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Alyssa Luck

Alyssa Luck

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Vitamin A Detox Diet for Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease

Alyssa Luck · Jul 9, 2022 · 2 Comments

I have not yet had time to delve as deeply into this theory as I’d like, so in a moment I’ll be directing you to other sources for your own exploration, but I wanted to give a brief introduction to the topic and a few of my own thoughts.

Back in 2014, a man named Grant Genereux (an engineer, unassociated with the science or medical fields) introduced a radical new hypothesis about the underlying cause of eczema, which he later expanded to include all autoimmune diseases and most other “diseases of Western civilization” as well: vitamin A toxicity. He even goes so far as to argue that vitamin A is not a vitamin at all, but a toxin.

He himself has now maintained an essentially no-vitamin-A diet for 7 years, both to prove a point that vitamin A is not, in fact, an essential nutrient, and to maintain the significant health benefits he’s realized by avoiding vitamin-A-containing foods. (Notably, his own diet has consisted of three foods – beef, rice, and black beans – for years, so obviously there could be mechanisms at play other than vitamin A status. Regardless, he explicitly does not recommend that others follow such a restrictive diet.)

He’s written two free eBooks that contain his hypotheses in detail, plus the associated research to back them up. Unfortunately, his blog isn’t very easily navigable, and from what I can tell, the “vitamin A detox” community lives primarily in the discussion forums on his blog. As an outsider being exposed to the concept for the first time, there isn’t a great way to get your bearings.

Dr. Garrett Smith seems to have capitalized on this gap by creating an online program/membership space called “Love Your Liver” ($99.99/year as of July 2022) that guides you through the vitamin A detox process. By contrast, I don’t believe Genereux has ever attempted to make a cent off of his work.

Admittedly I’m fuzzy on the connection between these two – I know Dr. Smith is active on Genereux’s forums, but I don’t know what level of collaboration might exist there.

As for the hypothesis itself, I’m a bit skeptical, but I’m intrigued. I’m loathe to re-categorize vitamin A as a toxin, if only based on the historical consumption of vitamin A rich foods like liver (as you know, I think there’s much wisdom in traditional food practices), but he brings up a lot of interesting research, and there are certainly anecdotal reports of success with a wide array of health conditions.

I’m also intrigued by the overlap with the bean protocol. Although the emphasis of “allowed” and “restricted” foods differs significantly between the two diets, the increasing emphasis in the vitamin A detox community on soluble fiber to help with elimination of excess vitamin A through the bile (plus Genereux’s inclusion of black beans in his own limited diet) makes me wonder if the two protocols are built around the same nugget of truth.

The vitamin A detox community has also recently addressed the topic of stearic acid, ultimately leading to recommendations to avoid coconut oil, cocoa butter, beef fat, and other highly saturated fats. This creates another parallel between the two protocols.

Given my own initial success with the bean protocol, as well as some other recent experiences I’ll share more about at some point, the vitamin A toxicity theory of autoimmune disease is currently of interest to me, and I hope to delve more deeply into the theory in the coming months.

For now, I’ll direct you to this page from Eat Beautiful for a primer on Genereux’s theory and the vitamin A detox diet. This is the first time I’ve ever been to that website and I don’t know anything about the author, so I can’t vouch for her, but from what I can tell, she’s done a lovely job summarizing all the main points, and it’s the most thorough write-up I can find online at this time.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the whole vitamin A thing is a hypothesis – keep your skeptic hat on and don’t let yourself get sucked into a new dogma with a new set of food fears. I have a great deal of respect for Genereux for the amount of time and research he’s put into this topic, and his obvious disinclination to profit from it in any way, but that doesn’t mean he’s right.

Remember that humans have been eating vitamin A- (and carotenoid-)containing foods since humans existed (and as one commenter below pointed out, we have pathways to convert carotenoids into vitamin A), so the likelihood that Genereux is correct about vitamin A being a toxin seems extraordinarily low. But that doesn’t mean that vitamin A couldn’t still cause problems in certain contexts.

