🚨 The Vitamin A Lie: Is your 'healthy' diet secretly toxic? 🍎 Thor Torrens drops mind-blowing truths about vitamin A toxicity and how it's affecting millions. 😱 From fortified foods to supplements, discover why this 'essential nutrient' might be
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How are people becoming vitamin a toxic? In 1970, they decided mandate fortification programs of dairy, cereals, grains, baby formula. Ten years later, starting in 1980, you start to see all the autoimmune disease exponentially rise.
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All right, guys, Thor Torrens here. Today we're going to talk vitamin A, aren't we?
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Oh yeah.
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So you tweet about it every day. So yeah, break it down for everyone watching this because vitamin A is. You're not a fan of it, right?
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No, no. So it's an important topic. Vitamin A is not a vitamin. Okay? January this year I read this book called Poisoning for Profits by Grant Ginroux. And it changed my entire world. Basically. In 1970, we started. First of all, let's backtrack to the cornerstone research. In the early 1900s, Rockefeller research scientists, you know, evil white men discovered this vitamin, vitamin A. It was the first discovery before this, the word vitamin was really vital aminase, which was like protein, a macro, an essential. But then all of a sudden they had this chase, this discovery of, hey, Nobel Peace Prize patent and where there's a money grab, there's corruption, right? So there was a race to discover this hidden molecule inside food somehow we were all deficient in. So vitamin A was the first discovery. It's actually retinol, which is an alcohol. You see that ol at the end and it is a fat soluble toxin. So what does that mean? Your liver can get too much of it. You have a quota. They quietly tell you, hey, the RDA is 3,000 IUs a day. None of us listen, none of us really care because it's a vitamin, right? When you think liver, when you think non alcoholic liver, when you think fatty liver, when you, when you think cirrhosis of the liver, you think drugs and alcohol, right? And some like other. The last thing you think is a vitamin. But a lot of women know and a lot of doctors that deal with pregnant women know, hey, vitamin A causes birth defects. So that was the first thing. When my wife had our first child, she didn't want to take a multivitamin with vitamin A in it, a pre, a prenatal. And I was like, okay, yeah, you know, she's like, it causes birth defects. Never thought anything else of it. Didn't realize that me being a health nut, I was doing liver, I was doing cod liver oil. Yeah, I was doing a multivitamin. I was eating a sweet potato every day, trying to eat a carrot salad, doing spinach or a dark leafy green, doing a red pepper. I was basically trying to check the Box every day with all the nutrients. And I overdosed. I became hypervitaminosis a vitamin A toxic.
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Wow.
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Which now it looks like one out of three people are vitamin A toxic. How are people becoming vitamin a toxic? In 1970, they decided mandate fortification programs of dairy, cereals, grains, baby formula. The low fat craze brought in the margarines and the low fat dairy. And 10 years later, starting in 1980, you start to see all the autoimmune disease exponentially rise. That was the first thing. Then they bring in sunscreens. Okay, in 1960, sunscreens began and they started adding vitamin A palmitate to the sunscreens. Then they started the acne medications. Accutane and Retin A are a massive way that our teenagers are becoming vitamin A toxic acutely. So you can become acutely vitamin A toxic and you can become chronically vitamin A toxic. So what is that? This is why it's a very gray area and a convoluted conversation. Because a guy at 55 years old, after 40 years of dairy every day, say he's doing 5,000 IUs a day, right? It's a math equation. Are you taking in more vitamin A than you're able to get rid of? So this guy, it might take him 30 years to become toxic and get an autoimmune disease where it's a lot less likely that that kind of person is going to put two and two together. Where if someone takes Accutane, this is basically isotretinoin, which by the way, your body converts all forms of vitamin A into some forms of this in the body. They're getting acutely poisoned. And that's why when you look at the side effects of accutane, it's like 50 different symptoms from irritability, angry, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression, dry skin, liver damage, like the list goes 50 things long. These are also the symptoms of vitamin A toxicity. And these are also the same symptoms of 50 different autoimmune conditions. So after reading this book, basically.
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He'S a genius engineer. He had chronic kidney disease, okay? Debilitating eczema, early onset dementia, and really bad joint pain. He was looking at going on dialysis. They said, you know, you don't have much time left. And he was looking at years of a steroid cream for his eczema that caused more cancer and side effects down the line. So he said, this makes no sense. And his doctor said, oh, it's nothing you ate. It's bad luck. It's genetics. There's no cure. You know, good luck, basically. So one night, he goes late at night onto an eczema for him, and he sees this thing called trigger foods. And he's like, that's weird. What's a trigger food? Oh, well, this is a food that if you eat it, your eczema gets worse. So he had put all this in a spreadsheet in a database because he's like a nerded out engineer. He's like, well, what do all these foods have in common, these trigger foods, okay? They all come up high in vitamin A. He's like, well, that's weird. This is this essential nutrient that we need for eyesight. He does a few hours of research and he's like, all right, well, if this is true, all I have to do is go on a low vitamin A diet and I can reverse everything I have wrong with me. Okay, well, what's the downside if this isn't real? Oh, I'll go blind. And he makes the decision. He's like, well, I would rather be blind than have this debilitating eczema. And be on dialysis. So he's like, let me roll the dice. So he goes on a super strict diet and he decides to eat bison, rice and beans, breakfast, lunch, dinner.
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Wow.
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Every day, 22 days in, he wakes up, no more joint pain. He's like, okay, we're onto something. Something's working. And he, because he was a maniac, he was looking at his eczema under a microscope and they have these like cone shaped blisters of the epithelial tissue of the epidermis. And he starts to see that his skin is basically no longer eating itself and that it's starting to stop. He's like, it's not getting better, but it's stopping. Two months in, he starts to see it reverse. Few months later, he goes to the kidney doctors and he is the first person the kidney doctors have ever seen to reverse stage three chronic kidney disease.
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Damn.
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Nine years later, no dialysis, no more eczema, a head of gray hair, reverse to brown.
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Whoa.
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Yeah. No more joint pain. And he has three books published. The one Poisoning for Profits, and they're all free ebooks on his website. And I had already been health coaching and working one on one with guys and some athletes, and I was already a health nut trying to figure out my own problems. And once I read this, I was like, oh my God, I have to pivot a lot of what I'm doing. Like, this makes total sense. Another way we're getting it is seasonal plants. We were not supposed to be eating colorful seasonal plants 365 days a year. So this is the double edged sword of capitalism and marketing. As you know, as we all know in the entrepreneur world is like anything and everything can be sold to us. And like, it doesn't matter what it's doing to us. All that matters is the profit margins of the people selling it.
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Right?
