains, none of which have vitamin A. Yeah. You know, as far as I could tell, macadamia nuts are free of vitamin A. Yeah, but I did document the diet that I use. Now, I'm not saying it's the perfect small animal diet. I'm certainly not like qualified small animal keeper. You know, I don't have any history or background in doing that.
55:39
But yeah, you can repeat the experiment. Yeah, interesting. Well, I think that's definitely an experiment worth doing if you would like to see it for yourself. I definitely think that you're right, that there was some serious flaws in that experiment.
55:55
I'm still interested in this, like, what was so bad about lard versus butter thing. I'd have to look it up as to what, like, is lard supposed to be okay for a rodent? Like, is it innately toxic? And if so, why is it innately toxic? As you said, right? Like, what is it about it? I got to suspect that there's been some HPLC work done on lard and, you know, the retinol gas content. It's almost for sure there. Like, it's like humans…
56:22
accumulate vitamin A or adipose tissue and start. So, you know, pigs will too. Right. So you take that and the rendering process of lard, you know, they, they take the carcass and the hide, they expose it to steam and they, you know, it all kind of, you know, runs off and they collect it. Well, that's, that's, you know, one way of generating retinol acid for sure. Like it's for sure. It's just oxidization of retinol. Right. So,
56:50
wouldn't surprise me at all to see like i would fully expect lard to have retinol gas yeah i've been surprised a small portion again of this community like advising people to uh eat uh pork products i'm like huh where has this come from because whether it's the retinoic acid or whatever it is it's certainly not beneficial to any pork i think um and i don't know um yeah i don't and you know i had an interesting you would not recommend just to clarify
57:19
No, no, I would not recommend pork. And when I first started this, I was really sick, right? Like, as I mentioned, the outset. But one of the things I did was, okay, I'm going to go on this low vitamin A diet and, you know, Google a vitamin A content of, you know, all these foods. I'm trying to find, you know, what am I going to eat? And I find, oh, I can eat steak. Okay, great. Now there is a God.
57:42
And then, you know, same with pork. Pork meat is documented to be relatively low. And I had some pork roast, and I tell you, the reaction was crazy.
57:54
Almost immediately, within 10 minutes, I had this huge flare-up, huge amount of inflammation. It was just by eating, I don't know, a couple hundred grams of pork. So that was it. Never touched it again and probably never will for the rest of my life. Fair enough. Yeah, I've always…
58:13
found the smell of it cooking even disgusting because i was in a house fire once right about 10 burns on my body and the smell of pork cooking is the same as human flesh right it's very similar as you said in your book really yikes it always reminds me of that it's a bit cannibalistic eating pork for me but anyway um let's go back to the vitamin a detoxing thing and again for those watching you don't have to believe it's a toxin like grant does like i'm leaning towards
58:38
But you can just say, look, most people have too much of it. That's, you know, in this modern age, certainly by the time they reach a certain age. So we want to lower the amount of it. And I, you know, just clinical experience for a second, I do see, I have people test for it whenever they have the money to, if I'm seeing them. And I often see high levels of
58:59
serum retinol hand in hand with inflammatory conditions, allergic conditions, autoimmune conditions. So I admit it's not massive, it's anecdotal, but I see it in practice frequently. So I'm often guiding people to
59:17
reduce the vitamin A as much as possible without them having to necessarily believe that it's bad, you know, right? Just like you have too much. That we're sure of. So let's get it down. And then also let's support getting out of the body. So in that regard, you know, a while ago you very kindly…
59:33
put a comment underneath my video on cholestasis explaining that you are a fan of using activated charcoal as a way of helping to bind bile and stop it being reabsorbed. And of course, if you're binding bile and stopping it being reabsorbed, then you're also binding all the toxins bound up in the bile and stopping them from being reabsorbed.
59:55
reabsorbed. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Activated charcoal is, you know, documented as kind of the go-to antidote for acute vitamin A toxicity. So, you know, clearly proven, used in hospitals and ambulances for
01:00:07
not just vitamin A toxicity, but all kinds of poisonings. So, but it's actually documented. If you look up, I think it's shown a link to the recommended procedure for, you know, acute vitamin A toxicity is retinol capsid. So absolutely. I think retinol capsid is activated charcoal.
01:00:27
Sorry. Yes, yeah. And I was recommending that for a while, and I still do recommend it because it's cheap, it's easily available, there's a lot of research behind it. There is talk that it will bind up nutrients if you have it too close to food. My personal experience is the only reason I wouldn't have a lot of it with food is because I think it might soak up stomach acid, so it interferes with digestion that way. But…
01:00:51
And all the research shows that the only nutrients that it binds up are vitamin A and vitamin E, right? So unless you're very concerned with vitamin E depletion, I guess, there really is no concern with that. And the fact that it binds those two things, I do think it
01:01:10
puts a little bit of a pool of suspicion on vitamin E as well, especially one of the ways that the mainstream media often likes to debunk vitamins as being beneficial, as they say, oh, these studies that show if you have too much, they're bad for you. And often they use vitamin E or vitamin A to show that high levels of them actually have a potentially detrimental effect in people. So that's great. So we're both on the same page about charcoal, potentially. My only issue with charcoal is
01:01:38
You've got to be careful of using too much because it can constipate you. And if you constipate, obviously you're slowing down the removal of poison. So it's a bit of diminished returns in that regard. But I'd say the more the better so long as it doesn't poison you really. Sorry, so long as it doesn't block you up really because of how effective it is for removing poisons.
01:01:57
what about uh cholestyramine that's one that i've switched to i've been using it this year um it's significantly more effective as a bile sequestering in fact it's 100 effective um i think charcoal is more like 50 or something like that so uh you know it's extremely um powerful and effective um have you got any experience with that or do you have any opinions on it no no i don't know no experience no opinions i'm you know
01:02:22
never looked at it actually. Yeah. Well, I would recommend looking into it. I have felt significantly better this year using colostaramine. Um, and I think that must be one of the reasons why, because it is more, I think I definitely had toxic bile, uh, for various reasons. I think because of having colostasis for many years, partly because of being on a low fat diet, partly because of being on a low choline diet and, um, causing colostasis. Uh,
01:02:47
No. I was saying because of a low-calorie diet and a low-fat diet, I developed cholestasis. And because I had cholestasis for many years, I developed more and more toxic bile, I would say, because it wasn't moving. And so it is very toxic. And so cholestyramine,
01:03:02
in my experience is the best. I think it's a gum resin. Um, I think it's, uh, yeah, anyway. Um, so if anyone watching, it's something, uh, obviously grant doesn't endorse it. Uh, I do tentatively, I would say, you know, look into it potentially if you're interested in accelerating your progress, uh,
01:03:19
because it's just so effective at absorbing bile in general. It's going to help with stopping the vitamin E to be reabsorbed. Okay, so that's cool. Yeah, we talked before we started recording about there's been other kind of attempts to debunk your work. You said you perhaps wanted to address some of that. Is that something? Sure. Yeah.
01:03:46
I watch some of those videos and I put up a blog post kind of trying to address it. I think there's a fundamental logic flaw there where
01:04:00
And what Mike has done is he's looked at the studies I'd referenced in my e-book, and he used those as a basis for his extrapolation of how much vitamin A you need to consume before you get in trouble with it. Well, the fundamental problem is that those studies are looking at lethal doses of vitamin A, and those studies are actually deliberately poisoning these animals literally to death with vitamin A. And so…
01:04:27
You know, that's a huge flaw in the logic. So his conclusion was, oh, you'd have to, you know, consume these massive doses of liver eggs before you get into trouble. But it's completely flawed logic. And, you know, my analogy would be if we're going to look at automobile accidents and say, you know, let's say we come into this saying, no, automobiles are perfectly safe. And, you know, they cause no harm, kind of Mike's position. But it's flawed logic because we…
01:04:52
did that analysis with automobile accidents and we looked at, you know, automobile accidents, let's say over a hundred kilometers an hour. And we see, geez, a hundred kilometers an hour or higher, you know, most accidents are resulting in a fatality. So therefore, you know, by conclusion, you know, anything less than a hundred kilometers an hour is perfectly safe. There's no risk in driving an automobile. That's kind of, you know, by analogy, you know, his analysis, which is, you know, my painting, very, very flawed. And of course we have the real world data. You know, we have,
01:05:21
just so many testimonials now of people who have been eating liver, you know, oftentimes from coming from a carnivore diet that included liver and their health has been, you know, quite destroyed.
01:05:35
A year or two ago, I was getting probably one email a week from somebody else, you know, being, you know, having, you know, serious health consequences of consuming liver and not the massive doses that Mike was claiming in his video that are needed. You know, so real world evidence, you know, shows that no, you don't need to do anything kind of crazy like what Mike was suggesting. So, yeah.
01:05:59
That's my take on it. Yeah, thank you. And again, it makes sense even if there's some validity to their argument. It makes sense because, again, this idea of biochemical individuality, right? The dose, the dose,
01:06:11
The dose of poison that is going to create a poison effect in you, maybe you have 10 times as much resilience to it as I do. And so to treat everyone as if they're the same, I think, is always a mistake. I try not to be antagonistic or argumentative of anyone, but anyone who acts like everyone is the same or everyone is roughly the same, they're wrong. There is such a huge difference between people and their capacity to
01:06:34
deal with different poisons and their need for different nutrients and all of this basic stuff. So to treat everyone as if they're the same is always a mistake, in my opinion. Yeah, I totally agree. I absolutely agree. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, so thank you for that. Well, let's… So we've done a lot of talking about challenges, objections, like things that people may have thought of themselves, things that people may have heard. One of the things I do want to say is
01:07:03
So I used to teach a breathing practice back a long time ago, like maybe 15 years ago. And I used to teach people that it was a way of increasing the oxygen in their system. Then maybe 10 years later, I learned about Teiko and I realized that actually breathing
01:07:21
Like increasing oxygenation really isn't that beneficial. It's hyperventilation. It creates certain effects, but it's perhaps not that positive. And what I realized actually, probably the value in the breathing practice I was teaching 10 years before was actually that even though it was taking quite deep breaths, it was really slowing down the breathing massively. And probably actually the benefit was coming from
01:07:43
reducing the overall now that someone was breathing, say liters per minute, as opposed to increasing it. And so I say that to say this, I think sometimes it matters less are like reasons for recommending something. And what matters a lot more is what we're recommending and does it work? And in case of that breathing practice, I stand by it, that it made people feel better. It was a very relaxing breathing practice for people who are feeling stress and tense.
01:08:11
And so what I've noticed with interest is that, you know, I've had someone else on my channel. I don't know if you want me mentioning him in this plane, but he kind of comes from an opposite school of thought from you. But when asked about like, what's an ideal diet for someone having any health challenges, it was basically beef and some kind of simple carb that agrees with you, whether it's
01:08:31
whether it's rice or apples or something like that. And I was like, so it's interesting that even with a completely different theoretical framework, the conclusion, because, and so this is the great thing. And I try and only have people like you who are honest and have integrity and a well-meaning. And so even when they have completely different theories about how things work and all the rest of it, the bottom line is if you're dealing with a lot of clients and when you have people coming to you and,
01:08:57
You're not one of those narcissistic people that says, oh, if it's not working for you, you must not be doing it right. But you actually listen to people and take feedback and all the rest of it. In the end, you're going to come to the same conclusions, which is that a healing diet is probably going to be some kind of protein that you agree with, beef being very commonly good, especially for men, it seems, for whatever reason. Beef or bison really, you know, I don't know.
01:09:24
Usually not pork. I mean, I would say that's probably one of the worst. But some people do do better on chicken, for instance, right? That does happen. And then some kind of simple carb that agrees with you. And there's actually low in vitamin A, probably low in a bunch of other stuff as well. And that can be a diet that takes someone from being really sick with all kinds of chronic diseases to being really well and really healthy. And so I think…
01:09:53
That's one of the bottom lines I want people to take from this. You don't have to believe the theory to…
01:10:01
do what Grant's suggesting and get a lot of benefit, right? That's the bottom line. And so to kind of come full circle to that, like I know that you're not a doctor. I'm not a doctor either. So this is why I use the word suggesting, right? It's certainly not prescribing anything. But for someone who is interested in prescribing,
01:10:23
maybe having the same, you know, interested in the possibility of having the same complete rejuvenation of their health and well-being that you had, what would be kind of in your list of suggestions for them to do? First, I want to acknowledge, like, everybody's an individual and, you know, results are going to be
01:10:42
Very individualistic, of course. And I think the other thing I want to say right up front is the expectation of time frame, right? There's no quick fix to having, you know, substantial recovery and health. It's going to take time. Now, how long? I don't know, one, two years, maybe more. But I think what I would suggest, I think, like I said before, the carnivore diet is probably pure muscle meat. Carnivore diet is probably…
01:11:10
One of the first things I would start with, if you can do it without the carbs. Now, I think in the carnivore diet community, they've kind of vilified carbs. They're saying, oh, carbs are the reason we've gotten sick and we've gotten obese. And so let's get rid of carbs. I don't agree with that. I think carbs are not the cause of it. They're
01:11:28
They're a player, but they're not the cause. And so, you know, if you want to lose weight and recover your health, carnivore diet is probably a good starting point. But eventually what's going to happen, which happened to me and there's some other people I know, is you're going to, regardless of the consumption, continued consumption of carbs, you're
01:11:48
or not, you're going to reduce your insulin resistance. And once that happens, even with the consumption of carbs, your insulin levels are going to be coming down and you're going to lose the weight. So the question is like, how quickly do you want to lose weight if you do want to lose weight at all? So I think, you know,
01:12:06
a muscle meat, you know, beef, muscle meat diet, plus like a carbohydrate, whatever agrees with you. You know, there's some concerns about rice that you need to be aware of, even though that's what I use. You know, maybe potatoes, if potatoes agree with you, I don't know. And also there's some fruits too, right? So you don't have to eliminate all fruit and like apples are great. I think even bananas kind of, you know, they're a good source of potassium.
01:12:36
sure they have a tiny bit of monofitamin a but i would kind of it's negligible i wouldn't concern myself about that so there are some fruits also right so you don't have to um you know go down to like two food groups you can actually have um you know meat starch and and fruits also so i think you know and just you know really kind of focus on eliminating the big ticket vitamin a items out of your diet and uh
01:13:01
you know, with the extra, extra meat from a muscle meat diet, I think, you know, it's going to, you know, be a really healthy strategy for a lot of people. Yeah. And as I said, even people who completely don't know about your theory, disagree with your theory, they still come into the same conclusion. And that tells me there's some real truth to it, right? Yeah. And I, I, that's why I find that the carnivore diet is so fascinating because it's,
01:13:24
As far as I know, nobody, almost nobody in that community is looking at vitamin A. You know, I'm going, oh, you know, I know why that's working because it's a low vitamin A diet. But yeah, they're getting results, right? So let's just focus on the real world results and just set aside the academic debates and go with the results. Yeah, absolutely. In an ideal world, you'd meet all of your nutritional needs in the form of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and more from the foods you eat.