In any case, I’ll update this post once I’ve had time to do my own digging. For now, if you have any thoughts or experience with a vitamin A detox diet, I’d love to hear about it! Feel free to share below.

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Comments

  1. Adrian says

    September 13, 2022 at 5:58 am

    To be honest it doesnt make sense to me, because the body itself produces vitamin a out of carotenoids. So even if you dont consume any dietary Vitamin A your body will still produce Vitamin A through the internal conversion of carotenoids.

    Reply
    • Alyssa Luck says

      September 13, 2022 at 7:03 pm

      Great point! I added mention of that to the above post. Just to be clear, I don’t think vitamin A is a toxin, but I do think there could be something to the idea that dysfunctional vitamin A-related activity could be involved in autoimmune disease. And it is interesting how long some of these people can go without consuming any vitamin A (or carotenoids) at all.

      Reply

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Hi! I’m Alyssa. I like thunderstorms and cats, hate wearing shoes, and enjoy devising extensive research projects for myself in my free time. This is me in Bali with a monkey on my shoulder. And this is my blog, where I muse about health-related topics and document my relentless self-guinea pigging. If you want to know more about me, click here!

alyssa.luck

alyssa.luck
Photo dump from the last year. Thanks to everyone Photo dump from the last year. Thanks to everyone who made 28 the best yet - excited for 29🥰

(PS. In case anyone wants to know what it’s like in my head, I was going to write something like “year 28” or “my 28th year” but then I realized that the year between your 28th and 29th birthdays is not your 28th year of life, it’s your 29th year. I am turning 29 because I have been alive for 29 years. So then I had a whole thing about how to word it without being inaccurate and ended up going with what you see above which is vague and weird but the point is it was a good year and I love all the people in my life dearly)
Biology of Belief (2005) was written by Bruce Lipt Biology of Belief (2005) was written by Bruce Lipton, who earned a PhD in developmental biology in 1971 and was an anatomy professor and academic researcher in the 70s and 80s. Despite the book's presentation and Lipton's background, this is not a science book. It is an exposition of an ideology, supported by haphazard and poorly contextualized nuggets of evidence, rhetorical leaps, and a mind-boggling overuse of analogies. 

The book largely failed to deliver on its promised content. What it does is argue for the primacy of the environment over DNA in controlling life; propose that the cell membrane rather than the nucleus is the "brain" of the cell; invoke quantum physics to explain why modern medicine fails; explain that our behavior is largely controlled by our subconscious mind; inform parents that they therefore have a great deal of control over the destiny of their children; and conclude that humans must become nonviolent protectors of the environment and of humanity because Everything Is Connected.

It’s not that these points aren’t relevant to the topic at hand - they are. But they were not connected in a coherent way that would explain how “belief” actually works (like…biologically), and the treatment of scientific concepts throughout was careless, or perhaps disingenuous.

I think he's correct about many things, some of them being common knowledge. For instance, the "new" science of epigenetics is now old news, as is the critical role of parenting and early environment in shaping a child’s future. But however important these and attendant concepts may be, the book did not do a good job explaining, supporting, or connecting them. 

As far as practical guidance, he refers the reader to a list of resources on his website, which is fine, but I expected some scientific insight into how/why those modalities work. None was given. 

On the plus side, the book was quite thought-provoking, and I came away with loads of references and topics to follow up on. My favorite line? "There cannot be exceptions to a theory; exceptions simply mean that a theory is not fully correct."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (section 382) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (section 382), as quoted in the introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra because I like the translation better.
This paper totally changed the way I think about e This paper totally changed the way I think about early nervous system development and the relationship between physiology and sociality. 

The authors propose that newborn babies are not inherently social, and have just one goal in life: physiological homeostasis. I.e. staying alive. This means nutrients, warmth, and regulation of breath and heart rate, i.e. autonomic arousal (it’s well-accepted that newborns sync their breathing and heart rate with caregivers through skin to skin contact). 

All these things are traditionally provided by a loving caregiver. So what the baby experiences during the first weeks of life, over and over, is a shift from physiological perturbation to homeostasis (a highly rewarding event inherently) REPEATEDLY PAIRED with things like the sound of a caregiver’s voice and seeing their face. Thus, over time, the face/voice stimuli become rewarding as well. 