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Right. So we weren't supposed to be eating mangoes every day. You know, we're down here in south Florida, my neighbor has a mango tree. He's like, yeah, these mangoes come once a year. Oh, okay. So we were supposed to eat those once a year. But now, in the sake of health and this eat the rainbow diet. Eat the rainbow was brought to us by Sesame Street. Right. It had nothing. It was not from a health department. It was brought to us by Sesame Street. Why do they bring it from Sesame Street? Because if they can get the young kids, those kids grow up and they mold that brain. Right? So seasonal plants, salads, smoothies, another new thing, right? You go back to the 1990s, even the early 2000s, if you said, I'm having a smoothie for breakfast, people would be like, what is that? You know, now every single person, I have guys in my community who are like, well, what can I do for my smoothie? It's like, like, well, we're not doing smoothies. And if we do, here's how we would do it. So it's kind of like a high level breakdown of how the vitamin A things happen. There's a lot I'm leaving out, but that's kind of like a summary.
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Yeah, there's a lot there, man. I want to start with the carrots because as kids they tell us to eat that to have good vision, but that's a myth, right?
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Yeah. So the original carrot was white. Okay. The French made it orange to honor the Dutch flag. And then by domesticating it by cross breeding it, they realize that not only is the orange carrot sweeter, Right? So taste. But the colorful plant, the colorful orange, sells more than the white carrot. So the white carrot got phased out over time. So we were never supposed to be eating an orange carrot again. Once again, we're going against nature. For some people, you'd say you're going against God and you're going to pay the price for it. The myth of carrots being good for your eyesight started in World War II. The British pilots basically lied to the German side, the German pilots, saying that they were eating carrots to improve their night vision. With what we know now by all the research and studies, vitamin A actually hurts your night vision. Vitamin A actually hurts the epithelial tissue of your eyes and causes cataracts and deterioration. So it was a total lie. Not only in that hand, but again, just logically, this is something that didn't occur in nature. We didn't have the orange carrot in nature. And now we have every Tom, Dick and Harry online saying, have a carrot salad, drink your carrot juice. And it's just another thing we get people off of and then that we see a lot of results in them leveling up because of that.
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Steve Jobs used to drink a lot of carrot juice.
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Steve. Great point. So did you know that when Ashton Kutcher played Steve Jobs in the Bio Epic, Ashton Kutcher was hospitalized for pancreatitis.
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Holy crap.
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Because he tried to do the Steve Jobs diet and drink carrot juice every day. This is just more and more proof. There's an English guy in 1976, forgetting his name, overdosed and died of drinking, I think, 14 gallons of carrot juice in, like a two week period. He was also supplementing with vitamin A, but when the, when the police and ambulance found him, he was dead on the ground. Orange and yellow, basically. Dyed orange skin.
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Vitamin A is in all the multivitamins, right?
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Vitamin A is in all of, not all of them, but majority of them for some reason. Majority of multivitamins have 150 to 200% the RDA, which to me is insanity because, okay, experts are already telling you, you, you can get too much of this thing. There's an RDA, it's 3,000 IUs. Well then why are we putting double the RDA? And basically we're saying, don't eat another piece of food for the rest of the day. You've already reached your quota. So what I like to say is we're kind of health accountants, right? You have somebody doing the in and out with your wealth, you have someone tracking your expenses, you have someone tracking your in, who's tracking the intake of fat soluble toxins like vitamin A. So I had a guy the other day who joined our community. We tallied up all his nutrients. He was doing 20,000 IUs of vitamin A a day. You know, he had skin issues, he had migraines, he had irritability and anger issues. Because one thing that traditional Chinese medicine showed us is anger is housed in the liver. How many people are walking around angry and irritable, right? How many people realize like too much vitamin A is what's causing this in their liver? So it's another way, like, majority of people that I've interviewed that are in my community are like, I can't believe how much more calm and at peace I am and how much less anxiety I have just from eliminating vitamin A as much as I can. You can't eliminate vitamin A completely. It's in everything. There's only five foods that don't have it in it. And what we're saying, we're showing is like, hey, you have to be conscious of it. You have to realize that most health nuts are doing a high vitamin A diet. And this is why if you look in the health food stores, a lot of people look sick. You know, it's the people who. How many times do you hear it? The, the health guru, the person on supplements ends up getting a disease or cancer.
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Yeah.
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And they're like, look at this guy, he ate hamburgers and smoked cigarettes and he lived till 95. So because he was doing way less on his liver, he was keeping it super simple and boring. And what we're seeing is like the Picky eater was kind of right. You know, the kid who didn't want cheese and tomato and onion on his burger that we kind of all made fun of. He was actually right in a lot of ways.
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Wow.
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It's pretty interesting.
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That's crazy. Yeah. No, that's so spot on though because even like guys like Carnivore, Paul Saladino, he's having some health issues, right?
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So the carnivore thing works at first and it works for a lot of people because when you first start Carnivore, you're pretty much just eating muscle meat steaks, right? So you're going on a low vitamin A diet without even knowing that that's what you're doing. What happens is there's two things that go wrong with the Carnivore diet. Not enough soluble fiber and people compliance. People get bored, so they're like, well, can I eat eggs, can I eat liver, Can I eat raw dairy? Then you see the guys like Saladino and others, well now they're eating mangoes and color and watermelon and raw dairy and raw butter. So they go, at first, they make a smart decision, hey, I'm just going to do muscle meat. I'm going to have. That's a high zinc diet. It's a low vitamin A diet. Their skin problems get better, a lot of things get better. And then they start to play around and start to fine tune it and start to add a bunch of things and then soluble fiber. It's like, guys, we, our liver makes poop. That poop is called bile. That bile inter hepatic cycle. 20 to 70 times a day, that bile is circulated through our liver, through our blood. If you're not having soluble fiber to net onto those soluble toxins and get them into the toilet bowl, it's just circulating through your system.
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Geez.
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So this is called cholestasis. Cholestasis is basically, it's a stagnant bile, stagnant liver. It's basically in your blood. It's basically toxic. Bile is in your blood. This is migraines. This is also skin issues. You have three detox pathways. Poop, piss, skin and sweat. Well, when you're not pooping efficiently, when you're not eliminating and defecating efficiently, where does it start to go out in the skin. And when these toxins come out in the skin, it's not like they're going into the bowl and getting eliminated. Then they're just festering and hanging around. So this is why we've had so much success in Fixing skin problems, getting people regular. You look at the oldest family in the world, the malice family in Sardinia, I think they're 850 years old combined age. Every day they have a three bean soup.
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Wow.