01:13:50
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01:14:14
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01:14:58
do you is there a particular like you know whenever i talk about stuff like this people are oh when should i take it how much should i take all that kind of stuff i mean i realize it is very individual but is there any guidance like would you for instance tell people to have it with food or not with food you know is there any kind of guidance you'd give around charcoal i i really don't uh you know personally i've taken an evening just just what i do uh and i actually don't use it very much anymore but um
01:15:23
So I don't have any guidance around that other than what you mentioned about, you know, the dose. You have to be careful not to overdo it because you will, you know, definitely, you know, there's potential, you know, blocking yourself up and having constipation. So you don't want to go too overboard with it.
01:15:42
So I think the other thing people need to be aware of, and for whatever reason, like we're seeing it over and over and over, is when people take on a low-vitamin A diet, they end up having more vitamin A coming into circulation. And that's, you know, wherever this term is, this detox setback. So you need to be aware of that and kind of have a plan, a strategy for dealing with that. And I think the activated charcoal is kind of one of those strategies. And…
01:16:08
For liquids, you're only drinking water. Is there anything else that you have? Yeah, water and coffee. That's the only, you know, I haven't…
01:16:18
He's thinking if there's anything else. No, just water and coffee. So I was on the coffee for most of these 10 years. I got off the coffee for a year. Felt great. My sleep quality over the last 10 years has been radically improved. So when I first started this, I had severe, crazy chronic fatigue and insomnia combined, which is anyway. And that resolved. And so my sleep quality is great.
01:16:42
turned to be, you know, very good. And then when I went off the coffee, that's the quality went from very good to fantastic. So, but for whatever reason, you know, a new job and everything, I got back on the coffee this year. So I don't think coffee is terrible, but it's just black coffee. And so, yeah.
01:16:59
um that's that's all eight are half but it's okay i mean i guess it it helps have it helps reduce constipation uh you know on the positive side yeah it sure does i i don't know if i i wouldn't go as far as saying i don't recommend it um kind of you know borderline recommendation because yeah i do like the kind of laxative effect it gives me in the morning and uh you know i like starting my my day kind of empty if you can say that um
01:17:24
So there might be some beneficial effect to the coffee. And there's been a few people contacting me doing coffee enemas and saying that they're getting great results with these coffee enemas. I don't know about that, but, you know, it's like, once again, I'm just looking at, you know, real world results. What are people actually seeing? And so…
01:17:41
There might be something to that. The other thing that I've done over the last 10 years is plasma donations. I think that's beneficial. You can actually do the math on it and see that it is. It might not appeal to everybody, but it's something else somebody can consider. Yeah, sorry, let's just explain that. So that's giving blood, right? And so…
01:18:02
Other than for altruistic reasons, why would someone do that? Well, here in Canada, you know, it's voluntary. You don't get paid for it at all. In the United States, they actually pay you for it, which is if you're in the U.S., you know, make 40 bucks in donation or something. Yeah, it's the same here. It's donation only, yeah, in the U.K. Yeah, so, but yeah, in Canada, there's a huge demand for blood and plasma products, but the distinction between
01:18:28
you know, a plasma donation and a blood donation. So blood donation is taking whole blood. So they're taking, you know, you're basically, you know, you get a needle and they drain a, you know, let's say, you know, close to a liter of blood, which is red blood cells plus the plasma. Whereas if you do a plasma donation, you keep your red blood cells and they centrifuge out the plasma. So that's
01:18:50
you know anything in the blood that's not you know red blood cells i suppose so you get a much higher concentration of any um retinal binding proteins and vitamin a being taken out with that donation so in my mind it's a more effective way of reducing your vitamin a um content now you know some people concerned about plasma donations i don't know um i i do them i i
01:19:15
I'm not really kind of buying into the theory that there's something, you know, um,
01:19:22
risky about it. A lot of people, when I go make these plasma donations, are on, you know, like, 100th, 150th. Last time I went, this woman beside me was on her 700th plasma donation. So, you know, seems to be safe. Honestly, I hadn't heard of it. I mean, I knew it existed, but I had not heard of it as a thing that was regularly done. Maybe it isn't in this country after looking into it. No, I'm assuming it is. If you just go to the, you know, blood donation clinic or, you know, get online and you can do a whole blood…
01:19:51
whole blood or plasma is it for people who are like concerned about anemia or something that they would only give the plasma and other red blood cells you know i've asked and um you know i i don't think there's a kind of a standard answer you know why people are making plasma donations versus whole blood uh i'm pretty sure that virtually nobody's doing it for health reasons i was gonna say yeah they're not doing it for the same reason as you normally no but and so but you know it's called um uh
01:20:19
Anyway, the organization had a candidate that manages this. You know, they have a requirement both for pool blood and plasma. So they make this distinction, hey, we need plasma donations and we need whole blood donations. But I got onto it just by chance, actually, because when I started doing these blood donations, my
01:20:39
nurse saying, wow, you have really nice, big, juicy veins and you're a great candidate for doing plasma. I go, oh, okay, I'll do plasma. So I didn't do it originally for trying to reduce my vitamin A content, but actually just by coincidence, it turns out, oh yeah, that would be a more effective way of reducing your vitamin A content. And how often do you do it or how often have you done it? I've been doing it about four times a year, but I'm going to
01:21:08
At least double down on it now, maybe quadruple down on it. So I'm going to be going once every 10 days probably for the next year because I want to get a vitamin A serum level test that says 0.0. So I'm on an absolute mission. I'm going to get it. Okay.
01:21:24
Well, maybe try the cholestyramine in that regard as well because it should block 100% of reabsorption in the intestines. Okay, yeah, very interesting. I did not know about that, so that's very interesting. I'll see if it is available here. And then just in terms of anything else, I'm just trying to think. I'm pretty sure you don't use supplements otherwise. What about salt? Do you have salt on food? Yeah, I do. Not too much or too often, but yeah, typically salt.
01:21:51
I don't know, a pinch of salt a day maybe. Maybe really, you know, a pinch of salt every three days kind of thing, whatever a pinch is, right? You know, just between your index finger and your thumb kind of thing. Very small amount. Do you still see a doctor? Like, have they ever expressed any opinion on this amazing turnaround from this, you know, terminal diagnosis? No, no. And I have gone to see my doctor for, one, I have to go in and make this excuse to get a –
01:22:18
a vitamin a test here uh but yeah they've showed no curiosity um no curiosity whatsoever yeah they're just they've got this waiting room full of sick people so they're not going to waste time asking questions i guess yeah yeah you're right yeah it's a shame that's the whole health care system right which is a separate conversation i was just just wondering if anyone expressed any interest um
01:22:40
Well, very interesting. Is there anything you want to add before we finish here, Grant? You know, with my encounter with niacin, I started, you know, looking at that. So, you know, my conclusion, my own conclusion is that, you know, eating or consuming, you know, a flour product that's fortified with niacin, most certainly here in Canada, probably in the U.S., you know, that turns out to not be safe, which is just mind-blowing to me. The other thing I thought I'd mention is, you know, this –
01:23:08
you know had a bit of what when i started looking at niacin i started looking at um sodium bicarbonate you know baking soda is that potential antidote to um retinoic acid i think you know there's probably something to that so it's something else that's on my radar uh to kind of look more into uh so i think you know low dose uh baking soda might be beneficial for some people um
01:23:35
Not recommending it, but a suggestion. Yeah, there's actually a lot of evidence around this. I dove into this quite deeply. I read a book on it by Dr. Mark Serkis or something like that, claiming to be able to heal all kinds of
01:23:48
serious and even life-threatening illnesses just with baking soda i mean definitely with kidney disease i think that's even mainstream that um that sodium bicarbonate can help with that um different mechanisms i think have been proposed you know the old way of thinking about it i think was the like the alkalizing effect um i think also because it's a carbon donor so it helps to increase the level of carbon dioxide in the system which is um
01:24:13
obviously very beneficial if you understand that most people are actually carbon dioxide depleted in their system. I used it for a long time. It's also antihistamine. That's interesting. So people have a histamine reaction. As soon as you have sodium bicarb, it will calm that down. The one thing is that it can potentially alkalize your digestive tract. And
01:24:36
And if that basically, the bacteria that is like the good bacteria, like the lactobacillus and bifobacterium are acid forming, that's really one of the main things about them that makes them beneficial is actually that they reduce the pH of the intestinal environment. So I think I actually probably ultimately created digestive problems inside myself by using too much sodium bicarb.
01:25:02
and so that's my only warning for people but you know
01:25:06
Maybe that's a worst-case scenario as long as you have a moderate amount. You don't obviously overdo it. But obviously, if you're saving yourself from a life-threatening disease, as is being documented with sodium bicarb, it's more than worth it in that regard. And so I think that's a very fruitful avenue of investigation. The retinoic acid is interesting, I guess,
01:25:32
Yeah, okay. I won't talk about that here because it's just speculation, but I think I 100% agree with you that that could potentially, like charcoal, be a very good buffering agent if someone is going through maybe a high level of detoxification of that particular molecule. That makes sense to me as well. Okay, yeah. Well, I think that's about it from my side. I've got some other questions.
01:26:00
the projects that I'm interested in investigating that I talked about in my 10-year update. So that's kind of going to be my focus for spring of 2025. I'm still very interested in the vitamin A topic. I haven't been very active in it at all, just been too busy and just kind of waiting for things to kind of evolve here. But maybe…
01:26:23
Maybe next year I'll be back into it. Well, it's interesting, you know, there's this political movement now to investigate the root causes of chronic diseases. And they're talking about various environmental toxins. And they're talking about like the mid 80s that a lot of these environmental toxins were introduced. When was vitamin A fortification in, you know, foods established?
01:26:46
introduced? Patents by country, I think in Canada it was 72 or 74, same in the United States, 72, 74 kind of timeframe. Yeah. Interesting, because I know you would say that's potentially a contributing factor, right, to the chronic disease epidemic is the fortification. I wonder if that's something that will come up? Maybe.
01:27:08
But the other thing, you know, that people need to be aware of is, you know, the seed oils and especially the canola oils. So canola oil has a high concentration of beta carotene. And in Canada, for whatever crazy reason, so, you know, Canada is a big producer, big consumer of canola oil, so is the United States. But in Canada, anything canola oil that we export is canola.
01:27:31
I think either doubled or tripled the beta carotene content just for whatever reason they're doing that. So, you know, that's highly toxic. You know, you really need, people need to be aware of that risk. Like lots of people kind of vilify the C-dolls because of the PUFA content or something. I'm going, well, I don't care about that. Look at the carotenoid content. It's enormously high. You know, also extra vitamin.
01:27:56
dangerous because it's pre-emulsified in a fat, in a lipid. So your absorption in that's going to be very high. So seed oils are off the menu for sure for a good long time. That's a different reason you'd avoid seed oils than is the carotenoid content. I mean, do they all have it? Is sunflower seed oil? I'm trying to think. Soy oil? Do they all have some degree of carotenoids? I have a study looking at the carotenoid content of most of these oils.
01:28:20
It's actually done in China. It's a pretty recent study. And they all have a significant amount of carotenoids. Some are less than others, of course. Some of the ones that I noticed that were unusually high were, of course, canola oil. Soybean oil was high.
01:28:35
I'd have to look, but I'd just stay away from the seed oil. You don't need them. Why even take the risk kind of thing? Interesting. So maybe another case of what I was talking about a little bit earlier, that there's a whole community of people telling people to avoid them for one reason. Maybe the reason you just said is actually the right reason to avoid them, but it doesn't really matter that much as long as you avoid them. It doesn't matter. Just avoid them. Like the plague, man. I just want to go back to talk about fortification for a second, because I
01:29:04
I will say as a UK person, I've looked into this. There's very little fortification in the UK of our food with vitamin A. I get dairy. Dairy is the one thing I have, I know you disagree with, that still has vitamin A. And I get it from a local farmer. And I asked them before, do you put any vitamin A in this? No, what on earth are you talking about? Like, you know, it would never occur to them. And yet I see like in vitamin A,
01:29:33
I don't know if you saw this, but there was a South Park episode. Have you ever seen South Park? It's like, you know, it's a satire, right? And they were making fun of the energy drinks that people were putting out there. And one of the jokes was like,
01:29:47
more vitamin A than a human being could ever consume. This is like this advert for this energy drink and this satire. And I thought it was a joke. And then I looked at how much vitamin A there actually are in these, I don't know what they call it, celebrity energy drinks. I was like, oh my God, they weren't joking. It actually, I think it was like 200 or 300% of the RDA of vitamin A in one bottle of this stuff. Wow. Wow. Yeah.
01:30:14
wow, like what on earth are they doing? Um,
01:30:19
And so this is the thing. Even if you've watched this whole thing, you're still not convinced, you still think that vitamin A is a nutrient. I understand, obviously, it involves questioning the whole basis of vitamin science really right from the beginning. And a lot of people, they like to go along with the crowd, right, as opposed to thinking things through for themselves from first principles. So you don't have to necessarily believe everything we've said, but just recognize that vitamin
01:30:48
especially if you're in the US and you mentioned Canada as well, you are being given way more than even is the RDA in most cases. And certainly if you're eating any processed food. So even if you want to believe the mainstream perspective and you believe that you should be getting 100% of the RDA, recognize that this is, no one in the mainstream disagrees that this has toxic effects in excess. And so, yeah,
01:31:14
Yes, if you're getting 200% or 300% of the RDA as opposed to 100%, if you do that one day, it's not going to be a problem. But as Grant points out, it's the fact if you do it for a year, if you do it for decades, if you do it for five decades, and you're consistently having two or three times the amount, that's where you get this accumulation to the point where even by a mainstream perspective, it can cause stagnation.
01:31:39
serious, life-threatening health issues. And I think that's the thing that's ignored by people. Yeah. Recently, I had someone send me an email, and they had done the math on, so they looked at the consumption of, I think it was just canola oil in the United States, the per capita consumption. Then they did the math on that, and they said, I didn't check their math, but what they said was it's 10x the RDA.
01:32:04
So what people are getting from canola oil only in the United States is 10x the RDA. Forget about everything else. So then, yes, you have the dairy and all these other things. So, you know, it's conceivable people are getting 15, 20x the RDA.