The authors argue that THIS is the beginning of humans’ wiring for sociality, and may explain why loving social interactions can have such a profound regulating effect on physiology throughout life: because the brain was trained for it at an early age. 

This framework holds all kinds of fascinating implications for what happens if that initial “training” isn’t so ideal. What if the return to nutritional homeostasis via feeding is paired with negative expressions and vocalizations rather than loving ones, perhaps as could occur with PPD? What happens if the caregiver has poor autonomic regulation, such that social stimuli become paired with cardiorespiratory overexcitement in the baby? Could that have potential for influencing later introversion vs extroversion? (Because if social interaction is paired with autonomic overexcitement, that could lead to social interaction literally being more energetically draining, which is what introverts experience. Thoughts?)

For my energy metabolism enthusiasts: Table 1 in the paper draws a link between metabolic rate and sociality across species. Swipe for a screenshot. 

Anyway, check out the paper! It’s free, just google “growing a social brain pdf.”
I’ll be under general anesthesia in a couple day I’ll be under general anesthesia in a couple days to have two tooth implants placed, and I think I’ll take the opportunity to have a little heart-to-heart with my subconscious mind. A bit of medically-assisted self-hypnosis, if you will. 

I randomly stumbled upon these papers a couple months ago - an RCT showing reduced post-op pain in patients who listened to recorded positive messages while under general anesthesia, plus a post-hoc analysis of the same data that found reduced post-op nausea and vomiting in a subset of high-risk patients. 

The full review paper from the first slide is unfortunately in German, but it has long been recognized that even when unconscious, the patient is listening (for better or for worse). 

It boggles my mind that it isn’t standard of care to have patients listen to recordings like this while under sedation, considering that almost nothing could be easier, safer, or cheaper, and we have at least some evidence of significant efficacy. I mean c’mon, what more could you want from an intervention? 

(Yeah, I know. Profit. If anyone still thinks that our medical system operates with patient well-being as the foremost goal, you’re deluding yourself.)

“There should be a fundamental change in the way patients are treated in the operating room and intensive care unit, and background noise and careless conversations should be eliminated.”

“Perhaps it is now time to finally heed this call and to use communication with unconscious patients that goes beyond the most necessary announcement of interventions and is therapeutically effective through positive suggestions. When in doubt, assume that the patient is listening.”
If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have y If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have you moving your eyes or tilting your head, you've probably encountered the work of Stanley Rosenberg. The exercises he created and introduced in his 2017 book now appear in instructional videos all over the internet. 
 
The book itself has much to recommend it: it's accessible, it's practical, it's inspiring. But it has one major flaw: the solid practical and informational content regarding the cranial nerves is framed in terms of the scientifically dubious polyvagal theory. 
 
I particularly enjoyed the book as an introduction to the therapeutic arena of bodywork, of which Rosenberg is a skilled practitioner. His book is full of case reports that demonstrate how immensely powerful extremely subtle movements and physical manipulations can be. These do need to be kept in perspective: it's a small sample size of the most remarkable cases, and the results were achieved within the supportive clinical environment of a skilled practitioner. You can tell from his descriptions how refined his technique is. But nevertheless, it was a paradigm-shifting read for me, and the exercises give you something concrete to play around with. 
 
The book also brought the cranial nerves and the concept of “social engagement” to the fore as arbiters of health. Rosenberg has a solid background in cranial nerve anatomy and shares many interesting tidbits and considerations that you don’t typically hear; for instance, the potential impact of dental and orthodontic work on cranial nerve function.
 
So, is it worth reading? If any of the above piques your interest, go for it! Just read my post on polyvagal theory first – you can use the book to practice separating the wheat (solid informational content) from the chaff (pseudoscientific framing). If nothing else, the book is a nice reminder that genuine healers who get lasting results for their patients do exist.

But if you just want to try the exercises, you can easily find them all on YouTube. 

“You learn techniques to understand principles. When you understand the principles, you will create your own techniques.” -Stanley Rosenberg
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