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Yeah. So it hurts me to see that so many of these health gurus online are, oh, beans are. And oats are peasant food, right. And they villainize beans and oats because the lexins and. And the other things because they don't realize, they're really mad at what vitamin A and retinoic acid has done. So retinoic acid comes into the bile, that bile goes into the intestinal lining and it's basically like a chemical peel. Right. So a chemical peel, a yellow peel, a facial is what they give women to make their skin look young. Yeah, they call it a yellow peel. Vitamin A is yellow. It's a vitamin A peel. How it works, it basically burns off a layer of skin cell turnover. So what happens? You get a bunch of red skin and it hurts for five days, and then you're like, oh, my God, my skin looks new. But if you go back for rounds three, four and five, you get severely injured. Right? This is what people are doing to their gut linings over time. They're basically chemical peeling retinoic acid, vitamin A in their gut lining. And. And then they have issues with the gluten and the lectin and the oats and all these. Then they become intolerant, Right? So what we do, we had a guy, Weldon, on one of one's podcast, who, three years into a low vitamin A diet, reversed celiac, no longer celiac. You can have gluten again. So he restored his gut lining, he stopped the toxins coming in, fixed the deficiencies that those toxins caused, and now he can eat these foods that have been villainized that we've been eating for thousands of years. You know, 100 years ago, no one had a gluten problem. You know, no one even knew what gluten was. So it's just kind of another thing we're shining the light on. And the carnivore community, I respect greatly because they know the power of red meat. They want to get better, Everybody wants to get better. But it's like, hey, let's make sense of this all and let's. This is a huge piece of the puzzle that you guys are missing. And because it's fat soluble, because the liver accumulates it over time, a lot of people overlook it and don't get it right. The first time you drank alcohol, you didn't wake up with a hurt liver, you know, it's like 30, 40 years later where you're like, oh, now I feel a pain. Your liver takes pain. The blows for you silently, right? It's. They call fatty liver and cirrhosis the silent disease, you know, so it's a real thing.
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Absolutely. Dude. I was on Accutane for seven months. I had a blood test last year. I still have liver damage 10 years later.
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Yeah. So I'm help. Accutane survivors is what I call them, are some of our hardest to get better. And Accutane is a way. People are getting acutely poisoned by vitamin A. Our dermatologists are handing out Accutane like candy. It's a total crime against humanity. Another thing that's happening is when a woman, when a young lady is put on Accutane, she has to also go on birth control, and she has to sign a pledge that if she's to get pregnant, she has to have an abortion.
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Whoa.
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This is how toxic vitamin A is. Because they know that child will have severe birth defects.
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Damn.
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Now we can talk about. Okay, well, not just Accutane. If you have a high vitamin A diet. Now we're seeing this is why women are having miscarriages or this is why they're having fertility issues. Now we're seeing so many women in the low vitamin A community that all sudden are getting pregnant, all sudden don't have miscarriages. But the Accutane thing is, like, if you went on Accutane, I have people who are 20 years later, they're like, I still have chapped lips from Accutane.
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I still have them 10 years later.
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So it's time to check in. You know, I'll put you in our community. I'll show you the ropes. It's like how to fix yourself from Accutane. Low vitamin A diet. Then we do some blood tests. Then we do a hair mineral test. Because vitamin A is an antagonist to so many essential nutrients. Vitamin A blocks potassium channels. Vitamin A leeches calcium from the bones, causing osteoporosis. Vitamin A leeches zinc. Vitamin A leeches B12 and folate. Vitamin A leeches magnesium, which is a huge.
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All these were low, by the way, on my blood test that you're saying.
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So how can we call this thing a vitamin? Oh, it's an antagonist to vitamin D that was low.
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My Vitamin D was 22. Something super low.
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So what we're seeing is people don't have a vitamin D deficiency. They have a vitamin A toxicity. Right.
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I don't even think they measured vitamin A on my blood test.
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They don't measure it.
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I don't remember seeing.
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You have to ask for it.
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Wow.
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And many times they will not give it to you. Many times they'll say, well, what's your reason? Because they work. These doctors work for the insurance companies, right? So if they can't have a valid reason, they have to pay out of pocket. God forbid they pay out of pocket for their patient. Right? So what we're seeing is a lot of doctors do not work for us, the patient. They work for the insurance companies first, big pharma second, and then us third.
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Wow.
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Right. So it's a huge problem. And people are fed up. People are getting, I did a tweet the other day, what red pilled you for modern medicine, and there's like hundreds of replies of just horror stories. Yeah, Just people are getting fed up. People are looking for answers and then they're out on their own in this wild wild west of big supplement is like the new big pharma, right? Health guru biohacker is like the new doctor who's like, try this, try that. And the health guru biohacker is not taking people under their wing and like, holding their hand and walking them through it. They're like, hey, take these liver supplement. Oh, well, I took those liver pills and now I have eczema and I had to go to the hospital for ulcers. Oh, well, sorry, that must be your fault. It's like, no, guys, like, if you go on Amazon and you look at the number one selling liver supplement and you type in one star reviews, hundreds of people getting wrecked from hypervitaminosis A. And it's. My whole thing is like, as a health person, as a health coach, as a nutritionist, as a doctor, as a biohacker, if you are selling supplements, even if it's a safe supplement, that supplement's only going to work for 70 to 80% of people. There's going to be 20 or 30% of people. If you're not doing a blood test with them and a hair test with them, you can't just say, hey, take this at this amount and good luck. So even at a healthy mineral or vitamin, it's like, hey, if that didn't work for you, don't take it. Let's reassess, let's try something else. Let's look at your blood and hair, right? With these guys selling liver, they're like, oh, that didn't work for you. Now, like, read these studies. Like, that's your Problem. You know, someone sent me an email and of one of the liver companies targeting pregnant women.
B
Wow.
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Saying that liver is safe to take for pregnant women. First of all, vitamin A is known in the literature to cause birth defects. Liver is also high in copper, which a lot of people are copper. Toxic. We're seeing now. We'll get to that with the birth control conversation. You cannot tell. I cannot tell a pregnant woman, hey, this liver is going to be safe for you. Guess why. I have no idea how much vitamin A is in her liver already. The way it works is if your liver has reached full saturation, it's like a bucket in your backyard filled to the top with water. Any amount of water dropped into that is going to cause a spillover. So if we have a pregnant woman who's already at a saturation, I could never in a million years say, hey, it's safe to take liver. The answer is, hey, I have no idea if this is safe for you. And it's better to be cautious and just not do it because this is why so many babies are being born. I think 50% of babies now are being born jaundice. Wow.
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What's the 50%?
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What's the color of jaundice? Yellow.
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Hello.