01:32:22
Like, come on. Like, no wonder everybody's sick. And then, yeah, then they're fortifying, fortifying the food over there. And then they're genetically engineering foods to like rice to have, to have more of it. And so this is the thing we have to realize. You don't have to believe that it is not a vitamin, that it's a toxin to recognize that it is a toxin.
01:32:41
if you have enough of it. And we are having more than enough of it. And this is one of the things I said in my recent episode grants, like, I don't know vitamin A is a toxin, but I don't believe there's such a thing as vitamin A deficiency. I think by the time you've reached your 20s, you've had a lifetime supply. You don't ever have to have it again for the rest of your life. It's built up in your tissues. It's built up in your liver. It's built up in your fat stores. You've got plenty. Don't worry about running out. And so-
01:33:08
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for adding that at the end. That was awesome. I had no idea about the seed oils and their high carotenoid content, so it's another great reason to avoid them. Okay, so for people who want to learn more about your work,
01:33:25
Where should they go? Well, I have my blog, so ggeneru.blog. Maybe I'll just make a comment here. I'm now overwhelmed by email. And I've tried to answer everyone's email for the last 10 years, but it's just getting overwhelming. I really can't keep up with it. So if people have questions, post them on my forum. Just general questions. I don't…
01:33:50
do coaching or consulting. You know, I'm just a guy putting this message out there. So, you know, thank you for your interest, but you know, don't, don't email general questions to me. I just don't have the time to answer them anymore. And to explain like Grant is one of the few people, you know, I'm not in this category either, who is not in the business of health. He, you know, he's a full-time engineer by trade. That's what he does.
01:34:13
Um, and so, um, he's made $0 out of this, I believe literally zero. Okay. It's going to say it must be a minus amount, right? Because it, it takes money to maintain the website and all the rest of it. And of course, if you value your time, which everyone should, then as he said, he's put, you know, tremendous amount of time, of course, writing books, as he said, replying to every personal email pretty much over the last 10 years. Um,
01:34:37
the vast majority of information you are going to find in his books or in his blogs, and I 100% agree with that. Please don't email with questions that show that you… If you've literally read every one of his books cover to cover and all of his blog posts and scoured through his forums and you still don't have an answer, maybe then email him. But I think that would cut down your emails by like 99% probably. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Now, let me qualify that. I do get emails…
01:35:05
of progress reports when I call progress reports or testimonials, I do appreciate those. And I do get actually the last few years I've been getting about on average, let's say about one a week. So I like getting those. Those are great. You know, it makes me feel like, okay, this is all worthwhile. So, you know, I'm fine with those types of, and I never share them with anybody. I just, you know, keep them to myself. So those are fine, but yeah. Yeah.
01:35:31
the general questions just on half the time. Yeah, because he's probably already answered them, as I said, many times in those other places. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for the work that you do, Gron. I appreciate you being willing to be, what's the word, challengeable.
01:35:46
challenged here with a lot of questions um but you know i'm i'm a huge believer in what you do uh i i am a huge admirer of the fact that you as i said you're doing this you know for entirely selfless reasons um you know you obviously care you could just work this out for yourself healed yourself and being on your merry way right and and not dedicated so much energy to trying to help others
01:36:09
And yet you have. Thank you for that. And, you know, what really motivates me? Yeah, sure. I've recovered my own personal health. Fine. But we are living in a very, very sick society. And, you know, if we don't turn this around, like in Canada right now, you know,
01:36:24
The provincial budgets, it's about 45% to 50% of our government budgets are being spent on health care. So we have this socialized health care system in Canada. So about 50%, almost 50% of the government budget goes to, quote, health care. This is going to destroy our societies if we can't turn this chronic disease thing around. So that's what motivates me.
01:36:48
My small part. That's why I don't talk about politics usually, but I'm very excited that any politician with any standing is starting to talk about, instead of arguing about how much we spend on healthcare that doesn't work, they're talking about
01:36:59
What is the root of all these chronic diseases that is bankrupting every country? That's such a great question. And the fact that you have done this investigation into this very topic and come up with conclusions which are absolutely effective, as you say, not just for you, but for thousands of other people who've reached out to you. You can see them in the forums. You can see them in the comment sections on all kinds of other places. Probably underneath this video on YouTube, you'll see a bunch of comments saying how this system has profoundly changed someone's life. And by the way, if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to add those comments if that's true for you.
01:37:28
You know, let people know. And I'm sure, you know, Grant would love to see those. Although he doesn't share your private success stories publicly, if you do post it publicly, I'm sure he'd love to see that as well. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much, Grant. I appreciate your time. I'll let you get to work. Okay, great. All right. See you.
Edit:2025.04.30
埃尔文·罗宾逊再次邀请格兰特·格纳鲁参加节目。格兰特·格纳鲁著有《毒药谋利》等书，他在过去10年一直遵循极低维生素A饮食，这一话题在之前的节目中引发了很多讨论，此次两人继续深入探讨相关话题。
格兰特的健康转变
• 曾经的糟糕健康状况
10年前，格兰特健康状况极差，处于接近死亡的状态。他患有慢性肾病，医生曾预言他最多只能活五年，到2014年时病情已十分严重。此外，他还出现了皮肤剥落、极度虚弱、认知问题、关节疼痛、手指弯曲、脊柱侧弯和椎骨鼓起等诸多健康问题。
• 现在的良好状态
经过10年的低维生素A饮食，他的健康状况有了显著改善。视力良好，眼睛健康，身体的寒冷和过热适应能力变强，不再轻易出汗或感到寒冷。关节疼痛消失，力量和耐力达到成年后的最佳状态，甚至比20多岁时更强。此外，他的皮肤不再出现因维生素A相关问题导致的异常，如不再有汗渍弄脏衣物的情况。
对质疑观点的回应
• 饮食与健康改善的关系
有人质疑格兰特的健康改善可能是由于排除了其他食物而非维生素A。格兰特以自身经历回应，当他尝试将主食从大米换成酸面包时，出现了严重的皮肤干燥问题，他认为是面包中含有的烟酸导致的，这表明减少饮食种类有助于发现食物与健康问题的关联。
• 维生素A是否为必需营养素
格兰特认为维生素A并非人体必需的营养素，他的身体在几乎零维生素A摄入的情况下依然健康。他引用了自己和其他一些遵循低维生素A饮食者的案例，如一些人在低维生素A饮食后健康状况得到改善，包括体重减轻等，尽管他本人并未刻意减肥，但两年后体重也有所下降。
• 遗传因素的影响
格兰特承认遗传因素可能导致不同人对维生素A的耐受性不同。例如，亚洲人饮酒后易出现脸红反应，可能意味着对维生素A的代谢能力较弱；囊性纤维化和镰状细胞贫血患者可能对维生素A极为敏感，甚至无法承受。他还提到一些人可能存在对维生素A的更高需求，但这可能与他们能更好地处理和排出维生素A有关。
相关实验与研究
• 动物实验
格兰特曾尝试用豚鼠重复沃巴赫和豪威在1925 - 1926年的实验，将豚鼠置于极低维生素A饮食环境中。他选用了煮熟的米饭、少量燕麦片和水作为食物，但由于环境因素（夏天车库温度过高），豚鼠在34周时死亡，而正常情况下豚鼠寿命约一年。不过他认为在正常环境下，豚鼠应该能存活更久，以此说明低维生素A饮食并非一定会导致动物死亡。
◦ 澳大利亚的迈克尔用老鼠重复了类似实验，老鼠存活了51周，进一步对传统观点构成挑战。
• 关于黄油和猪油的争议
在经典的证明维生素A是必需营养素的实验中，用黄油替代猪油使老鼠的健康状况得到改善。格兰特认为可能是黄油中的奇数链脂肪酸起到了保护作用，而非维生素A的作用。他还指出猪油在加工过程中可能产生视黄酸，使其具有毒性，他自己食用猪肉后出现过严重的炎症反应，因此不建议食用猪肉。
健康建议与补充措施
• 饮食建议
对于想要改善健康的人，格兰特建议可以先尝试纯肌肉的生酮饮食，搭配能接受的碳水化合物和水果。他认为碳水化合物并非导致健康问题的根源，但在恢复胰岛素敏感性和减轻体重方面，生酮饮食可能是一个好的起点。随着时间推移，即使继续摄入碳水化合物，胰岛素水平也会下降，体重也会减轻。
• 补充措施
格兰特提到活性炭是一种有效的胆汁结合剂，可以帮助排出体内的毒素，包括与胆汁结合的维生素A和维生素E。不过要注意使用剂量，以免引起便秘。此外，他还尝试过胆甾胺，认为其在吸收胆汁方面比活性炭更有效，有助于减轻有毒胆汁的影响。他还建议进行血浆捐赠，以减少体内的维生素A含量，他本人计划增加血浆捐赠的频率。
其他观点与话题
• 对营养补充剂的看法
格兰特本人基本不使用营养补充剂，他认为大多数人应从食物中获取营养，但在某些情况下，如基因导致对某些营养素需求增加时，可能需要适当补充。
• 对种子油的看法
格兰特指出种子油（如菜籽油、大豆油等）含有较高的β - 胡萝卜素（一种类胡萝卜素），具有较高的毒性。因为是预先乳化的脂质，人体对其吸收率很高，所以建议避免食用种子油。
• 对食品强化的看法
格兰特提到维生素A在食品中的强化现象，如在加拿大和美国，70年代中期左右开始对一些食品进行维生素A强化。他认为这可能是导致慢性疾病流行的一个因素，因为人们从加工食品和强化食品中摄入了过多的维生素A。
Edit:2025.04.29
00:00
So imagine, you know, some young person picks up the habit of smoking. You know, they're not going to get upset from smoking in the first week, first month or first year, or maybe not even the 10 years or 20 years or maybe 30 years. They're still fine. And the time frame with vitamin A toxicity is about the same. It's in decades, typically, depending on
00:18
you know, the circumstances, I suppose. And, you know, there's lots of factors involved. So, you know, having, you know, obviously food with vitamin A in it, you're not going to get immediately sick. It's the accumulation of that over decades of time. Hi, this is Owen Robinson and welcome to the Rejuvenate podcast. This episode is very special. That's the first one that we've got a guest interview being interviewed. And our guest is Grant Jenneroo.
00:56
Grant is a very interesting guy, as you're going to discover. And he really opened my eyes to something quite interesting. And it's about vitamin A. So vitamin A is the first vitamin to ever be discovered.
01:12
And Grant has some very interesting things to say about it. Now, the way that I have structured this video is like the interview is purposeful. In the first half of the interview, roughly 45 minutes, we're going to be talking purely about mainstream science, but that most people are not aware of.
01:33
of. And so this is the impacts of vitamin A, the different types of vitamin A, the effects of those different types of vitamin A. And all of that is pulled from an abundance of pretty much uncontested scientific literature. And Grant does share quite a few references and you should see those underneath the video if you're watching this on YouTube. So that's very, very mainstream.
02:03
Now, in the second half of the interview, then we talk about something that is a lot more speculative. Because, of course, what we're talking about is the toxicity of vitamin A and how different forms of vitamin A can be turned into your body into other substances, which can be even more toxic.
02:26
But then there's that question hanging in the air of like, well, how much is too toxic? And of course, that depends from person to person. But what we'll speculate about is that actually, possibly way less toxic.
02:46
might be toxic than we think it is. And I say to Grant at the beginning of the interview that I think that the book he wrote could be one of the most important books written in the last hundred years. And I have to say from my personal experience, I stand by that statement that I'm about to make.
03:04
Listening to what he says and incorporating some of it has made a massive difference to me and my health. It's the piece that I haven't shared up until now. I've kind of gradually been sharing different pieces of what's helped me as well as, of course, what's helped others in the episodes. But this is one of the main big ones that really made a difference to me. I really talked about lead in a previous episode and how I had high levels of that and how that caused a problem. Well,
03:32
I was also tested for vitamin A and I also had excessive levels of that and don't seem like such a big deal because it's a vitamin but as you'll learn about in this episode perhaps it can be a big deal. Grant is an excellent author I thoroughly recommend checking out his work as we'll talk about during the video and at the end.
03:56
And I just want to say, you know, before we get into it in order to introduce Grant to just say what a treasure I think he is. He is someone and I'm not disparaging people who make this into a business. It's what I've done because why not, right? If it's something that you love,
04:13
then, you know, make it your life's work, make it what you do full time if you can. So obviously I'm not disparaging that over anyone, but I do know that when you do that, it comes with a certain level of people are,
04:26
you know, less trustworthy. And I hope that, you know, they seem less trustworthy to people. And I hope that I've mitigated that with these podcasts to a large degree, because as you may well have realized, the vast majority of what I recommend and promote on this podcast, I don't sell, you know, none of my companies sell. So I hope that helps you to trust me and to realize that I'm just recommending it to you because it's good.
04:54
And so ditto with this, with Grant, there's no financial benefit to me recommending him whatsoever. But anyway, my point is more that Grant has, I don't think he's ever made a penny from his work. He's got free books on his website that are available to download for free. He's got, you know, many, many articles. He's done studies and
05:18
And he's not been funded. No one customer benefactor has ever given him a penny to do this research, has ever given him a penny for any product in relation to the work that we're going to talk about today. So he really is doing it just because he believes in it. He is an engineer by trade. I believe he has done that full time for…
05:39
you know, a long time. And so he's purely doing this for the love. So if that matters to you, if that means that you can trust him more, then great, please do. So without further ado, someone who, as I said, I think has got very high levels of integrity, very high levels of caring about the human race and wanting to help them. And with a very, very interesting perspective that you may not have heard before. Gra.
06:06
Grant Chenery. So Grant, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with me. I was thrilled when you said yes. Great. I'm glad to do it. And anything that helps get the message out there, I very much appreciate. Yeah. And the reason why being, you know, I read one of your books, which I'd highly recommend that all of our viewers check out after they watch this or listen to this, and that's Poison for Profits. And I have to say that
06:32
I feel like that book might, I guess the key word is might, I can't be certain, but it might be the most important book written in the last 100 years. I mean, it's incredibly impactful if what you're saying is true. And I'm inclined to believe that it is, but that's what we're going to explore and look into today. And of course, I can't be sure I'm relatively new to this world. So I'm
06:56
of this topic. So I'm very keen to find out more and share more with my audience. So
07:04
I guess the first thing that I would want to… So let's get straight into it, right? Sure. Obviously, people know from the title that we're talking about vitamin A and the various forms of it and how an excess of it can be much more damaging than people may realize. So that will be the starting point. And then I think, you know, we'll progress from there.
