Loading ...What is Vitamin A?
Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, knew 24 centuries ago this that eating beef liver helped with failing eyesight. What was not known then is known today, that beef liver contains high amounts of Vitamin A.
Vitamin A was the first vitamin to be discovered by a researcher named E. V. McCollum. He was doing experiments on colonies of rats in the basement of an agricultural hall. He was feeding rats a diet of pure protein, pure skim milk, sugar, minerals and lard or olive oil for fats. When he did this the rats failed to grow. He then added butterfat or extract of egg yolk to the diet and their health and growth was restored. He realized after some time that there was a fat soluble component contain in the fats that he named “fat soluble factor A”.
What does Vitamin A do in the body?
Vitamin A helps keep skin looking healthy and vibrant. Vitamin A is a crucial component that the body needs for growth and immune function. With a depressed immune system, you leave yourself open to infection and if prolonged long enough you can develop things like Chronic Fatigue Syndrom. Infection will rapidly deplete the liver of its vitamin A reserve. Vitamin A helps fight general infection and illness by helping the epithelial tissues of the body stay healthy, and by boosting the body to build more helper T cells. Epithelial tissues are the cells that line your skin, eyes, mouth, throat, nose, lungs, digestive tract and urinary tract. Keeping the epithelial tissues healthy is crucial as the first line of defense for your body, thus helping to keep invaders out in the first place.
For example: after surgery, the body’s inventory of lymphocytes does NOT decrease (as it otherwise will) when large doses of Vitamin A are given. (Cohen, B. et al: Reversal of Postoperative Immunosuppression in Man by Vitamin A,” Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, 149:658-662, 1979.)
Vitamin A is needed to grow and maintain healthy bones and teeth, healthy eyes, and to keep the thyroid properly functioning. Vitamin A is needed to convert light energy to nerve signals for the brain to interpret as sight. The first signs of Vitamin A deficiency in the eyes is Night Blindness. Deficiency also causes Bitol spots, which develop on the exterior of the eye and can cause severe dryness. If the deficiency isn’t corrected, it can lead to things like cataracts and blindness.
Retinol and retinoic acid (RA) are essential for embryonic development. Both Vitamin A excess and deficiency are known to cause birth defects. During fetal development, RA functions in limb development and formation of the heart, eyes, and ears. Additionally, RA has been found to regulate expression of the gene for growth hormone. – Linus Pauling Institute
Today’s lack of whole quality dairy products, lack of consuming raw organ meats, and lack of using no animal fats in cooking (which all contain Vitamin A along with a multitude of other nutrients) all have contributed to the latest physical degeneration and suffering that we have all become accustomed to in our world over the last 150 years. Honestly, we need to get back to the way food used to be raised and prepared if we are to turn this nation away from the downward slope that everyone is on.
What affects Vitamin A absorption?
Lightly cooking vegetables usually helps the body absorb more Vitamin A, because it makes more of it available by breaking down the cellular walls. Fats in the diet play a key role in absorption of Vitamin A. Eating meals in general along with fats helps break down and absorb nutrients, and fats are your bodies best source of energy to begin with. Zinc helps transport Vitamin A around the body, while Selenium and Vitamin E help the Vitamin A to work more effectively. Vitamin D protects against the toxicity of Vitamin A as well as the other way around, so much so that studies show that up to 2,300UI of pure natural Vitamin A per kilogram of body weight can be taken when there is enough D present along with it! This is remarkable as this equates to over 100,000UI for the average adult per day.
Liver disease, cystic fibrosis chronic diarrhea, alcohol abuse, smoking, birth control, chronic infection, stress, drugs that lower Cholesterol and bile production, and the drug methotrexate all will lower your Vitamin A levels within the body. Vitamin A stores can be quickly depleted while exercising, if you are sick with a fever and during periods of stress.
Physical exercise, consumption of alcohol, excessive consumption of iron (especially from “fortified” white flour and breakfast cereal), use of a number of popular drugs, excessive consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids, zinc deficiency and even cold weather can hinder the conversion of carotenes to Vitamin A,7 as does the lowfat diet. – Weston A. Price Foundation
High-protein, lowfat diets are especially dangerous because protein consumption rapidly depletes vitamin-A stores. Children brought up on high-protein, lowfat diets often experience rapid growth. The results-tall, myopic, lanky individuals with crowded teeth, and poor bone structure, a kind of Ichabod Crane syndrome-are a fixture in America. High-protein, lowfat diets can even cause blindness as occurred once in Guatemala where huge amounts of instant nonfat dry milk were donated in a food relief program.11 The people who consumed the dried milk went blind. Primitive peoples understood this principle instinctively, which is why they never ate lean meat and always consumed the organ meats of the animals that served them for food. – Weston A. Price Foundation
What forms of Vitamin A are there?