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What's the color of vitamin A? Yellow. What's the color of non alcoholic fatty liver disease? Yellow. What are people with yellow eyes? Yellow hands, Yellow nail beds? So we're seeing a lot of it. You go to a plastic surgeon and you ask them about liposuction. All their healthy clients, their fat is yellow or orange. They'll tell you, oh my, I had a really healthy client today. The fat was bright orange. Vitamin A toxicity. Now we can get into the obesity topic. Why is obesity and vitamin A correlated your body? Once your body has had enough in the liver, it now is time to store toxins. Other places. What's another place the body can store toxins in the fat? So this is why I get mad and argue with a lot of guys on Twitter and online of, oh, it's calories in, calories out. Right. All you need to do is count calories. Well, if you're counting calories but you're still intaking consuming toxins, your body specifically, one person different, the other wants to store that somewhere. So for some people that could be like, hey, I'm going to keep these 15 pounds of fat on you for the rest of your life because this is saving your life from having toxins free in your bloodstream and killing you. Your body's going to pick the Slow death over the quick death. It's that simple.
B
Crazy. And a lot of these supplements are made in India and China too, right?
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Yeah. So that was another big problem. I was a big supplement guy, had a whole. I call it the supplement graveyard now, where I get a lot of clients and community members just throw majorities in the trash. What I found out is big supplement is basically the new big pharma. Ever since COVID we're seeing that more and more people have lost trust for modern medicine. Right. Where are they going? They're going to the supplements. I saw that the pharmaceutical companies are the ones who are making the supplements. And most of the supplements are being made in China. These companies in China are the Chinese government. That is communism. Right. So your supplements are being made by communists. They're getting paid a dollar an hour in some warehouse to make your supplements. Vitamin C is a big one they make, and a lot of times it's made from black mold cheese. And it's like, well, how is this nutrition if we're outsourcing it? And it's being made by communists for slave labor? And they have no regulations, they have no oversight. We have certain regulations and laws put in place, but nobody wants to be the vitamin cop, right? So you see it all the time. We had Ryan Garcia the other day tested positive for this, whatever it was. And a lot of times guys online will be like, oh, look, he was doping and he was taking stuff. And I look at it from a different lens where I'm like, he could have been taking some supplement and had no idea it was spiked with something. Like, that's a legitimate thing that's happening to a lot of people. So my whole thing now is like, we have to stop playing guessing games. We have to just stop throwing everything but the kitchen sink at our people. And the, the Hippocrates oath was do no harm. Like the founding father of medicine, Hippocrates. You know, there's an argument. Obviously there was people before that, but modern medicine in the west, his whole oath was do no harm. And we can't live by that oath if we are just like, hey, here's the 150 supplements I take a day. You should take those two.
B
Dave Asprey.
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Dave, Shots fired.
B
Brian Johnson.
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Brian Johnson's a big one. You know, Brian Johnson was a tech multimillionaire, I think. And all sudden now he's decided to get into the anti aging space, which is cool, whatever, I'm glad you care about your health. But now he's taking this marketing entrepreneur Mindset into sales of what he's doing. He's making the same the mistakes we made 20 years ago. Right. So it makes me mad to be like, I get it, you have big pockets, you can market, you can come on the tv, you can do the whole don't die thing. In no way is Health taking 150 pills a day. Our whole thing is like, let's stop the toxicities coming in, let's fix the deficiencies those toxicities caused. Once we fix your deficiencies and get those levels right now we're taking away supplements. This is the way it's supposed to be. Our grandfathers were not taking any supplements and their testosterone was twice of ours.
B
Right.
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You know, the over supplementation is another way that guys are destroying their livers over time. And if you look, you can type in PubMed multi ingredient supplements. Liver injury, it's the leading cause of liver injury in the hospitals.
B
Damn.
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Is multi ingredient supplements. So these guys have no idea what they're doing. It's blind leading the blind. They're playing total guessing games. Because the liver will accumulate over years. It's very hard to tell. You would need a liver biopsy. Right. And that's dangerous. People say, oh, my liver enzymes are fine. Your liver enzymes aren't going to start sounding the alarm until it's very late in the game. Right. So keep this in mind. Stay conscious of every day. I'm putting things through my system every day. My liver is my commander in chief who is filtering and allocating. And the more work, the more product I give my liver, the more stressed my liver will be. And this is why people in our community and my clients like energy levels through the roof, feeling better than ever. Because really we're just not taxing their liver like everyone else is.
B
Right.
A
Another thing Brian Johnson is doing totally wrong is he's eating colorful plants all day long, 365 days a year. Colorful plants, not natural. We were never. These are seasonal plants. You're supposed to eat them seasonally. And this is why you see him, oh, I still have joint pain or oh, I went out and I stayed out till 1am now and I'm wrecked. We're building resilient humans who even if you deviate for a day or two, it's not supposed to blow you off the rails like a little flower or snowflake where you can't, you know, you can't be thrive anymore. So he's making a lot of mistakes. He's doing a lot of high carotenoid foods. He's doing a lot of high chemical warfare plants and he's over supplementing and he's playing guessing games and he's afraid to go out in the sun, which is to me is like the definition of false light. Yeah.
B
He only leaves in the early morning and late night, I believe.
A
Yeah. Which is, listen, my whole thing is like, okay, will the sun damage your skin over time? Yes. It's balance in all things. Right. So just how we don't go out at. If you spent five years never being in the sun, I'm not going to be like, hey, go out at noon in south beach. No sunscreen. Right. It's like, hey, slow cook it in the morning, Slow cook it towards sunset and work your way up. Work up a base.
B
Yeah, absolutely. You also had a interesting take on parasite cleanses because I get videos for those every day.
A
Yeah. So I almost fell victim to the parasite cleanse thing. Listen, guys, it's this simple. Parasites, bugs, pathogens, where do they thrive? Stagnant wastewater. Right. You are either a cesspool of crap or you're an efficient plumbing system. So parasites are a proxy of a toxic human body. Right. So all these parasite cleanse and herbs and master cleanses are another thing people are doing to damage their liver. We had a guy, I think in your group chat, or a girl who was like, yes, and I recommend you do this four times a year, every year. It's like, you want me to take a parasite herb four times a year for the rest of my life? Have you looked at the long term data on what that does to the liver? How about we make the human body less toxic? And then parasites want nothing to do with you. Right. Parasites feed off dead waste. So if we clean up your liver, clean up your diet. Stop the nonsense over supplementation. A lot of people on the low vitamin A diet are saying, wow, I had parasites come out and I didn't even do any type of cleanse.
B
Wow.