07:28
So my first question would be, I understand from reading your book that retinoic acid is one of the most or the most, you can tell us, toxic forms of vitamin A. So…
07:44
Why is it so toxic? What is it about retinoic acid that makes it so damaging to the body and or at least an excess of it makes it so damaging to the body? And how does it cause that damage and what kind of damage does it cause? Well, that's a big question. Take a while to answer that, but it's worthwhile. Worthwhile because it'll take us down right into the mechanism of how that happens and why that happens.
08:10
So you're right, retinoic acid is regarded as kind of the most toxic form of vitamin A. And there's a whole myriad of molecules that fit under the vitamin A umbrella. You've got kind of the least toxic beta carotenes, and those will split into retinal aldehydes. And from there, you can get into retinal esters. And there's this hierarchy of toxicity. So beta carotenes would be the least toxic.
08:39
Retinal aldehyde is kind of medium. Retinal esters are kind of the next most toxic, and retinol gassid is the most toxic.
08:49
And just to understand that… And sorry to interrupt, where does retinol fit into that hierarchy? Well, retinol is… With an O-L at the end. Yeah, it's an alcohol. So it's toxic. It's documented to be too toxic to be in serum unwrapped, meaning outside of this protective wrapper protein that is usually carried in blood. So it is definitely toxic on its own, but it's not… So what happens with vitamin A? It goes through this…
09:15
metabolism sequence. It's really a catabolism sequence where the body starts bringing it down. And as it does that, it actually gets more toxic. But kind of specifically, retinoic acid is regarded as the active form of vitamin A. So these other forms of vitamin A before they're converted into retinoic acid are considered kind of inactive, but it becomes active once it converts into retinoic acid.
09:40
And what happens with retinoic acid? It actually gets through the cell membrane very quickly, gets into the mitochondria, gets into the nucleus of the cell and binds with RNA and DNA. And once it binds to your cellular DNA, I believe it's a permanent chemical bond there. And the cell is DNA compromised and the cell is no longer producing DNA.
10:09
proper proteins. Because with DNA and RNA through transcription, it's a very delicate weaving machine. All of a sudden, you've got this extra molecule stuck in the middle of it, and the cell doesn't produce the proper proteins. And so, consequent to that, what happens is a whole myriad of things. One is, obviously, the cell is no longer able to produce proper proteins. It can't actually
10:37
perform its proper function. And through maintenance and everything else that the cell needs to do, it can't do that. The DNA has been poisoned. Secondly, what happens is the cell starts to present these or reject these defective proteins that have been induced by the retinoic acid
10:57
the immune system kicks in and starts attacking those cells because the immune system detects those proteins as kind of foreign species, most certainly not belonging in the human body, and they attack those cells and then you have autoimmunity. So there's a long kind of detailed kind of spectrum of the possibilities of these defective proteins.
11:18
In the 1990s, it was documented to be about 300 different gene expressions. So in the medical literature, they'll describe these as gene expressions, which are really measured by the presence of these proteins. Then by kind of 2010, it was up to 500 different gene expressions induced by retinoic acid. So it's just a very large number of combinations. And my belief is the reason you have such a large combination of
11:46
quote, gene expressions induced by retinoic acid is that it's completely or almost completely random where it attaches to the DNA and RNA. And, you know, depending on that specific position that it attaches to, you're going to get a different protein generated. And so you have to know kind of, you know, the readers should know, our viewers should know that
12:10
The DNA, RNA is this fantastic little intricate weaving machine that weaves together proteins. And anything that kind of gets stuck in the middle of the pattern there is going to mess it up. And so this is why it's toxic. Now, I'm not just claiming that retinoic acid is toxic. It's super well documented in the medical literature. And it's been used as a chemotherapy drug for 30 years. So
12:34
we have a vitamin that is… That was going to be my next… Go ahead. That was going to be my next question, Grant, because one of the things that fascinated me about your book is, you know, I've heard a lot of alternative health theories and a lot of them are backed by either no science or very little science. And so while they may actually be accurate, who knows?
12:51
there's very little evidence that they are. Can you tell us roughly how many studies there are supporting the idea that retinoic acid is toxic? Well, yeah. Roughly. I'm sure you haven't memorized them all. Well…
13:06
It's in the hundreds probably that talk about the toxicity of vitamin A in general and probably very specifically, I don't know, 30 or 40 that would talk about specifically retinoic acid and the use of retinoic acid in chemotherapy.
13:21
But, you know, your viewers are fortunate if they're really interested in this topic because vitamin A is probably one of the most studied molecules in all of medical science. I did kind of do a kind of a meta-analysis a number of years back on how many studies have been done on vitamin A. And I think it was like, you know, 10,000 or more. And then, you know, maybe 400 or 500 looking specifically at the toxicity. So the toxicity of vitamin A has been known for a very long time.
13:50
And I think most importantly, the toxicity was best understood in the early research back in the 1940s, 30s, 50s through animal studies and deliberately poisoning animals with vitamin A and looking at the effects of that poisoning. Now, those early researchers wouldn't have known that that's actually retinoic acid that's causing poisoning.
14:18
the damage in these animals or the health issues in these animals but that's the metabolism of vitamin A conversant to retinoic acid has a horrible consequence and you know animals get very sick or die um
14:32
I can name a few of those studies if that's of interest. No, that's great. We'll include a couple of links. Maybe we'll get to that, but I want to make this super relatable for people because that's really interesting in terms of the science. But how does that manifest in the human body? Like how would I know as a person watching, listening to this, that this may…
14:59
be related to me, right? Like what problems can this cause when you have these proteins that are not being created correctly by the DNA, if I've understood that? Yeah. So there is a well-known list of symptoms of vitamin A toxicity. And I'm going to say, I don't know, 40 or 50 kind of major kind of known symptoms.
15:28
health issues due to vitamin A toxicity. And literature is called hypervitaminosis A. You're just getting too much vitamin A, or for some reason you've been exposed to retinoic acid. So that could happen and often does happen with people that take an acne drug that's based on vitamin A called Accutane. And there's just a long list of devastating health consequences. And I'll
15:55
Kind of most commonly, kind of early symptoms would be depression, anxiety, lots of cognitive issues, memory loss, chronic fatigue.
16:10
Those are kind of overall sense of, you know, losing your sense of well-being. But then kind of more specific, I'll just think maybe from the top of the head down to the bottom of the feet. So hair loss, you know, rapid hair loss is definitely a sign of vitamin A toxicity. Skin issues, you know, eczema, psoriasis, you know, inflamed skin, dry skin.
16:31
One of the key symptoms of vitamin D toxicity is dry eyes. So your eyes just being dry, maybe extra dry at night,
16:40
Your glands and your eyelids are not functioning properly because they've been blocked up and your eyes become dry. Would that include your sinuses as well? Sure. Dry sinuses? Yeah. And so maybe I'll get through that list and then we'll talk about, okay, how is that happening and why is that happening? So further down, I guess…
17:03
I think tinnitus ringing in the ears is probably a pretty common symptom. Joint pain, twisting of the jaw, crooked teeth, pressure in the brain. So this is actually one of the other really early symptoms of too much vitamin A is intracranial pressure and inflammation on the brain. Kind of going down, inflamed esophagus, inflamed lungs, asthma,
17:33
Kidney issues, weight gain, signs of early diabetes, joint and bone problems, GI issues, Crohn's disease, colitis, muscle fatigue. There is just a long list. So if…
18:00
The other thing I need to be really clear about is the timeframe. This is the tricky thing about vitamin A toxicity is the timeframe that's involved is huge. And it's really hard, I think, for the average person to kind of get their head around that. So I just want to maybe state that. I kind of use the analogy of smoking.
18:22
So imagine, you know, some young person picks up the habit of smoking. You know, they're not going to get sick from smoking in the first week, first month or first year, or maybe not even the 10 years or 20 years or maybe 30 years. They're still fine. And the time frame with vitamin A toxicity is about the same. It's in decades, typically, depending on
18:40
the circumstances, I suppose. And there's lots of factors involved. So having obviously food with vitamin A in it, you're not gonna get immediately sick. It's the accumulation of that over decades of time that starts to add up and build up. And if your body's not dealing with it properly, then more of that vitamin A is, a higher percentage of the vitamin A that you're consuming is slowly converting into retinoic acid, actually internally giving yourself chemotherapy.
19:09
So, go ahead. So you said retinoic acid is used as a chemotherapy drug and you said it's also used as an acne drug. And so, of course, chemotherapy drugs they use because they kill cells, right? So in essence, is that what you're saying, that that's what retinoic acid is doing? Yes. So one of the hallmarks of retinoic acid are kind of, you know, it's actually in the very definition of, you know, the vitamin A activity.
19:41
It drives stem cell replication. So stem cells that are exposed to retinol acids start to replicate faster. And it's documented to be used for stem cell differentiation, meaning stem cells are immature cells in your body, in your bone marrow, or we'll say typically in your skin, or a lot of tissues in the body. All ducts, all glands, all tissues.
20:11
tubular structures within the body or cardiovascular system, like so many tissues in the body have stem cells. When they're exposed to retinolic acid, retinolic acid has this interesting property where it drives them to replicate faster, so kind of a higher rate of growth. But if it goes too fast, then it causes inflammation. This is super well documented in medical literature. And that…
20:36
function of retinoic acid to drive stem cells into a higher rate of replication is why retinoic acid is used and has been used in dermatology for about 30 years as a skin thickening agent, you know, typically for women that are concerned about
20:52
wrinkles and thin skin, you know, there's a product like Retin-A that they put on as a skin cream. And in the short term, it actually works because what it's doing is driving up the replication rate of the stem cells in the skin and the skin becomes thicker, fuller, you know, and the wrinkles kind of get, uh,
21:09
smoothed out. But in the long term, it's going to devastate the skin and permanently damage it. That's well regarded in dermatology. So that's kind of 30 years or more of history of retinoic acid use in dermatology and that effect. So back to the glands and why
21:36
you might have dry eyes or nasal problems is because very small glands or
21:46
uh, ducts in your body, the lining of those ducts is an epithelium and the epithelium there's, there's what's called a basal membrane and then stem cells that line that. And those stem cells are like the body's kind of perpetual source of new cells. So as you lose cells from the outer layer of that tissue, the stem cells, you know, they replicate and grow naturally to kind of maintain the structure of that skin. But if you drive it too fast, you'll plug up that, that, uh,
22:15
that gland or that duct. And now, like with the eyes, now your tear ducts aren't working properly anymore and you'll have dry eyes. So that's kind of the mechanism. And that's even without the inflammation that's caused. So the immune system is not going to sit by and just watch all this happen without…
22:36
doing its best to kind of try to get things under control. Interesting. So the list you gave of things that could go wrong with the body, and I remember a few off the top of my head that you didn't say, like hypothyroidism is another one. Yeah.
22:50
that vitamin A toxicity can cause. And, you know, as I said, I've been in this alternative health world for a while, and there are a few things like hypothyroidism, mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, that if you list the symptoms, it is kind of like almost everything because it is such a systemic inflammation creating such an issue. So is there anything that differentiates
23:15
vitamin A toxicity from other kind of toxicities that could give people an early warning sign that it's this kind of toxicity that's bothering me, not perhaps another one. Like I'll give you an example with mold toxicity. They say, you know, that there's a laundry list of problems it can cause, but
23:33
one of the signs is that you get little electric shocks, you know, when you touch things like much more commonly than other people. And it's like, especially neurological. I think you've already said one, which is this tendency for dryness, especially in the eyes. And I guess the mucous membranes. Is there any other kind of telltale signs that in your years of experience now you're like, ah, you know, that looks like…
23:57
like that it's usually very predictive of vitamin A? I think I would kind of direct people to kind of just get online and just look up the symptoms of vitamin A toxicity. It's a well-established list. But you're right, it's a lot of overlap with other toxicity conditions. And so to kind of
24:18
try to rule one thing out, you know, versus something else. I don't know, but I would say that, you know, these things work synergistically. So, you know, just because, you know, maybe you've got a mold condition, well, maybe your vitamin A is actually contributing to that or vice versa, right? It's like you're getting kind of a double whammy kind of thing if you're getting too much vitamin A and exposed to some other toxic environment, like, you know, sure, there's lots of toxins like, you know, arsenic or something like that that would have
24:46
kind of similar kind of responses. I think a really good one would be poison ivy, like a poison ivy rash. If people are familiar with that and you start to see eczema or pronounce it eczema here in Canada, you know, that's eczema is, is, is, you know, my mind is a hundred percent guaranteed caused by eczema.
25:06
you know, vitamin A toxicity. And I like to use… See, that's what I was looking for. Yeah. One of those telltale signs. That's perfect, yeah. Eczema is a really good one. I think psoriasis, asthma. Yeah, those would be… And, you know, lots of neurological issues. You know, depression, anxiety. You can go… There's a really good…
25:28
little graphic on a website called acne.org and if you go to Accutane which is that chemotherapy drug which is also used for acne and you know that website has a this diagram of a human body with you know kind of every organ every tissue with a you know arrow going to it and saying okay this this is you know you know a symptom of vitamin A toxicity and it literally covers the body from head to toe it's like you know nothing nothing is spared from vitamin A toxicity I think
25:57
One tissue that's kind of less susceptible is actually muscle tissue because muscle does not have those stem cells. So they're a little bit more
26:08
I wouldn't say fully immune, but more resistant to vitamin A toxicity than other tissues that do have stem cells. Interesting. So it's just only the non-important areas that are susceptible, like the brain and the nervous system and the organs. I'm joking. Sorry. Okay. So fascinating. Yeah. When I looked up Accutane, it said that it was the only drug, the pharmaceutical prescribed medication that was
26:36
if you take it and you're a woman, you have to take birth control pill with it because it's so dangerous. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
26:44
And that's amazing. That's from an industry that said Vioxx and all kinds of things were safe, right? And they still say it's that dangerous. Oh, yeah. Let me talk about that for a second. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was just going to say it's not a… No, I'd like you to comment. Yeah. So, you know, if you go get a prescription for Accutane, and this really kind of boils my blood. You know, I have no…
27:10
you know, firsthand experience for with myself or anyone in my family with Accutane. So I don't have an ax to grind, but this, this is just absolutely ridiculous that this product is on the market. You know, imagine a teenager going into their doctor with a little bit of acne and the doctor gives them a prescription for Accutane, which is chemotherapy. So for God's sakes, you know, kids going in, they got acne and the doctor puts them on chemotherapy. Okay, fine. If it worked and had, you know, few side effects, fine. It seems like, you know,
27:39
The nuclear option for trying to get rid of acne, in my opinion. But the devastation. So many people have contacted me. So many young people have contacted me. And their lives have been absolutely destroyed by this drug. There's a lot of suicides associated with it. So a kid doesn't feel well about themselves, a little bit of acne. They go into the doctor. They get Accutane. And now they feel so depressed and so just depressed.