Vitamin A itself, called preformed Vitamin A, is found as Retinol, Retinaldehyde, and retinoic acid. Pure Vitamin A can be used instantly in the body with no conversion necessary. Natural preformed versions of Vitamin A have about an 80% bioavailability. Vitamin A doesn’t only come from the forms listed previously, it can also be found when your body converts it from Carotenes. Carotenes are plant based components and can be converted to Vitamin A via bile salts in the intestines. It is wise to eat fats with your meal as a general rule to boost your bile salt production, thus making more nutrients available to you and in this case more Vitamin A.
Carotenes will be converted at any given time if you need Vitamin A, otherwise they circulate in your blood and get stored in the body while acting as antioxidants. Carotenes can also be stored in fat tissue if they are not needed for conversion, acting as antioxidants for your fat stores. This is crucial because toxins like to get stored in your fat cells creating many free radicals. Antioxidants lessen this affect of free radicals creation as well as the damage that they do.
Carotenes are what give red, yellow, and orange foods their color. There are different types of carotenes, but the major 2 that can be converted into Vitamin A are Alpha and Beta Carotene. Beta Carotene is much more prevalent in foods but Alpha Carotene is as much as 10x as effective in antioxidant power. Beta Carotene has about a 40% bioavailability. The conversion of carotenes in the blood is accomplished in the small intestine where a certain enzyme splits the carotene molecule in half thus making 2 Vitamin A molecules. Once the carotene is stored in fat tissue, the liver is responsible for converting it into Vitamin A when needed.
One problem with just eating foods with carotenes and not Vitamin A is that even people who can efficiently convert carotenes into Vitamin A cannot adequately replenish Vitamin A stores simply from just plant foods. To be healthy you need to have a true form of Vitamin A along with carotenes for the best results.
What are natural sources that contain Vitamin A?
1 large raw carrot has up to 8,000UI of Vitamin A in it. Various animal livers, red and yellow foods, egg yolk, milk, butter, small fish, dark green vegetables, red palm oil, and cheeses all contain Vitamin A. The highest amounts of Vitamin A can come from things like raw beef or chicken liver, cooked sweet potato, winter squash, cooked spinach, corn kernels, cooked kale and raw carrots. Breast milk is the best natural source for babies to get Vitamin A.
Animal fats contain Vitamin A, and Vitamin A is present in large amounts only when the animals have a source of carotenes or Vitamin A in the diet, such as green pasture, insects and fish meal. This is just 1 of many reasons to get online, find a farm near you, get rid of your conventional products and order pastured meat and dairy products. You won’t regret it. Pastured meat and dairy products are so much more healthy for you vs. conventional products and do not contain any toxins. They also have way more nutritional value to them, something the diets of today lack. You have probably heard sources say that red meat causes cancer, and I know that it in fact does BUT only the conventional red meat causes cancer, not true pastured products like what people used to eat.
How much do you need?
Vitamin A has been labeled as toxic in even the smallest amounts. This is just plain wrong. Just to show you the amount of quackery going on, read the following from the Weston A. Price foundation.
Recently an “expert” panel recommended lowering the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for Vitamin A from the current 5000 IU daily to about 2500 IU and has set an upper limit of about 10,000 IUs for women. The panel was headed by Dr. Robert Russell of Tufts University, who warned that intake over the “upper limit” may cause irreversible liver damage and birth defects-a ridiculous statement in view of the fact that just a few decades ago pregnant women were routinely advised to take cod liver oil daily and eat liver several times per week. One tablespoon of cod liver oil contains at least 15,000 IU and one serving of beef liver can contain up to 40,000 IU Vitamin A. Russell epitomizes the establishment view when he insists that vitamin-A requirements can be met with one-half cup of carrots daily.
2500UI can cause irreversible damage to the liver and cause birth defects? I think not. Eskimos eat seal blubber and polar bear liver, which contain over 100,000UI per serving. Are they dieing off left and right? I think not. Have you ever ate raw carrots before? If so then how much at one time did you eat? Probably a lot right? 1 large raw carrot contains roughly 8000UI. I can juice a whole 2 pound bag of carrots and drink it in one sitting. Do I have liver damage? I think not. Get a lot of Vitamin A from eating whole unprocessed foods and it WILL NOT be toxic in any way. This is because eating whole foods contain all of the other nutrients needed to properly handle however much Vitamin A there is naturally in the food. Aside from downing a whole bottle of fermented cod liver oil, I think you will be safe with some real Vitamin A containing foods in your diet, like carrots and unprocessed CLO.
Beta Carotene as a good way to get some more Vitamin A in your diet if you are lacking it. Beta Carotene is virtually nontoxic, so much so that even if you store enough in your fatty tissues to turn yourself yellow you will not have any toxic effect from it. This condition is called “Carotenosis” and is harmless. If you turn yellow you can cut back and the color will fade over a few weeks. This makes Beta Carotene a triple win for antioxidant power, Vitamin A maintenance and safety.