A
And now I don't have any of the symptoms for life. So our whole thing is like, I do not want to be dependent on a parasite cleanse for the rest of my life. This makes zero sense. You know, and it's another way. It's the blind leading the blind. It's the wild wild west. What's great about our time is the entrepreneurs who are selling things online. What's bad about our time is the entrepreneur selling things online. You know, so we have to be super careful of like, do no harm. Why are you becoming famous on Instagram for selling parasite cleanses? Because people are scared. People are not healthy. You put this boogeyman, you are chasing symptoms, you are not getting to the root cause. And what we do gets to the root cause. And then it's like, hey, clean up your liver first. And then let's talk. Right? There's hospitals in the, in, in Europe and in Sweden and I think Germany and Russia, where they won't even give a drug or an herb or a medicine until the person like fasts for three or three to seven days and until the person does a colonic irrigation.
B
Wow.
A
It's like, we need you clean, we need your system working efficiently and then we can medicate you maybe. So we got to get back to that because we have toxic people and we're just throwing band aids on festering wounds. And this is why people think they get better at first. And then years later, the big one comes, you know, the cancer or the autoimmune disease. And then the doctor says, the doctor's not going to say, hey, you just spent 20 years destroying your liver. You just spent 20 years eating a high vitamin A diet. You just spent 20 years doing this. The doctor is going to say, genetics, you know, bad luck. Take this drug, here's chemo for you. Yeah. And to the doctor's argument, they have no idea what that person just did for 20 years. And they have no control over that.
B
But. And they weren't taught preventative at all.
A
Exactly.
B
They're just taught how to fix it.
A
It's just kind of like all our other niches and our, in our politics, it's like we the people. It's like caveat emptor, buyer beware. You have to be your own doctor to a certain degree. You have to get two, three, four opinions. You have to really sit down and think like, is what happened to me because of my, what I did or is it bad luck? And you know, the victim mentality is huge now. It's also huge in the modern medicine. Victim mindset is huge. I deal with people all the time. The people who admit that they did something wrong and know they can fix it, we can work with. There's a lot of people who say, no, I ate healthy, there's nothing I did wrong. And then those are the same people who identify with the disease online. You know, the big post, hey, I have this thing, hey, I'm marching in this race. Making the profile picture about it. It becomes like a self glorification of sorts. And that's pretty dangerous.
B
That's dangerous. Yeah. It's so easy to Self diagnose. If you just go on any site.
A
That'S the other thing. Right. Google Doctor, MD, Google MD super dangerous. Where people are like, oh, I have a headache. Well, that could be 100 different things, you know?
B
Yeah, 100%. I went through your Twitter, which is awesome, by the way. I pulled five tweets.
A
Cool.
B
I thought these were interesting. I'd love you to further explain them. You tweeted out ashwagandha is trash. A lot of people are taking that one.
A
Yeah. So Ashwagandha does something thing to a serotonin receptor. I think it's 51 TA5H 1TA receptor, where it basically acts as an SSRI. Right. So what does that mean? It causes guys to feel nothingness, numbness, no emo. Totally blunts emotions. So I started seeing more and more people. And I know people are going to say, source, bro, and this and that, but if you go on Reddit and the subreddits, you can see on the Ashwagandha pages that people are messed up from it.
B
Damn.
A
I had a few friends who got messed up from it. And when we come back, if I'm in the health niche, if my business and profession is getting people better, I could never tell any human to take ashwagandha after what I saw.
B
Holy crap.
A
Yeah. And it's just another example of plants as medicine. Well, medicine you're supposed to take once in a while. So what is it called? If you are every day doing plant medicine, you're identifying as a sick human being. Right. So we were never supposed to chronically abuse these plants because plants don't have teeth, plants don't have claws, plants don't have feet to run away. What do they have, chemical warfare? They have built in pesticides, oxalates, carotenoids. Right. That do work. That hurt people because plants want to survive. So people say, oh, that's just for little animals. Well, yeah, a little animal won't eat that plant because that little animal will die instantly. We're a big animal. What do you think happens to us if we make that a daily habit? You know, it's going to do something to us over time.
B
Does eating organic help with any of that?
A
No, it can make it worse a lot of times.
B
Really?
A
People are like, oh, well, I grow my food in a garden. It's like, well, that means it's probably even higher in carotenoids. You know, that means has more color. People say, oh, I get my eggs from the farm. The yolk is orange. Yeah, you have more vitamin A in.
B
Your yolk, pasture, raised.
A
So it's like people don't realize what they're doing of. You know, a tomato is still a tomato. A tomato is still an inflammatory nightshade that's high in beta carotene, high in lycopene, high in these things that when the tomato first came to Italy in 1492, it was considered a table ornament. They said, don't eat that plant. It's a poisonous plant related to the belladonna.
B
Damn.
A
Fast forward. Today people don't even know that the tomato is not Italian. People don't even. Italians have not been eating tomatoes for 10 times longer than they've been eating them. And if you told people that the Italians not originally the tomatoes not originally from Italy, they'd look at you like you're crazy. It's another food. Tomato is the most popular vegetable in the world right now. It's not even a vegetable. It's a fruit. And it's a trigger food. It's a high allergen food, especially for eczema because it's an inflammatory nightshade. Damn. Yeah.
B
So even like tomato sauce, like in pizza.
A
Even tomato sauce.
B
Wow.
A
So what's our most popular food? Probably pizza. Inflammatory nightshade, high in beta carotene, tomatoes, cheese. Vitamin A. A lot of times it's BS cheese too. And then a lot of times it's glyphosate. Flour glyphosate slows down the ADH and ALDH detox pathways. These are the pathways that help you eliminate vitamin A from your body.
B
Geez.
A
These are also the detox pathways that detox and metabolize alcohol. So the same thing your body uses to get rid of a night of drinking is the same thing your body uses to get rid of vitamin A. Dude, how is that a vitamin?
B
That's crazy. So many people go out to get pizza when they're drunk too.
A
So what we see a lot. It's funny because I have a lot of young guys in my community and they'll be like, dude, ever since low vitamin A diet, like, I don't get drunk anymore. And it's like, yeah, because your detox enzymes and pathways are working so efficiently.
B
Wow.
A
Yeah.
B
Some people get drunk so easily.
A
And how many times do you hear, oh, I feel like I have a. I feel like I drank last night. I have a hangover, but I didn't even drink. Yeah, they probably ate a high toxic brain fog, right? Yeah. Glyphosate, vitamin A food. Wake up feeling like crap, you know, the seed oils. Everyone wants to talk about seed oils and corn syrup. Yes, those are bad. No one's talking about vitamin A and how it's not a vitamin and how it's killing everybody.
B
You're the only person I've seen talk.
A
About it and there's a few others. You got Dr. Garrett Smith. I want to give him a shout out. He's incredible. You have Grant Ginroux, his blog. He has not. He's been on the low vitamin a diet for 10 years.