28:05
devastated that they end up killing themselves. And we're not talking tens of people, it's hundreds or maybe, I'm sure it's thousands of people. And then with that prescription, there's a black box label on the product that says, you have to enter into this agreement if you're a woman that you'll be on two forms of birth control to get the prescription. And then if you happen to do get pregnant, the go-to measure is abortion. Because
28:34
Accutane is as toxic to the fetus as is thalidomide. And it's like, what are we doing? You know, it's like, wow. How is this product still on the market? We better stop talking about it because my blood's starting to boil already. Well, that's okay. So that leads me perfectly to something you mentioned earlier, but I'd like to go into more depth about it because I feel in my experience of trying to explain this so far has been one of the hardest points for people to really comprehend and take in. And,
29:00
And so there's going to be people listening to this and I know them, you know, who are like, okay, that's, I know about this. I've taken Accutane. It's terrible. Right. But there'll be a lot of other people watching or listening who are like, okay, Elwynn, but I don't take Accutane. I've never had chemotherapy. And you know what? Um, you know, I haven't even eaten any animal foods and, you know, I had a client, uh, a couple of weeks ago who said that, um,
29:24
She's been on a plant-based diet pretty much consistently for like 20 years now. And we looked at her blood test results and her retinol was right at the top of the reference range. And as we'll discuss later, you don't really want your retinol to be anywhere near the top of a reference range. And she was like, how is that possible?
29:46
You know, because she doesn't eat eggs, she doesn't eat butter, she doesn't eat meat, she never eats liver. And so could you please break down a little bit more like the process of how someone, even if they've never had any of that stuff, could still have high levels of retinol and high levels of retinoic acid? Sure. Yeah, that's really straightforward, actually. So we have to understand that, you know, all vitamin A, you know, originates in plants.
30:12
So it originates in plants as the carotenoids. So these are molecules that plants use to absorb sun. Yeah, they're highly light-sensitive molecules. Plants use them as part of photosynthesis. They absorb sunlight very well.
30:29
So even without ever eating any animal products, if you're eating a lot of vegetables and certain, I don't know, maybe certain fruits, I suppose, they're high in the carotenoids, in beta-carotene. And when you ingest those, a certain percentage of that's going to be absorbed.
30:48
And the beta carotene molecule is really a double-ended retinol molecule. And it's a mirror image and you just split it in half at the center. So there's an enzyme that splits it in half and now you have two retinol, I'm being kind of specific with the terminology, we just call them retinol molecules. And now you have, you know, a lot of vitamin A in your body. And, you know, I think, I have a comment to make about, you know, plant versus animal. And I think that's just,
31:17
the wrong discussion. People shouldn't be having that discussion, but we can talk about that maybe later. Well, you know, it's a big discussion and it's a controversial one. So one controversy at a time. But I guess the point is plant or animal, some foods have high levels of this stuff. And when you said a beta carotene is turned into a retinol, that's short for retinaldehyde. That's correct. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.
31:43
So that's an aldehyde. That's like formaldehyde. That's like the aldehydes that they say, you know, you want to be careful of eating a lot of burnt food because that's high in aldehydes. Right. Yeah. So, wow. So beta carotene. So you're having a lot of carrots, sweet potatoes, stuff like that. Your body literally takes that molecule, breaks it into two, and each of those molecules is an aldehyde. Yeah. If someone just does a Google search for beta carotene, you see this kind of symmetrical molecule that's,
32:12
I guess it's called a chiral molecule because in the middle, it's got a mirror image going out to each side. And each side of that molecule is a retinal molecule. So that is vitamin A. So in the literature, you know, the double-ended molecule is called beta carotene and there's like 26 different versions of it. But you split it in half and each side of it is a retinal molecule. And that's on its way to becoming, you know, toxic potentially in the long run. Um,
32:38
So people need to be… So the aldehyde enzyme… Oh, sorry. So the aldehyde enzyme or gene, the thing that breaks down the aldehyde is the same thing that breaks down alcohol, ultimately, right? Yes.
32:52
And it's the same thing that ultimately breaks down histamine, I think, or one of the things, one of the ways that histamine is broken down. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Okay. That's my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong, commenters. And so, you know, I was starting to think, huh, I wonder if, like, if the body's overloaded with one, like if the body's overloaded with…
33:16
beta carotene even then the person might not be able to break down all the other toxic aldehydes that they're taking in as easily or if someone's drinking a lot of alcohol every day maybe they're not able to break down the retinol is that accurate absolutely accurate yeah for sure yeah okay interesting yeah and then how does that get turned into retinoic acid which we've just said
33:36
because you know we've kind of scared people a little bit if it's so dangerous it's as bad as thalidomide well and now we're also saying that there's nothing wrong with scaring people if it's genuine right if it actually is you know dangerous yeah well i don't want to scare people and i think you know once again people need to understand the timeline the time frame right so time is a huge factor here you know literally talking decades right so no one needs to be you know
34:04
afraid of something here. And humans have been dealing with retinol and beta carotene
34:11
Throughout our evolution, our God's creation, we're very well prepared to deal with this, but on a reasonable basis. That's where things have gone off the rails. We no longer consume it on a reasonable basis and it accumulates. That's the question I wanted to get to. Would it even be possible for, if you had loads of natural carotenoids, would it be possible to build up to the same level as you get from Accutane or is it not?
34:38
anywhere near as much. How does it compare? That was the question I was going to ask. In the literature, they do separate this into what they call a chronic toxicity or an acute toxicity. If you take Accutane and
34:57
take a certain dose of it, it's an acute poisoning. So you see the results of that in a matter of days, weeks, or months, let's say. Where chronic toxicity, we're talking years and decades, just kind of the slow progressive accumulation of it. And the other thing people need to understand, we're talking molecules, right? And so you have like a trillion cells in your body or more, whatever it is. And
35:19
you're ingesting, let's say you have a pizza and it has beta carotene in it, it's got some vitamin A in it. Some of those vitamin A molecules, well, what should happen naturally is as those molecules come into your bloodstream, very quickly, like within seconds, the liver scrubs it out of the serum and traps it into the liver. So the liver is your major defense organ that's
35:43
taking care of this for you so you don't have to worry about it. You're not going to experience an acute toxicity from eating something like a pizza.
35:53
But some of it does not get captured by the liver. It doesn't get captured fast enough. And those molecules then enter into cells, right? And so depending on the dose and kind of the state of the health of your cell membranes, you know, how fast it gets into the cells and how many cells it gets into is highly variable. But, you know, let's say you poison, you know, a couple…
36:15
thousand cells a day with retinol it's no big deal because those cells are going to die off and you know as part of that epithelium they're going to get replaced and you know the body can deal with this it just gets to the point where you will get more and more vitamin a staying in serum longer you know poisoning more and more cells and eventually you know that you know trillions of cells you end up with you know a couple billion cells that are now poison kind of maybe
36:44
you know, specifically in kind of one tissue or organ or most likely spread out through the whole body, you start to have this overall degradation of your health because these cells, one, they're poisoned, they're not doing their proper function anymore because their DNA is damaged and you're going to slowly get sick.
37:04
Now, what happens, kind of, you know, what really started me on this whole journey was, you know, a lot of autoimmune diseases, there's a well-documented set of trigger foods, right? So some people, they do have milk or dairy or eggs or eat a pizza and they have a big fire up, right? And it's like, what the hell? What happened there? Well, what happened was they surged their vitamin A intake and had an acute reaction to it. So hopefully…
37:32
I kind of glossed over exactly, you know, how does a retinol get converted into retinoic acid? But it's through an enzyme. It happens in the nucleus of the cell. It's through the retinol dehydrogenase enzyme. That's what converts it into retinoic acid. And from there, you know, it's going to get into the DNA RNA of cells. And the crazy thing, correct me if I'm wrong about this, is like,
37:55
that conversion has to happen, right? It's not like your body can either do that or get rid of it. It has to convert it into that toxic form to get rid of it. Is that correct? Yeah, I think once it gets into the inside of the nucleus of the cell, it's going to go through the reaction. But, you know, there's a lot of vitamin A you can't,
38:13
ingest that is not going to get down that pathway because the liver is going to capture it. It's going to store it in a fat and excrete it with a vial. So if you have a well-functioning liver, you know, it's, it's taking out the garbage on a daily basis. And a lot of that garbage is, you know, the retinol is going out with vial. So it's not like all of those molecules get converted retinol gas, a certain percentage of them. But I think you're right. I think once it's inside the cell, it's, it's destined to go through that retinol gas. It, um,
38:41
And I imagine that percentage is going to go up significantly based on what you just said, if the person is experiencing cholestasis, which we talked about in a previous episode. Yes. Yes. And that's a very, very risky position for someone to be in, in my opinion. That's…
39:00
That's a tough spot. Is there anything you want to say on cholestasis? Well, not really. In general, what's happening, the liver's not functioning as smoothly or as efficiently as it should be in expelling bile, and you end up getting more bile being recirculated into your blood. And as that condition gets worse and worse…
39:19
you're just going to have a lot more vitamin A circulating in your blood. I don't really care about the form of it. Vitamin A, retinol, retinol, or retinoic acid is just more of it in your serum, and you're going to definitely feel the effects of it. Now, as you said, from all of history pretty much,
39:36
we would have had to deal with some level of this, right? Either in plant food or animal foods. So our body is adapted to it quite well compared to many of the chemicals which have only recently been invented. And so there's no need to freak out about it, right? Unless we're having super high doses in form of Accutane and stuff like we talked about. But as you said, it's a thing that saturates and builds up over time.
40:03
And so I guess at the very least, as much as we, you know, the average person who's maybe not, you know…
40:11
extremely uh committed to trying extreme new strategies to get to be healthy they might want to say okay you know i'll have some vitamin a but uh maybe to stop it getting to that point where it builds up so much that it could cause a problem uh i might want to avoid the highest sources of uh vitamin a would that be a a sound strategy from your perspective i think that's absolutely spot on i would say you know if someone's
40:38
younger and healthy and doing well, then they don't need to do anything extreme. But avoiding what I call the big ticket items for vitamin A would be extremely prudent because it all adds up. It's just like little incremental amounts every day add up. So yeah, spot on.
40:58
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42:18
Yeah, just like with mercury, they say, you know, you could have a thousand portions of anchovy and it would equal the same as like one portion of tuna or swordfish, you know. So I think it's it's it has a mercury. Sorry. It has a mercury intake. So you can have a hell of a lot of the small fish and it's OK, but you want to avoid the large fish intake.
42:36
that are very high in mercury. So something maybe similar with vitamin A is to avoid the highest both plant and animal sources of vitamin A. So what would you put in that category for those people
42:48
who are generally, as you say, healthy and young, but they just want to avoid it building up over time. Yeah. So, you know, in the plant world, you know, spinach, you know, kale, those are really high vitamin A sources. You know, sweet potatoes, you know, just absolutely scratch them off the list, off the menu forever. Carrots, crazy thing, like,
43:16
a lot of food colorings are based on beta carotene. It was like a big shift in the, in the industry to go from synthetic food colors to quote natural food colors. But those natural food colors are made from beta carotene for the most part. So, you know, stay away from foods that have a lot of artificial colors. Uh,
43:33
Um, the other foods to stay away from, uh, like big time are the seed oils, like something that's special, like canola oil. You look at canola oils, it's got that yellow color to it. And what that is, it's a beta carotene inside that oil. And so, you know, definitely off the menu in, you know, animal products, uh, you know, no liver, no kidneys. Um, you know, those, those, those two organs are just, you know, should be off the menu for everybody for the rest of time. Um,
44:02
Those would be kind of the big ticket items, I think. And it's interesting, right? Because I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but those are often the things that people eat because they want to be healthy, right? I'm going to have sweet potatoes instead of normal potatoes because they're better for you. And, you know, I'm going to have spinach and kale. And then if they're not into that and they're more of a carnivore paleo type, then they're like, I'm going to have lots of liver because it's full of nutrition.
44:26
So yeah, it's so interesting to hear that. And again, we want to remind people here, this is not Grant's opinion. There are a very large amount of studies, as you said, around 500 or so that back up the issue of vitamin A excess being extremely dangerous, right? Yeah, and…
44:48
Maybe I'll send you some links with some references if people are interested in reading. Or I can mention some off the top of my head too, if that helps. Yeah, please mention a few that are impactful enough you've memorized them. Okay, so there's one paper from Peniston and Sherry. I don't know how to pronounce her last name. But it was published, I think, in 2006. It's called The Acute and Toxic Perspective.
45:16
The Acute and Chronic Toxic Effect of Vitamin A. Very good paper. It's about, I don't know, 30 pages or so. And it's really focused on vitamin A toxicity in a very kind of modern day, relatively modern day paper. With some good, you know, studies to kind of back up what they're saying. Now you got to understand these, well, at least one of those authors is super pro-vitamin A. She's a
45:41
big advocate of supplementing vitamin A around the world. But the ones that I really think would drive the message home are some of the earlier studies. One done, I think, in 1962 or so from Iowa State University. This was the effect of vitamin A, effect of hypervitaminosis A on the young pig. And
46:06
I'll send you a link for this, but this is an amazing paper. I think it's about 40 pages long. What they do in the study, they take a bunch of young pigs and they just give them high vitamin A diet, like a very high vitamin A diet, and devastates these animals just completely.
46:22
You probably should read those studies on an empty stomach. It just, you know, destroys these animals, often kills them, causes hemorrhages, brain bleeds, you know, the animals die. They become so dumbed down they can't even feed themselves. They can't get up on their feet. It just
46:42
you know, just wipes them out. But the other one that I like the best is an early study by a guy named Rodell. I think he's in Sweden, Oslo. And it's called hypervitaminosis A again, which is the standard established term for this condition. And he did a study on various animals, you know, poisoning them with vitamin A, various doses of vitamin A. And I think it was like chickens and
47:13
dogs and, you know, quite a variety of different animals and just devastates these animals, poisons them to death. And just these animals die horrible deaths in these experiments. And so, you know,
47:27
And that paper, I think, was about 200 pages long. So for each animal he documents, or each species that he tests, he documents exactly the doses that he gave them and what the consequence was and how fast it happens. And these studies, these early animal studies, they're poisoning these animals to death in weeks with vitamin A. So I really have a hard time.