Having too much Preformed Vitamin A for extended periods of time can produce toxic effects. Something you should get used to is that the word “Toxic” does not mean death. Toxicity can be something as simple as a headache. These include blurred vision, bone pain, headaches, diarrhea, loss of appetite, skin dryness and muscle weakness. Vitamin D found in unprocessed cod liver oil and butterfat from pasture-raised animals protects against Vitamin A toxicity, allowing one to consume much more Vitamin A before it becomes by any means toxic. Moderate amounts of Vitamin D increase the body’s need for Vitamin A, so unprocessed cod liver oil is the best source of both. Many brands of cod liver oil remove the Vitamin A and D during processing, and then add back synthetic versions. You want to order unprocessed and fermented cod liver oil if you can, which shouldn’t be a problem in most countries. The highest quality Cod Liver Oil that you can find is from the GreenPasture.org site. They sell fermented CLO, which brings out the nutrients so that they are more bioavailable. They also sell the X factor butter oil, which is a whole other topic all in itself. Both products are extremely powerful towards restoring health when they are used together. The Weston A. Price Foundation has all of the information that you need to learn about these things.
Children have a lower threshold than adults before Vitamin A toxicity. Most importantly, using synthetic versions of Vitamin A will produce toxic effects much sooner than using natural Vitamin A. Synthetic versions of anything in general cause toxicity by themselves because they are altered versions of natural components.
Consumers are mistakenly warned by the US Food and Drug Administration that excessive Vitamin A supplementation can produce a toxic liver buildup. However, an estimated 30-60 cases of Vitamin A overdose are reported annually, while over a million older Americans report symptoms of night vision problems due to a lack of Vitamin A. Cases of liver/Vitamin A toxicity often involve alcoholics and others who have liver disease. Vitamin A toxicity is completely reversible. The US FDA has only chosen to warn doctors and consumers of the potential for Vitamin A overdose without a balanced reporting on Vitamin A deficiencies. The only reported case of mortality from Vitamin A toxicity involved a hunter in Canada who consumed bear liver, which provided over 1 million units of Vitamin A. -DoctorYourself
MISC facts about Vitamin A
The conversion factors for Vitamin A are all screwed up, try to follow me here. Vitamin A is measured in Retinol Equivalent (RE) units. 1 mcg (microgram) of preformed Vitamin A is equivalent to 1 Retinol Equivalent (RE). 2 mcg of supplemented Beta Carotene in oil is equal to 1 RE, 6 mcg of dietary Beta Carotene is equal to 1 RE, and 12 mcg of Alpha Carotene is equivalent to 1 RE. RE is the standard measure, yet manufacturers still use IU as their unit of measure. To figure out UI to RE, you need to divide the UI by 5. So this means that the 10,000 UI Beta Carotene supplement that I take is equivalent to 2,000 RE.
A baby’s tooth enamel is constructed in the womb. Ameloblasts adequately form the enamel in the fetus only if Mom gets enough Vitamin A. Carotene is best because too much fish oil Vitamin A (over 25,000 IU daily for many weeks) can be harmful during pregnancy. All green and orange vegetables and, of course, carrot juice are ideal. You cannot easily harm Mother or child with produce. - DoctorYourself
A 4 year study showed that supplementing Vitamin A and Beta Carotene in people that were exposed to asbestos and who smoked had a 28% higher incident of lung cancer.
The studies showed high amounts of beta carotene to have no affect or to increase your chances of developing lung cancer if you fall in these groups. They think that it has to do with supplementing with only Beta Carotene in the study and not eating a diet rich in the entire natural Carotene complex. The study did not test non-smokers.
The Weston A. Price foundation states the following – Food manufacturers are allowed to label foods only containing carotenes as “Vitamin A”. A can of tomatoes for example are labeled with having Vitamin A, yet there is no Vitamin A in them except for the microscopic insect parts that it contains.
Diabetics would do good with high amounts of Vitamin A, as it helps prevent the degenerative conditions associated with it such as blindness and fighting infections. Patients with Muscular Dystrophy show positive results with ample amounts of Vitamin A along with other nutrients.
Vitamin-A deficiency in pregnant mothers results in offspring with eye defects, displaced kidneys, harelip, cleft palate and abnormalities of the heart and larger blood vessels.
I would like everyone to visit the Weston A. Price Foundations site when they get some time. This Foundation is something that you cannot afford to ignore. These people have the FACTS regarding nutrition, and it would be wise for you to spend a lot of time getting familiar with them. They are terrific people that have continued the work of Dr. Weston A Price, and continue to this day to preach real solutions.