B
Damn.
A
His vitamin A serum level is at zero.
B
Holy crap.
A
Anything below 20 is considered deficient. Anything below 10 is considered severely deficient. He should be blind. So the labs called him and they were like, hey, we just want to check in with you. Like, your vitamin A is at zero. Like, are you okay? And he's like, yeah, I'm fine. Thanks for asking. I appreciate that.
B
Wow.
A
So we're totally flipping this whole thing on its head. We're proving that the cornerstone research is severely flawed. They actually proved vitamin A toxicity in these mice. And when they go to these countries and show that everyone's vitamin A deficient. It's not vitamin A deficient. They are malnourished. They don't have protein, they don't have zinc, they don't have taurine. Like, they're missing essential nutrients. And then because capitalism, because marketing, because of money, that's when they come in with their big pharma has a huge hand in vitamin A. I bet they have a very vested interest in it.
B
You also tweeted out you're not a fan of coffee. That one broke a lot of people's hearts about.
A
Yeah. So coffee, we can get off the ledge a little bit. Grant Shinroo, 10 years, low vitamin A diet, reverse all these things. He still drinks black coffee. Why I stopped coffee. I'll still do coffee once or twice a month. You know, it is a performance enhancing drug listed by the NCAA for a reason. It works. It helps if you take coffee before physical activity. Like, you probably will perform better. What I saw it's doing and what it. What it basically does is it raises epinephrine and norepinephrine in the. In the hormones of the liver, which is basically has people running off adrenaline. Okay, why is that bad? It can raise cortisol. It can lower essential nutrients like magnesium and zinc and others, and it causes a lot of people to be super anxious straight up. So a lot of people, I'll get off coffee at first, during their early detox, just because they're like, oh, my God. Okay, I don't have the extreme high as I did anymore, but I don't have the crash. I'm not adrenal fatigued. I have this calm child, like under. Think about it. As a child, we did not need coffee. No, right. When we drank coffee as a child, we spit it out, this bitter, nasty taste. We were in tune more with nature in our true sense of like, hey, that thing's a toxin. So just how you wouldn't drink coffee 100% black. Like, some of us like it. I actually happen to like it. But people need the sugar and milk to hide the true nature of the bitter. Same thing with 100% cacao and chocolate. These are copper rich foods. That's another way that people are becoming toxic. It's another way people are getting deficient. And it's just another way coffee, what it causes is slows down detox.
B
And we were taught dark chocolate is good for you. And now they're finding all these heavy metals.
A
It's another thing, another superfood by these bio. Dark chocolate is promoted to us by guys like Brian Johnson, guys like, I don't know if Asprey does it, but the truth of the matter is majority consumer reports tested 28 different dark chocolate brands. All of them tested for cadmium and jeez, every single one of them. There was another study done. I think it was PubMed, 300 different foods. Chocolate was top three behind baking soda and cacao powder for lead.
B
Wow.
A
Not only that, chocolate is high in copper. Copper is an estrogenic toxic metal that we're also seeing in blood and hair. A lot of people are toxic in copper.
B
Crazy.
A
That's causing insomnia, that's causing racing thoughts, that's causing unnecessary weight gain. Copper is a nasty metal that is out of balance in a lot of people. That's why I say, hey, you know, people eat cough. People eat chocolate because it has this chemical in it, phenothylamine. That is the love hormone, the love chemical, when that released when people are in love. So this is why they sell it to us on Valentine's Day. This is why women chocolate makes me feel better. So it's a drug effect, right? And this is why people crave it. And if you're craving something and if you feel like crap without something, that's a pretty big indicator that, like, I don't like becoming dependent on stuff, you know? So when I found myself, like, if you have the T shirt on, like, don't talk to me till I've had my Coffee, you have a problem.
B
You know, I've seen those.
A
And if you need coffee or caffeine to go lift weights, you're handicapped.
B
Right.
A
You're using a crutch. So my whole thing is like, let's get to the point where you feel amazing. Reverse the adrenal fatigue, fix your liver, fix your adrenaline hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine. And then once in a while it's like, yeah, you can enjoy a coffee as a treat, but when you're drinking three a day to get through it, that's a problem. Yeah, it's taxing you.
B
You mentioned baking soda earlier. A lot of people wash their fruits with that.
A
Yeah, it's a good. It's a good way to wash stuff. Get the one that's, you know, aluminum free.
B
Okay.
A
Get the healthy one. A lot of people are doing it pre workout. A lot of people are deficient in salt and sodium. So baking soda is a good way to clean vegetables and produce. Most of these vegetables and produce and fruits I'm not even a fan of. So, you know, get them organic. Peel them. You know, the chemical warfare is found in the colorful peel. Unless it's like apples, where it's a good trade off because apples have pectin, and pectin is really good at detoxing heavy metals from the body.
B
So you could eat the skin of an apple.
A
Yeah. And if you look at the apple, it's white and creamy in the inside.
B
Right.
A
Low in vitamin A. So we love apples and bananas.
B
I love bananas. Now they're putting Apeel on these fruits.
A
Criminal crime against humanity. Bill Gates putting a peel on the apple. Just so happens that apple is probably one of the best fruits you can eat. And now he's coming in and trying to tarnish this fruit. It's. It's a crime against humanity. Bill Gates, guess what else he's doing when he goes to Africa with these vaccines. Guess what else he's bringing with him?
B
What?
A
Vitamin A.
B
That's crazy.
A
Vitamin A is Bill Gates favorite vitamin.
B
Wait, he's just injecting it.
A
He's megadosing these children and these people in Africa, Southeast Asia. And then if you look, South Africa became hip to this. South Africa was like, yo, this vitamin A stuff is not working. In fact, we think it's really hurting people. And they were like, okay, we're just gonna give you free food instead. And then they fortify the freaking food.
B
Wow. Why is he doing that, though?
A
I don't know.
B
It's weird.
A
I don't Know, I don't like to get caught up in like, this is a conspiracy theory and they're trying to kill people. It's either people are useful idiots or they're in on it. Right. And most people are useful idiots who want to make money. And most people will say, oh, well, look, all the research on vitamin A says it's good. I can make millions of dollars a year fortifying countries with it. Let's go. Right. So that's why I think it's super important for us to just educate people on this topic, that this is a real thing. Like, this is not. We're not what is so cool about this topic. It's like a unicorn because it's super controversial, it gets people mad, it's clickbait. But it also happens to be true and real. Right, Right. So it's like at first people are like, you're just saying this to get traffic. And I'm like, no, I'm saying this because this is one of the biggest truth bombs I've ever seen in my life. I did it on myself. It worked. I've seen hundreds and now thousands of others. It's worked on. And spend three hours researching it and you will see for yourself. Like, you can go and chat DBT and just trick them into admitting that this thing is not a vitamin and that it's very easy to become toxic in it. Yeah, you know, it's a. It's not like. And Chachi BT does not have the political biases on this topic because it's in the literature. There's over 450 published studies on PubMed showing that vitamin A is toxic. Vitamin A is toxic. There's another guy, Dr. Anthony Mawson in New Orleans. He might be in his 80s now, he's a very modern doctor. So he can't come out and be like, vitamin A is not a vitamin. But his research shows it one out. He says it very indirectly and he has an amazing study on how COVID 19, the COVID 2 SARS virus, basically what it did was go into the liver and just expel all the vitamin A in the blood.