47:52
that anybody could read those papers and still believe this to be a vitamin. But those are some good papers. I'll send references. And so you just mentioned something there, which leads me on to the, I guess, part two of the interview that we're releasing all at one time. So everything that we've said so far is really mainstream science, right? There's nothing that anyone would be able to disagree with. Now I do want to get into a little bit more of
48:16
what you have brought to the world, which I think is potentially extremely revolutionary, as I mentioned right at the beginning. And it's to do with, I think, is it chapter four of your Poisoning for Prophets book? Which for people who I know are not going to read, was it 400, 500 page book? I always try and get them to at least read just that chapter. And I, again, encourage everyone watching to do that. We'll certainly have a link for it underneath this.
48:42
And it's the chapter where you talk about the research that discovered vitamin A. And I wonder for those who I cannot get to even read one chapter of the book because they just don't like to read, is it possible to ask you to do a synopsis, like a breakdown of that? Because I think that is one of the most fascinating stories I've ever read and I think deserves as wide an audience as we can possibly get.
49:11
Sure. So the definitive study that established vitamin A to be a vitamin was the Wolbach and Howe study from 1925. Now, prior to that, well, you have to kind of know at that period of time in medical science, there was this grand search on for vitamins, right? They were quite sure that there was these hidden nutrients that, you know, were not available.
49:37
previously established and they're on the hunt to find these these special vitamins vital amines go ahead and who's they i heard that the rockefeller foundation were key funders is that accurate or do you know i've heard that about one of the studies but they you know it's usually um
49:56
mostly Americans. There was a few people in Germany that were doing this. Some of the names escaped me from the early German researchers. But typically, you know, I'm going to say mostly Americans. And it's actually a small cadre of people. This is not, you know,
50:13
probably more than 10 or 15 people researching that are kind of laser focused on trying to find these fat soluble vitamins. And because before Woback and Howell in 1925, there's some other papers that were doing similar kinds of studies, trying to basically doing elimination diets on animals and then looking at the response of animals. And it's very suspect study to me because, you know,
50:40
Vitamin A hadn't been chemically established until after those studies. So how are they claiming that these are vitamin A-free diets when they don't even know how to kind of identify it? It really kind of throws a lot of doubt onto their research. But anyway, what happens, Wolbach and Howell, they get –
51:02
a study going, I think they have 40 or 50 rats in this study, and they put them on what they believe is a purely vitamin A free diet.
51:13
primarily based on, you know, they've got starch, they've got some protein, they've got some salt, and they've got Vegemite to provide some of the, I think, B vitamins, I guess. And what happens in this study within, I think, six to eight weeks, like most of their animals are either dead or dying or, you know, incredibly sick. And that study was the original study that proved that in the medical literature, that vitamin A is this essential vitamin, and you'll go blind without it.
51:42
And so I started to dig into that study and say, well, hold on. This makes absolutely no sense to me just based on common sense. And what I figured out was in all of these early studies and even quite modern day studies on rats, there's a
51:58
Now the rat is the de facto model used in medical research for testing pharmaceuticals and all kinds of other things. So early on they used casein in the diets of the rats and what they did is they sterilized the casein. So they boiled it in alcohol and then boiled off the alcohol to sterilize it. And this was the protein source for the animals.
52:21
But what they didn't know at the time is that casein actually encases the vitamin A molecule. And so vitamin A is inside of the casein. So one, their diets were not vitamin A-free diets. They were actually…
52:34
quite a lot of vitamin A. But the interesting thing about vitamin A is if you heat it and oxidize it, you will convert it into retinoic acid. So you need this activation energy from a chemical reaction point of view. And so what I believe they did is by heating and sterilizing the casein they used in the lab feed for these animals, they were basically poisoning them with retinoic acid. And this is why their animals died in six to eight weeks.
53:02
But very interestingly, right at the same time, there's some other contemporaries, researchers in the United States, performing their own vitamin A-free diets without heated casein. And their animals survived perfectly. And there's no negative outcome in their studies. But Wolbach and Howell, for whatever reason, I guess maybe they had some academic clout or something.
53:26
They had some leverage somehow. They just dismissed these other studies and said, no, those other studies aren't valid. Ours is the one that we should go with. And so from that study to where we are today, like 100 years later, that was a study that established vitamin A to be a vitamin. And you'll quickly go blind without it. So not true. And I'd like to kind of mention this.
53:50
the research from T. Colin Campbell in the 1980s, I think it was, on casein. And it's quite amazing because I really liked his book, The China Study. So what he identified, not really in that book, but in his research at the University of Chicago, he established that casein was one of the most toxic substances
54:13
He said, you know, kind of known to man. It definitely causes cancer. And he, you know, was very adamant that this was an incredibly toxic substance and, you know, we should avoid it. Where he sadly went off the rails was he blamed all animal proteins. He said, oh, this is an animal protein. Here I have my lab. We're doing these casein studies. We're killing these animals, inducing breast cancer and rats with casein on and off. And so he kind of, you know,
54:40
was that 50 years later, he proved the toxicity of casein, which was actually the primary cause
54:46
food source in the study from Wobacken Howell way back in 1925. So I think it delegitimizes their study and obviously I think their study is completely wrong. But nobody's gone back to reproduce it or investigate it and so here we are. And the other thing is, weren't they also giving them lard? They did. They gave them lard, yes. Which in itself also
55:11
is a source of retinoic acid, right? So two sources of retinoic acid in their vitamin A-free diet. And that's the active form of vitamin A, right? So those animals should have did incredibly well if this was a vitamin, but of course it's not.
55:26
So just to summarize, they proved that you don't need, sorry, they proved that you need vitamin A by giving a completely vitamin A free diet from their perspective. Right. And watch these animals die a horrific death. Right. Again, as you said earlier with the pig study, like,
55:43
I remember reading the description of it, right? It's like lesions, like the lesions in their mouth and in their eyes and everywhere. Like they're in constant agony, their body's falling to pieces. And they managed to induce that within six to eight weeks. And they were like, wow, a lack of vitamin A is really bad, you know? But actually they were giving them,
56:05
milk protein, casein and lard, both of which are high in retinoic acid, which is the most poisonous form of vitamin A. Is that right? That's what I believe, yeah. So rather than proving that a deficiency of vitamin A causes you to have this horrific death, all they really proved from your understanding of the research was
56:26
is that giving very large amounts of retinoic acid causes a horrific death. Yeah. But they just didn't know that. And were they able to measure even retinoic acid at the time they did those studies? No, no. I think vitamin A, if I'm going to…
56:41
Might be wrong by a few years here. I think vitamin A was actually isolated in, you know, the molecular structure was defined in kind of around 1930. But then it wasn't until 1960 that retinoic acid was discovered. So, you know, 35 years later, oh, we've got this other form of vitamin A called retinoic acid, which is incredibly toxic. And so, no, they would have had no way of knowing that. Yeah.
57:11
Wow. And so it's kind of an amazing thing. And I think probably this message is gonna fall on more fertile ground, I would say now than it would have done a few years ago, because I think there's a lot more people questioning from first principles, a lot of medical science than they used to be, which is, you know, a good thing, because it's always good to ask questions, right? And to think for yourself.
57:37
In terms of some of the other aspects of that,
57:42
I would highly recommend that you read Grant's book. I don't think we're going to be able to really talk about it on YouTube, what that means, that the medical establishment would make such a gargantuan mistake. But I would say that in his book, Grant deals very well with taking the hypothesis of the idea that, you know, actually vitamin A isn't an essential nutrient at all, it's just a poison. And then, you know…
58:12
runs with that and makes a lot makes lots of uh um speculation based on that which i found personally to be very profound and uh you know very compelling in terms of uh whether they might actually be accurate or not um so tell us grant like a lot of people ask this question right at the
58:34
you know, getting them to share what their, you know, what their big breakthrough is, what they're most passionate about. But I would love to hear your background as to how you got into it as well. Because you're not a doctor, right? You come from a different background. So I'm not a doctor. That's not a negative to me, but I'm just saying what led you to, but you're obviously very able to,
59:02
read scientific studies, which I think the average person isn't, and you have the patience as well as the ability to actually have done so. So what's your background? What led you to being motivated enough to get into this and then to share it with the world? Sure. Well, my background, I'm a civil engineer, so trained as a professional civil engineer. But in university, I also did a lot of chemistry and physics, and so it was very kind of well-trained.
59:32
acclimatized to the scientific method and understanding science. I love science. I'm a science guy. And it was just going along with my life. And then in 2006, surprisingly diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, which was a pretty early diagnosis to have chronic kidney disease. But it was what it was, and I wasn't going to do anything about it. So I just kind of continued to go on with my life.
59:57
And then in 2014, I started to break out with eczema. And I've never experienced it before. I didn't even know what the word was before that. And I had it very severely. So it was pretty much body-wide eczema. And I had to tell maybe it wasn't all over my body all at once, but it was moving all over my body and pretty much
01:00:19
Every square inch of my body was covered with severe eczema. So I was getting very, very sick. And I considered that that was probably just kind of the end stage of the chronic kidney disease. So that's kind of a manifestation of the chronic kidney disease. And of course, you know, I go to my doctor. I've got this huge inflamed body, body-wide rash. And, you know, he tells me, oh, you've got eczema and autoimmune disease.
01:00:41
And it gives me this little, you know, two ounce tube of steroid cream. Tells me to go home and take it easy on the steroid cream because there's side effects. And, um, but it's kind of, you know, kind of longer story, but he kind of wrote me off meaning, okay, you know, this guy's, he's on his way out and, uh, there's nothing we're going to do for him. Yeah. Sent me home. And, um,
01:01:04
I walk out of there and I got this little tiny tube of Steri-Cream. I said, “Holy man, I need a bathtub full of this stuff. This is not going to cut it.” Then knowing nothing about X-Men, coming to the realization I have to be able to at least try to figure out something for some relief because this is a pretty horrible condition. I had also by that time
01:01:28
gotten very very sick. I was chronically fatigued, incredibly weak, all kinds of health issues were cropping up. So the eczema was just kind of the finishing stage of it, I guess. And so I was looking for what can I do to at least alleviate some of the pain. So I got on Google and started searching eczema.
01:01:51
And what was fascinating to me is there's a lot of documentation of what's called trigger foods. So as it turns out, a lot of autoimmune diseases document trigger foods. And I went up to the America Eczema Association, another similar association in Canada, and they talk about trigger foods. And both these associations…
01:02:09
And actually the Canadian Crohn's and Colitis Association have something similar. Yes, there's trigger foods for Crohn's and Colitis, but all of them say, you know, your disease condition is not related to food. That didn't make any sense to me. Like, you know, how could we have these quote trigger foods,
01:02:24
And yet, you know, the medical establishment is saying your disease is not related. Well, it didn't make sense. So what I did was wrote down a list of the trigger foods, which were for eczema. It was like the common trigger foods were, you know, eggs, milk, dairy, cheese, tomatoes, bell peppers, fish, and a few others. And I went out to the National Institute. It's actually a national database in the United States. It's the…
01:02:53
Anyway, one of the agricultural databases maintained by the U.S. government. And I got all the molecular compounds from all of the trigger foods and I put them into a database. And I just started doing queries and said, what's common between all these foods? And what pops out is vitamin A. And so it's not strange. I haven't been eating a lot of vitamin A. I didn't think I was, you know, I was just eating kind of a normal standard American diet kind of thing.
01:03:16
And then from there, I go, well, what are the symptoms if you get too much vitamin A? So, you know, go out, you know, symptoms of vitamin A toxicity and go through the list. And it's like, you know, the perfect, you know,
01:03:27
30 item list. Okay, here are all the conditions of vitamin A toxicity. I've got pretty much every one of them. And so from there, I decided, oh, I'm just going to do a simple, really stupid experiment. I thought it was ridiculous to even be embarrassed to tell anybody that I did it at the time. I decided I'm just going to eliminate all foods that have any vitamin A from my diet and see what happens. And that's how I got into this and went from there.
01:03:52
And well, tell us a bit more. So what happened as a result of doing that? Well, that's a good question because I gave myself three weeks. So when I started that vitamin A elimination diet, I gave myself three weeks and I was like, first week, nothing. Second week, nothing. Third week, nothing. Like same, just really, really poor health. And then I was at this kind of tipping point. Oh, this is foolish. I shouldn't do this. Yeah.
01:04:18
you know, anyway, so I said to myself, I'll give it one more day. And so one more day. And what happened was, uh, leading up to that, I had about 10 years of chronic joint pains, most specifically in my knees. Like I would sleep every night with a heating pad wrapped around my knees. I could not sleep without that heating pad. And on, you know, like the 22nd day, I think it was 22nd or 23rd day. Um, my joint pain in my knees disappeared. And, um,
01:04:48
all kinds of just really profound changes in my overall sense of well-being and health like my chronic fatigue evaporated and my mental clarity just zoomed to you know 10x of what it was before so this really profound uh response and you know i was okay maybe i'm kind of sort of onto something here and then a very after that a very long slow bumpy road to get to where i am today um
01:05:17
So that's kind of the story there. But interestingly enough, in 2006, when I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, I was given kind of five to six years remaining. And so getting very sick by 2014 was kind of in alignment with that prognosis. But here I am now in 2016.
01:05:40
What is that? 20 years? Yeah, 2023. I was just trying to calculate the number of years. Almost 17 years, right? 17 years later, and I'm doing pretty well. My chronic kidney disease is gone, and I've just gotten another testimonial from somebody that they've reversed their chronic kidney disease. So that's how I got into this. Fantastic. And the eczema? I'm sorry? Oh, the eczema. Yeah, it's gone. I'm completely…
01:06:09
completely recovered from that. That was… And how long have you been doing it now? I'm close to nine years. So this is… In August, I'll be nine years with no vitamin A in my diet. Because when people hear this kind of thing, like an easy way to dismiss it is to say it's the placebo effect. But I've studied the placebo effect quite a lot. And while the placebo effect is very powerful, it doesn't tend to be very long-lasting.
01:06:31
Meaning if you believe this is going to help you, it might make it go away for a few months or maybe a year, but it's not going to make it go away for nine years. To me, that fundamentally proves that there's something very real and biochemical going on. Yeah. And so, yeah, so kind of to finish the story and my own personal story. So…
01:06:52
I don't know if I'm dragging this out too long. No, no, no. We want to hear. Absolutely. Inspire us. What I did was when I was really sick, I was having these really bad cognitive issues.
01:07:04
function capabilities and all kinds of signs of early dementia or early Alzheimer's. And I wasn't really too worried about that because I knew the kidney disease was going to take me out early. So that didn't really matter to me so much. But when I had this really profound improvement in my mental clarity and just, you know, amazing difference. The next morning I got up and went out to the website and I was like,
01:07:32
wondering what happened to the rate of Alzheimer's dementia in Atlantic Canada after, I think it was, oh, it was a year. Anyway, I think it was…
01:07:45
I've forgotten the year now. I think it was like 1993 or something. So what happened? Historically, for the last 500 years, Canada has had this very big cod fishery out on the East Coast. And in, I think, 1993, that fish stock was fished almost to extinction. And the government abruptly, like overnight, closed down that cod fishery.
01:08:06
And codfish, of course, is really high in vitamin A. So I was just curious what happened to the rate of, and also coincidentally, the rate of Alzheimer's dementia in Eastern Canada is the highest in the world or was the highest in the world. And Canadians well knew that. Like that was kind of a, you know, I guess anybody kind of in tune with anything in Canada, you kind of knew that, you know, that region of Canada, for whatever reason, has really bad health.
01:08:31
And so got out on the web and here we are, you know, 10 years later, I said, what happened to the rate of Alzheimer's? And it was almost cut in, I think it was
01:08:39
almost cut in half after they closed the cartridge year 10 years later and so was Crohn's and colitis. So we have this big population with a history of the worst disease rate for those two diseases in not only in Canada, in the world, and it was cut back into half. And so I thought, okay, you know what? I think I'm probably onto something here. From there, I said, it's important enough where I'm going to write these eBooks
01:09:06
try to make them compelling enough with enough evidence to try to get other people to participate with this. And I've been pretty successful. There's many thousands of people, I want to say maybe 10,000 people from around the world who are now participating in this and using this diet experiment and sharing their results. And so I'm not a one-off by any means. There's lots of people reporting quite remarkable recovers in their health.
01:09:35
The downside to it or the reality of it is it's a very long, slow process to recover your health after you've been seriously poisoned with vitamin A. I think this is the case of all fat-soluble toxins. It takes a long time for them to build up, as you said earlier, but it also takes a long time to get them out, unfortunately. Yeah.
01:09:55
Yeah, I would recommend one of the reasons I'd recommend going to Grant's website. I mean, the number one reason would be to read his articles in his books. But another one is he periodically does tests, right? Sorry, not tests, surveys of his audience. And you can actually see, you know, published there and edited the responses from people about whether it's helped them or not. And it's, you know, about a wide range of issues, right? And it's very interesting to see that.
01:10:22
I wish all people who taught a specific diet or exercise or health regime would do that actually, allow unbiased feedback. And I'd like to do that myself. I used to do it for my programs back in the day. But yeah, it's very good to be able to see
01:10:39
And I can tell you're a scientist, you know, engineer, scientist, it's the same kind of thing ultimately, right? You just want to get the data and you obviously want to help people, but you also want to make sure it's working, right? You want to actually see it. Yeah.
01:10:52
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm no longer alone. Go ahead. Sorry. I want to move on to the next thing. Well, let me ask you about, cause you mentioned about the cod fishery and I was like on the fence about asking this question, but I think I will. And if it becomes too controversial, we can always edit it out. And it's this issue of, well, you know, just for the YouTube version anyway, but it's this issue of like the health epidemic. So, yeah,
01:11:19
starting around the 1980s there was just an explosion of autoimmunity analogies that wasn't really there before and it does depend on which country as to the year there's different speculation about but it's been pretty much worldwide certainly throughout the western world there's different speculation as to what would cause it one is the thing that will get you banned from the channel if you talk about it okay the
01:11:46
from the, you know, from the platform. But, you know, one of the things that spec, and I'm sure you know what I mean, you talk about it in your book and I recommend people read your book. But there are other theories, right? And one of them is the introduction of seed oils in very large quantities in the 80s is blamed for this issue. But,
01:12:08
back when they, you know, before most fats that were consumed were saturated fats and animal fats. And then there was this switch to health, heart-healthy margarine, right? And vegetable oils. So this is often blamed on the, this is often blamed. But this seems like another potential candidate because, and I want you to correct me on this because I haven't done enough research on it. But was there like a push at some point to, because we talked about the natural benefits
01:12:37
of vitamin A, right? You can get it from liver and sweet potatoes and all the rest of it. But was there a push at some point to start fortifying, or if we believe it's a poison, contaminating the food supply with it on quite a wide scale? And do you know enough about that? You feel confident to speak about that? Yeah, I sure do. So in 1972, 74, vitamin A was mandated into…
01:13:06
foods in North America. So in Canada, it's mandated into dairy. So all milk is fortified with vitamin A, um, margarines, butter. So, you know, you can't legitimately go get the milk product in Canada without having vitamin A, um, added to it. I shouldn't say added, but a lot of products have, there's a certain, I guess, best way of saying it. There's a certain, uh,
01:13:29
concentration of vitamin A that's supposed to be in the product. And if it's not there naturally, they top it up with a synthetic vitamin A, vitamin A palmitate, which is not really that synthetic. So yeah, big push in Canada. In the United States, it was worse because they added vitamin A into dairy in the United States. By legislation, this is legislated into the food. This is not optional. So dairy producers could not opt out. And worse in the United States because they added it to a lot of flour products
01:13:57
and bread products in their vitamin A breakfast cereal from the United States have vitamin A added to it. And then kind of at the same time, the World Health Organization got really kind of into high gear on this and they were running supplementation programs and still are today. Actually, one of the authors that I mentioned before is one of the big proponents of these programs. And they are running vitamin A supplementation programs in about 110 countries around the world.
01:14:25
And what they've done, and I found the paper where they kind of laid out their plan, was they're going to put it into regional food sources. Like in Canada, where it's common for people to have milk and dairy, but South America, where they don't have refrigeration, they need another source.
01:14:41
vector for delivering and they use sugar. So in South America, sugar is laced with vitamin A. And in Southeast Asia, it was put into MSG. So even if MSG is bad enough on its own, they've added vitamin A to it. A lot of crops are being currently kind of pushed over from natural white rice to golden rice, which is rice fortified with or genetically modified to produce beta carotene.
01:15:08
So yeah, massive push to increase the vitamin A content right around that timeframe. And like I said, it takes a decade to accumulate. So the timing is really good. You start introducing this additional vitamin A into the food source in 1972, 74. And then kind of by the mid 80s, you've got this epidemic of disease. And something like seed oils and canola oils would only make it worse because they also have vitamin A in it. Interesting. Interesting.
01:15:36
And in your book, you actually talk about the connection between vitamin A and the thing that we can't mention on YouTube. So if people know what we're talking about, I definitely recommend reading up in your book about that. Yeah, fascinating. It does make a lot of sense to me for reasons I won't go into right now.
01:15:56
But I also noticed they added it to baby food. Isn't that great? Along with the corn oil and soy and all the rest of it. It is terrible, you know. And there is a really good study. Rothman is the guy's name. He published a study, I think in 19… Oh, I don't know. I'd have to go back. In the 1980s, maybe 79 or something. It's called Rothman. And he documented the…
01:16:25
increased birth defects in mothers being exposed to even moderate amounts of vitamin A. And so, you know, he was one of the early researchers raising the alarm about, you know, the toxicity of vitamin A in early childhood and fetal development and kind of completely ignored, just tossed aside. And yeah, the attitude, baby food and formulas, it's terrible. Yeah.
01:16:51
my opinion and this so this might be another category of person um that you would recommend like had a lower vitamin a so we said earlier if you're healthy and young then you could probably do okay just avoiding the highest sources but yeah would you say if you're pregnant or planning to be pregnant or if you are very young that it would be better to
01:17:12
minimize the amount that you have more oh yeah that's that's in the medical literature like you can read you know you know vitamin a advice for for pregnant mothers maybe you'll find a lot of literature that says oh vitamin is essential for fetal development but then you know you know you turn the page of the same study and say oh but you know there's this warning if you get too much of it you know could lead to birth defects super well well documented you know being a um
01:17:38
you know, substance that can cause serious birth defects. So pregnant mothers should be very careful and our women planning to get pregnant. And the interesting thing is the scale, right? I mean, that's what you just said is true for almost every nutrient, right? What they call. So, you know, a certain amount is healthy, a certain amount is toxic. But the interesting thing about the vitamin A from what I saw is
01:17:59
the level that they say you need is not that different from the level that they say is toxic. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. In the Rothman paper, if you can find it, I think, you know, so at that time when he did that, I think the RDA for vitamin A for women was, I'm going to say 3000 international units. And he was saying, you know what, you can, you can get that between, you know, breakfast and lunch. And if you go up to, I think it was like,
01:18:29
you know, 7,500 documents an increase in the rate of birth defects. And if you go 2x that, you know, doubles the probability of having birth defects. And it's like this linear thing. And you're right. It's not 10x. It's like, you know, 2x and 4x. And, you know, it's,
01:18:48
You could easily do that with dietary sources. Which is easy to do. Yeah, easy to do. Yeah. And it's easy to do if you're trying to be healthy. One of the mysteries I've been trying to unpick for the last dozen or so years at least, Grant, is I've worked with a lot of people who are very committed to health compared to the average person, right? They don't smoke. They don't drink. They do everything that you're supposed to do. And I've been one of them.
01:19:11
to some degree and then they're like less healthy than people who do all that stuff. It's like, how is it possible? All I do is drink green smoothies or, you know, if you're a carnivore type or I eat loads of liver, I eat loads of eggs, like how could I be ill? And so, you know, this is such a mind-blowing thing that's hard to get your head around. Yeah.
01:19:32
actually you might have been better off if you were just you know eating pizza and fries and stuff like you said to some degree i mean look that stuff is still adulterated vitamin as well as a bunch of other chemicals i'm not saying it's great but it's just interesting that that's even vaguely comparable you know once you start to understand this yeah these so-called health foods are often not that healthy yeah and i think that's as we go back to you know my comment about
01:19:57
you know, people, you know, looking at food groups like T. Colin Campbell, you know, like I said, I really liked that guy, but he came so, so close to figuring this out and then he missed it because he blamed a food group, right? And I'm like, no, it's not about carnivore or vegan or anything else. It's the body doesn't look at, you know,
01:20:15
food that comes in as, oh, this came from an animal source or plant source. No, it looks at it as it's a molecule, right? So we need, and that's what the pharmaceutical industry does too. Like everything, every product from the pharmaceutical industry is it's, they're looking at molecules, they're building and marketing molecules. And so, you know, we need to go down to, you know, the molecular level and say, okay, what is it?
01:20:38
you know, about our food that has a certain, you know, probability of having toxic molecules versus good molecules. Forget about the food groups thing. That's just, that's a distraction in my opinion. I completely agree. I mean, what I've been teaching for years is ultimately toxicity is one of the main things. And so what I feel you've alerted me to is, you know, one of the,
01:20:59
not just another toxin that is really bad, but more importantly, this is a toxin that we've been like eating on purpose, thinking that it's good for us, which is the worst kind of toxin of all in a way, maybe paying good money to get more of this toxin, thinking that we're helping ourselves and really we're hurting. So something that we need to know. Let me ask you about something else, Grant, before we finish. So I,
01:21:25
I did a bit of research and tell me if I'm wrong, but you know, so I'm based in the UK and it does seem like the UK food supply is less contaminated with vitamin A. I think it's still added to more stuff than it should be, but it's often on the label. I don't believe it's added like wholesale to grain or anything. Um,
01:21:43
I think that's accurate. Yeah, that's my understanding too. So dairy, my understanding, in the UK is not supplemented with vitamin A in the UK. Okay. And I think this might be, although we're hardly fantastically healthy in the UK, I do think it's probably why the prevalence of obesity and obesity
01:22:00
And autoimmunity and allergies is even worse in the US than it is in the UK. It's certainly a possibility anyway. I mean, I'm sure there's other factors as well. But anyway, so when I was doing that research, looking at the amount and everything kind of similar to what you did, it sounds like, but maybe not as exhaustive. I…
01:22:20
I saw a comment underneath someone else who'd interviewed you talking about their cat. And they said, oh, my cat was like lame. It couldn't walk. And then I stopped giving it vitamin A and then it got better. And I was like, you know what? We have this Bengal cat, which is this leopard cross. Okay. And she had been limping around for like a month. And the vet didn't think there's anything wrong with her. Nothing like they could say, you know, she could go and see a neurologist or something. And I was like, you know.
01:22:50
Often those surgical interventions don't even work for humans. I'm very skeptical about whether it's going to be helpful for a cat as much as I love that cat. And I was like, you know what, let's just… And then I started looking at the cat food and I realized… So the average RDA that I see recommended for vitamin A for humans that might be 70 or 80 kilos is like 3,000 IU of vitamin A. The average amount of… The recommended amount of vitamin A for a cat…
01:23:18
that is four kilos is 5,000 RUs of vitamin A. So they're literally… And unlike with humans in the United Kingdom, every pet food pretty much is gothic.
01:23:33
got that vitamin A added they either put a lot of liver in there if you're buying more natural raw ones right or if you're buying more kind of you know store-bought packaged ones then they put just vitamin A in there and it's actually really difficult to find any pet food that doesn't contain and you know largely we just give them raw meat anyway so for this cat I started giving her just raw chicken okay
01:23:55
And it took a while because we were moving house. There was another month where I kind of intermittently sometimes gave her vitamin A and often didn't. And she just still didn't get better.
01:24:03
no change and then i started to give her a hundred percent vitamin a free diet and within about a month she was 100 better and she'd kind of faded away while she was limping like she was like you know smaller and and now she's like this fierce cat like my wife's actually kind of scared of her like they're like and she's like strong and muscular and like you know like powerful and she's been jumping racing up trees and all the rest of it and i'm like
01:24:30
I know that's anecdotal, but I wonder if you can comment, you know, I guess one of the advantages of animals over human is the accumulation is less. She wasn't even that old. She was only, I don't know, a year old or something. So I guess the accumulation is less for an animal, but then also the detoxification process would be quicker as well, right? Yeah.
01:24:50
for that same reason maybe so i don't know yeah so two questions about this i realize you may not know the answer to either but first of all for our pets because a lot of people have noticed they care more about their cat or dog's well-being than they do their own so is there any as you know you've you've made the assertion earlier which i encourage people to not believe or disbelieve but research right looking at your own works and looking at papers um
01:25:13
that humans don't actually need vitamin A. Have you done research in the area of whether animals actually need it? Well, in my opinion, there's no way an animal needs it. It's a poison. And look at that study from Rodel. If you want evidence, I'll send you that Rodel or a link to that Rodel paper. You know, read that through and, you know, that should just erase any doubt that this is a vitamin, hopefully.