B
Damn.
A
Yeah. Very Anthony Mawson. Type in Anthony Mawson Covid vitamin A.
B
You got to get this out there, man. I'm glad people like you are bringing it.
A
We got to get this out there. I'm telling everybody, hey, copy everything I'm doing. Tell everyone. Try it on yourself. If you have someone suffering from an autoimmune disease, what is the harm? What do you have to lose of Trying a low vitamin A diet. Right. The other thing to know is, what we're seeing is it can take three to five years to get your levels down.
B
Holy crap.
A
If you took Accutane, right, you might be looking at five years of a low vitamin A diet.
B
Damn.
A
On myself, my first vitamin A serum level was like a 43. Six months later, my next serum level was 57.
B
Oh, it went up.
A
It went up. So what does that tell you? The body is getting rid of this thing. The body does not want this thing. And when we look at all the other clients and community members, we're seeing the same thing where sometimes it'll go up before it goes down. And the cool thing is like in a lot of ways you start to feel better already. But it's a toxin going in and then it's a toxin on the way out.
B
Right.
A
So you can have detox effect. And what people need to know is like, listen, I'll be 40 in August. I spent 39 years consuming this thing. It's not just going to be some overnight. The whole. The big problem I had with the health space was like, do this week juice fast. Do this 30 day bottle of milk vessel. It's like, you cannot reverse decades of toxins on a weak juice fast. Right. But for three to five years to reverse decades of damage, that shows you how powerful our human bodies really are. When we give our bodies the chance to do what they do.
B
What foods have the most vitamin A?
A
Liver. Livers.
B
And Liver King is messing up big time.
A
Liver King is destroying himself and destroying other people. You look at Liver King, you know, not only did he lie about the steroids or whatever, he's almost going blind. His arm was in a sling. He had all these issues happen to his eye. Clear indication of vitamin A toxicity. We were not. Listen, a cow, a bison, that's about 800 pounds of muscle meat. Only 5 to 10 pounds of that is the liver. How much liver do you think we were eating in like a tribe of 200 people? You know, not a lot. You know, it was probably reserved for one or two people, if that. We were never supposed to make a habit out of eating liver. Liver is high in vitamin A, a toxin high in copper, high in cadmium, high in glyphosate. Because all these animals are all the grassroots. Yeah. And then you have to look at a lot of these animals are killed in a state of fight or flight. Now that liver is filled with adrenaline hormones. So liver is a detox organ. Our liver takes all of our toxins and stores them. Why does your liver store toxins? To protect you. To keep them out of your blood. This is the last thing you are ever supposed to eat.
B
Yeah.
A
This is why it tastes like freaking battery.
B
Tastes terrible.
A
This is why. But guess what? If you put it in a capsule and you put it on a commercial and you call it nature's multivitamin, no one knows better.
B
You know he's making millions a month off those.
A
He's. He's buying desiccated liver in bulk on pennies on the dollar and then selling it for like 50. The profit margins are insane. On the list.
B
Yeah. He gets it from New Zealand. Right.
A
And that's why they don't want to hear about it. They don't want to hear Paul Saladino. Me and him went back and forth. People are like, oh, some people are like, you're hating. I'm not hating. When you are promoting something that's damaging human beings. This is not hate. This is called protecting.
B
Yeah. Cuz there's no long term studies on that yet.
A
And there's a lot of studies that show liver hurts people, you know, so that's concerning.
B
They got me with that one. I was taking that, to be honest.
A
I took it too. That's how I became vitamin A toxic.
B
Oh.
A
Not only did I, I bought three or four bottles. I was going to my farmer's market buying the grass fed liver. And because my farmer's market sold like three or four in a pack, I would just eat the whole thing because I didn't want to keep it in my fridge. And that was one of the ways I started getting psoriasis. I started getting gallstones. I started getting neuropathy on my left side.
B
Damn.
A
The, the hair on my shins went bald.
B
Holy crap.
A
Yeah. I'm walking my dog one day and I look down and there's no more hair in my leg. And I'm like, oh my God, do I have cancer? Like, what's wrong with me? Go on Google. You know, why did I lose the hair on my shins? No answer. Start talking to other guys, like in their 30s and 40s, 50s, 60s. I see a lot of other guys are losing the hair on their lower leg and I'm like, why'd that happen? They're like, I don't know, it's just part of aging. And I'm like, no, this isn't normal. Like something's gone wrong here. Eight months into a low vitamin A diet, all the hair on my lower shins has grown back Pretty much. Yeah. That Just shows you. And then you look at Accutane, you look at vitamin A toxicity. One of the side effects is thinning hair. How many times do we see a woman in her 60s or 70s and her hair is going really thin and almost bald, you know? Or how many men? Obviously male pattern baldness is another topic. But guys who are just thinning hair. Another huge conversation is, how much vitamin A are you doing? You know, so it's a. It's a very real thing.
B
Yeah. It makes you wonder because there's guys that gray in their 30s.
A
The gray hair people are like, all my friends my age pretty much have gray hair or bald. I'm one of the only ones who doesn't have gray hair.
B
Wow.
A
And I'm like. And I started to get a few. And now totally back to normal. Grant Shinru, head full of brown hair, was originally gray when he first started the low vitamin A diet. We're seeing a lot of people's gray hair reverse. Because gray hair is a deficiency. Gray hair is a toxicity. You stop the toxicity, you fix the deficiency of the essential minerals. And then all of a sudden you don't get leached. You know, that's what it's doing. It's vitamin A is leaching you of essential nutrients.
B
Yeah. Do you believe in this whole concept of reverse aging that Brian Johnson's promoting?