01:25:38
Just to add to your anecdotal story. Go ahead. Sorry, do you think that a predator, like a cat or a dog, dogs are technically omnivores, but, you know, like a more predatory animal maybe is more able to handle it? That's why they give such an absurd amount to them compared to… I don't know. I think it's maybe just…
01:25:59
kind of one of these inadvertent things because i think you're right i think you know from the you know meat producing industry they need to get rid of all the liver they produce and they put it into animal food same thing in north america all that you know dog food and cat food has a lot of liver in it so it's high in vitamin a just because of that not kind of by design i think it's just a side effect of the way they make that product um
01:26:23
Interesting. So you're saying the standard came first, sorry, the habit was first and then they just created a standard, oh, this is how much vitamin A all food has to have. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. I don't know if there's some regulatory, I highly doubt there's any regulations on vitamin A content of animal foods, but
01:26:44
I don't know, but I'll just add here. There definitely seems to be an industry standard. I'll tell you. I didn't know that. They all make sure that they has 5,000 AUs for a daily supply. Wow. Roughly. That's what I found. It's actually amazing. Crazy. I'm glad I could teach you something about vitamin A. You don't know. And maybe it's not the case in Canada or the U S but it's certainly the case in the UK. I'm not saying it's government mandated, but it seems to be, uh,
01:27:09
universal industry standard they put this ridiculous high amount wow all food and if and if it's not liver then it's just artificial uh yeah well no wonder so many people's animals are sick um yeah yeah and so so the other question was about um if you think they're more able to deal with this poison maybe because you know they would have had to eat more liver naturally than humans or something and i realize this speculation i don't know um yeah sorry i just don't know um
01:27:35
Okay, fair enough. And I wonder if you've seen studies on it as well. Because, so obviously, you talked about the studies with rats, mice and pigs. What about cattle? Do they feed it to like larger animals in higher doses? I don't know about cattle, but most certainly chickens. So, you know, any of the kind of factory farm chickens, they have really high numbers.
01:27:59
vitamin A concentrations in their feed, like the factory feed is juiced up on vitamin A big time here at least in North America.
01:28:07
I don't know about cattle, but cattle you wouldn't really need. They're constantly eating grass, which is high in carotenoids. So they're going to get, if you assume that this is a vitamin, they're going to get a lot of it in their natural grass feed. So you mentioned earlier, Gron, about how some of the other poisons that I mentioned, like maybe mold or heavy metals, might interact with vitamin A in the sense that together they would…
01:28:34
make the situation worse. And it could be an explanatory, it could be the hidden variable, right? It could be an explanatory model or an explanation, maybe not the only one, but why a bunch of people can live in a house and one of them or two of them get really sick with mold and one or two of them don't, you know, it's because of the toxic load they have to deal with. Another
01:28:54
obviously variable would be how well they're able to process the toxins, but it definitely could be another variable. Absolutely. So what would you say in your experience, if you have any, are like other toxins that you see often go hand in hand with vitamin A toxicity that make it worse? Is there anything in particular? Well, you know, glyphosate has been on kind of my radar for quite a while. So I've seen some documentation that glyphosate is impeding
01:29:22
the vitamin A detoxification process. So glyphosate could be a pretty important factor. I haven't looked at it at all really in depth. It's on my to-do list and I'm actually really quite interested in that topic. I just haven't had the cycles to look at it. So that's one. But
01:29:42
And I think, you know, the way a lot of these toxins work is they damage DNA. And so vitamin A is damaging DNA. Other toxins are damaging DNA. And, you know, it's, you know, once that happens and, you know, things start to break
01:29:55
breakdown excellent i can ask you about uh is it glucorolidation because so retinoic acid is the most poisonous form of vitamin a right am i right in saying that glucorolidation is the process by which the body would convert that into something that can actually be excreted from the body yes yeah i think that's correct and so retinol acid goes through this enzyme called um
01:30:21
it's kind of cytochrome p450 and enzymes and this there's a whole group of those enzymes under that kind of umbrella uh categorization so they're involved in the detoxification of retinoic acid um i you know if early on i was kind of looking for quote an antidote i've never found anything that i would consider an antidote to retinoic acid you know i think we're just kind of
01:30:49
Right now I'm in the position where I think it's just time, right? Time is really the kind of the biggest factor in recovering. It's my opinion. Okay. But theoretically, anything that genuinely supported the activity of glucuronidation could speed up the process, theoretically. I think so. Yeah, theoretically. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Very, very interesting. And so from your point of view, I don't know if you want to answer this, please tell me if you don't, but…
01:31:17
Is there any practical advice you would give to people who are considering reducing their vitamin A significantly? Yeah, I'll take a shot at that.
01:31:32
I'm in this for almost nine years. My goal is to go 10 years with no vitamin A in my diet. And the reason I'm doing that now, I'm like, my health is really good, so I don't need to continue this restrictive diet. But I want to prove that a human can go 10 years with no vitamin A in their diet. To disprove this whole claim that this is a vitamin. So that's my personal mission.
01:31:54
But I'd highly recommend people do their own research, read what I've written and read. If you're really interested in long-term health and sustainability, long-term health, then I would put this at the very top of your reading list. And then if you…
01:32:13
come to the same conclusion that I'm coming to and other people are coming to, then you can kind of go from there. And I think once again, to repeat, just, you know, stay away from the big ticket items, the high vitamin A items, not to go too crazy. Now, if someone is really sick and got, has serious chronic disease, and, you know, this should be even higher on the priority list for reading. And then, you know, knowing that
01:32:37
You know, there's a whole bunch of people trying to reverse their chronic disease condition. You go to my forum and listen or read about what other people are doing and just kind of get in tune with what's going on there because it is a tricky, tricky process. So if you are
01:32:53
in a disease condition that you think is caused by vitamin A toxicity. I naively thought, okay, I'll just eliminate all the vitamin A from my diet and get out of this, which worked for me, but other people are going through a bumpy road. There are a lot of people that actually go through this process quite smoothly and do recover their health. There's a lot of people where it's much more difficult
01:33:16
non-predictable. And, and, you know, so I just put out a blog post like last week about avoiding this detox trap that some people find themselves in. So that's something that people need to be aware of. Like, it's not, it's not a simple straightforward process. Just reduce your vitamin A and turn around your health. It's,
01:33:37
You know, it's a long, bumpy road. And so if someone wanted to be safe or do the less like extreme version, but still listen to what you said here today, is a potential strategy… Like, is it the case, like a lot of the time…
01:33:55
If you realize that something is bad for you and then you completely remove it, your body's response to it is actually a lot stronger and it's better to just reduce it a bit slowly and gradually over time. Would you say this is an example of that in your experience? Absolutely. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. So a good analogy would be somebody who's a chronic alcoholic. If they quit cold turkey, they can get in very, very big trouble and maybe even die. So you've got to taper yourself off.
01:34:25
slowly off of this, the cold turkey route is not really advisable, especially if you're in a poor health condition. Yeah, it's true. - And the last question is about testing.
01:34:36
So I think I saw one of your articles that you have been doing some testing and you've got your levels of retinol down to a very low level. Have I remembered that correctly? Yeah. So that you can prove that human beings don't need it, basically, as you said earlier. Yeah. My ultimate goal is to get a vitamin A serum level that says 0.0. So the last one I did was I think four years ago now, and I was at 0.1.
01:35:03
So 0.7 is considered severely vitamin A deficient. So, you know, and I got an alert when I had my last one four years ago, it was 0.1, and, you know, recommendation, oh, my God, you're vitamin A deficient, you know, do something. So that's me personally. There's a lot of other people now that are doing their own vitamin A serum level tests, and it's, you know, it's a slow process. It's, you know, it's a very slow process for a lot of people. But for whatever reason, I'm very low, and I think by, you know,
01:35:32
my 10-year point. I hope to be at 0.0. And so, you know, that's my goal. And is this trans-retinol or what type of vitamin A? Okay. So if your viewers or readers don't know about, don't have a background in chemistry, you come across these terms, trans and cis. And they're
01:35:54
In this context, it's kind of meaningless. You don't need to get hung up on that. That's all it means is kind of what side of the isomer of the double bond is on. And so the other term is, you know, for your listeners, you'll come across, you know, this term isomer in chemistry. So an isomer is the same molecular structure. It's just got a different 3D spatial shape to it. And so people don't need to get hung up on, you know, all trans versus, you know,
01:36:21
All trans or all cis-retinoic acid, they're just variations to it. Well, I guess what I meant more is, is it beta-carotene you're testing? Is it retinol? Is it retinol? Is it retinoic acid? Oh, yeah. Oh, I see. No, when you go get a blood test, they will typically not ever…
01:36:36
Just maybe not ever. It would be a very unique demand to get a beta carotene serum level and retinol gas as far as… I've had beta carotene from a company called Genova Diagnostics and it was very high. And retinol was…
01:36:51
at the top of their reference range when I test it. Oh, okay. Yeah. If I went to my doctor here in Canada and asked them for beta carotenes to test, they'd just say, no, we don't do that. And same with retinoic acid, as far as I know, that's not generally available. So when you go get a blood serum level for vitamin A, what they're measuring is retinol, but
01:37:15
It's even more specific. So retinol that's in your serum is wrapped up in this, what's called a retinal binding protein. So this little…
01:37:25
encapsulation of it and you know what they do when they take the blood draw for the test they wash it out in cyclohexane and try to wash a retinal molecule out from that retinal binding protein and that's what they're measuring so the major retinol typically with a with a serum level test and even you know there's another one that you know would be nice to get a measure on this retinol esters but you know
01:37:49
that's not generally available either. To get a really clear picture of what's going on in serum, you'd need to measure all of those, which is out of reach for most people. I would say just don't even worry about it. I've only seen beta carotene and retinol, but retinol is much more cheap and easily available.
01:38:07
I'll put a link underneath for people in Europe at least where you can get it done fairly easily and order it yourself without a doctor for those who want to test. And so for those who test grants, as I said, mine was right at the top of the reference range. So that's pretty clear that I could do with some less, like no doctor is going to go, oh my God, you're not going to have enough, right? So that's pretty easy in my case. And same for my wife, it's right at the top of the reference range.
01:38:35
What about for someone who has a low in the reference range? Well, yeah. The other thing that people need to appreciate, you know, like your serum level of vitamin A is not a good indication of your tissue storage or your liver storage of vitamin A. It can be, you know, it's all over the map, right? So it's not the gold standard, I guess, for measuring how much vitamin A you have in your body. But yeah, you…
01:39:00
in the long term, you do want to reduce that serum level of vitamin A as best you can, I guess. There's people testing on my forum. It's like,
01:39:10
three years and it's very slow. It's amazingly slow progress, but anyway, it is what it is. As long as you feel better, that's the main thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time, Grant. You've been very generous. I would appreciate it if you send me those studies that you referenced today or as many of them as you're able to find. And for people who want to find out more, I think we've really spoken to this, but let's just summarize what will be their next steps. So I've…
01:39:38
Yeah, I've got a blog, ggeneru.blog, and I've got three e-books that other people can download. They're free. There's no charge. There's no hooks, nothing there, no advertising, completely free.
01:39:53
That's kind of my chronology of going through this process and this very layman perspective on this. Then if you look at the reference studies that I'll send in the link. And also there's another fellow that I would highly recommend you look at. His name is Anthony Mawson. So he's been a long-term vitamin A researcher. He's at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. He's got about 20 papers on vitamin A toxicity and associating with a lot of different disease conditions.
01:40:21
A lot of kind of focus on diabetes. So that would be kind of mainstream academic research that you could read to get another perspective on it.
01:40:33
yeah i guess that's about it thank you and i just want to say how much uh i appreciate that you're making that available for free to everyone um and there's no upsells there's no there's no there's no sales i think there's no there's no way of buying anything on your website if you if you wanted to well you know what it's kind of funny i put up a little merch thing to maybe try to pay for my uh okay my hosting service on my blog okay but not a single person has purchased a single item so i
01:41:02
I haven't made a dime off of this, so not a dime. Maybe do a donate thing with the books I would recommend so then people can show their appreciation that way. Yeah. I'm not in it for the money. This is just me trying to get the message out. That's the main thing I wanted to emphasize. Yeah. So Grant is absolutely – whether you agree with him or not, you can be absolutely certain that he's not saying it. He's not trying to sell you anything of any kind. He's doing this because –
01:41:30
he cares and he believes it's the right thing and that in itself is a fairly rare thing in this world so thank you very much for caring enough um to not just find this out but uh put it out there yeah no my pleasure i think uh you know my perspective is that you know i'm older right i'm 63 and you know when i was in my 40s you know like my expectation was that
01:41:56
historical expectation in Canada was, you know, people in Canada don't get sick until their mid-80s or 90s, and they're generally doing pretty well in their older age. And now I've seen that completely reversed. Like people are, you know, a lot of people are very sick by, you know, 60, 65. And so I believe, you know, this downturn in health in North America is devastating. And so whatever I can do to, you know, my two cents worth, I'm trying to
01:42:25
put a little dent in that is part of my mission. Well, thank you. I hope that we can magnify your message over time and make it into a big dent because I think this is something the world needs to hear. It may not be the only health issue that we face, right? But it could be that
01:42:41
missing link that thing where you've tried so many other things and you think you're living healthy and you think you're eating the right thing and all the rest of it and you're still not where you want to be this may well be the thing if you've tried a lot of the more you know obvious stuff that could be your Achilles heel so that's why I wanted to bring it to you
01:43:01
as soon as possible. As I said, I've witnessed my cat spontaneously become completely healed from it. Could be a coincidence or whatever. But as I said, she had several months of limping, not getting better, and then just suddenly completely transformed after a few weeks of not having vitamin A. And for myself, I had this chronic health issue for several years of pain in my gallbladder.
01:43:24
which has diminished more and more, the less and less vitamin A I've had. So I'm, you know, what's the words? Not convinced 100% yet, but I feel that what you said makes a lot of sense in theory. And I'm starting to see some very interesting results
01:43:45
results in practice. And as you said, looking at your forum, listening to a lot of other people who have had the experience and not every single person, as you said, gets better immediately. It's not about that. But if you know, statistics are much better than anecdotes, and you've done a good job of collecting those statistics with those surveys on your site. And you can see that overall, the trend is that people feel, you know, very significantly better in a huge variety of different ways.
01:44:13
when they try this approach. So I recommend again that people check that out. So thank you very much for your time, Karan. I very much appreciate it. My pleasure. And thank you for helping get the message out. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you did, I want to tell you about a way that you can support the podcast while also getting great deals on high quality supplements that Ellen and I personally use. And that's Feel Younger.
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Edit:2025.04.29