A
I think there's a few things wrong with this whole anti aging movement. First and foremost, like, stop caring so much. You know, like, you cannot obsess. And stress. Stress is a killer. Right. So these guys are kind of making their identity and embodying like this ageless thing. And it's. It's more like guys like Mantak Chia, he's this Taoist who does tai chi and breathing. The guy's like 90 and he looks incredible. And he kind of just talks about, like, what's good breath work, the reverse aging and all these indicators and they hook themselves up to these machines. My whole thing is like, what's. How fast can you run a mile in? How fast can you run three miles in? How strong are you? How do you look? How do you feel? Can you go outside at night? Like, why are you going to bed at 10 o'clock every night? I agree. Getting to sleep early is a huge multivitamin in itself. But when we start to obsess, there's a really cool book called Mind body code by Dr. Mario Martinez. And he studies centenarians. And a lot of the centenarians have this laissez faire approach where it's like, yeah, I can have a drink once a week, you know, I can smoke a cigar. I can. Because there's also something very unhealthy about like depriving yourself of joy, you know?
B
Yeah.
A
Of like being in this strict prison of I can't ever do this. Like, there's a good quote that perfect is the enemy of good. Right. So it's like I was at the Atlanta airport all week. Connections. Am I gonna starve myself or am I gonna go eat some rice, beans and steak from like the, the Chipotle? And like, yeah, there's probably seed oils and yeah, there's this and that. But I know as long as I don't make that a habit, as long as I don't obsess over it, you know, the person eating McDonald's with a smile is a lot more healthy than the person drinking carrot juice who's miserable, you know?
B
Yeah.
A
You have to embody this. And another cool thing about centenarians in this mind body code was they refuse to adhere to like the societal norms and the cultural editors who are like, at 65 years old, you have to collect senior citizen. At 65 years old, you have to pay this amount. Like one of the guys was like, no, like, I'm still hanging out with 40 year olds. I'm still, I'm not collecting that Social Security tax because I don't want to identify as like an old and sick person.
B
Right.
A
So that's a pretty cool, like to be an outlier, you know, I want to still, at 80, 90 years old, still be running, still lifting weights. And most people would say, hey, don't do that. That's not safe. That's dangerous. It's like, well, the first step is like in your mind of like what your self belief system is, what you identify with. Don't obsess over aging, you know, age gracefully, accept the wisdom. And what I will tell everyone is aging is not years. Aging is poisoning. And the more you poison your liver, the more toxins you intake, the older you're going to get. And the more simple you keep it on your liver, the more happy you'll be, the more or less anxious you'll be, and the better you're going to look and feel. And that's when people are going to be like, hey, what's your secret? Yeah, you know, that's another reason I started this and went so hard on this is because people kept saying, like, hey, what's your secret, man? Like, what do you do? And I was like, all right, And a lot of my friends were like, yo, what you do works? Like you need to scale this thing. I was like, let's go.
B
Absolutely. And we'll end it there. We'll end off with your community. What's it called and how could people join, man?
A
Yeah, it's called One of Ones. So it's really like how to become a one on one. How to not be an NPC. And it's thortorans.com. just my name and my website. And I think we're about 670 members strong today.
B
Nice.
A
It's $10 a month. There's over 30 courses. How to breathe, how to drink, how to eat, how to sleep, what supplements are safe, recipes, training guides, how to really do aerobic activity. Most people are doing aerobic cardio. Way too high of a heart rate. They're doing it way wrong. And we have amazing results. I had a new course pretty much every month. I do a live Q and A every week. And it's just a tribe of like minded individuals who are leveling up and just helping each other out.
B
Love it. Yeah, yeah, we'll link that below. Thanks for coming on, man. That was awesome. Yeah, thanks for watching guys, as always. See you next time.
Digital Social Hour: The Vitamin A Lie – Why Your 'Healthy' Diet May Be Toxic | Thor Torrens DSH #986
Released on December 16, 2024
In episode #986 of Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly engages in a compelling dialogue with guest Thor Torrens, delving deep into the controversial topic of vitamin A toxicity. This episode unravels the historical context, modern implications, and personal experiences surrounding the excessive intake of vitamin A, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes a healthy diet.
Thor Torrens begins by tracing the fortification of foods with vitamin A back to 1970. He highlights how government-mandated programs introduced vitamin A into everyday staples such as dairy, cereals, grains, and baby formula. This widespread addition was initially perceived as a public health advancement.
"In 1970, they decided mandate fortification programs of dairy, cereals, grains, baby formula. Ten years later, starting in 1980, you start to see all the autoimmune disease exponentially rise." (00:00)
Torrens argues that vitamin A is not a benign nutrient but a fat-soluble toxin known as retinol. He emphasizes that when consumed in excess, vitamin A accumulates in the liver, leading to potential toxicity.
"Vitamin A is not a vitamin. It's actually retinol, which is an alcohol... it is a fat soluble toxin." (00:26)
He references the book "Poisoning for Profits" by Grant Ginroux, which significantly influenced his perspective on the subject. Torrens explains how the early research by Rockefeller scientists and subsequent global policies have masked the true dangers of excessive vitamin A intake.
The conversation moves to the correlation between increased vitamin A consumption and the surge in autoimmune diseases observed since the 1980s. Torrens also touches upon the role of vitamin A in birth defects, noting its presence in multivitamins and prenatal supplements.
"A lot of women know and a lot of doctors that deal with pregnant women know, hey, vitamin A causes birth defects." (02:56)
He shares a personal anecdote about his wife's reluctance to take prenatal vitamins containing vitamin A, highlighting the inherent risks associated with its consumption during pregnancy.
Torrens identifies several modern sources contributing to excessive vitamin A intake:
Dietary Supplements and Multivitamins: Most multivitamins contain 150-200% of the RDA for vitamin A, surpassing the recommended daily allowance of 3,000 IUs.
"Majority of multivitamins have 150 to 200% the RDA... we're kind of health accountants." (12:10)
Medications: Acne treatments like Accutane and Retin A are significant contributors to acute vitamin A toxicity, presenting numerous side effects akin to those of autoimmune conditions.
"Accutane is a way people are getting acutely poisoned by vitamin A... it's a total crime against humanity." (19:54)
Fortified Foods and Seasonal Plants: The push to consume colorful, non-seasonal plants year-round, popularized by trends like "eat the rainbow", inadvertently increases vitamin A intake.
"Eat the rainbow was brought to us by Sesame Street... we're not supposed to be eating colorful seasonal plants 365 days a year." (09:23)
Torrens shares his journey of hypervitaminosis A, resulting from an overzealous approach to nutrition. Despite striving for optimal health through liver consumption, cod liver oil, and various vegetables, he experienced significant health issues, including joint pain and psoriasis.
He introduces Grant Ginroux's transformative discovery, where a low vitamin A diet reversed severe health conditions in Ginroux, including chronic kidney disease and eczema.
"Nine years later, no dialysis, no more eczema... reverse to brown hair. No more joint pain." (07:51)
Torrens emphasizes that hypervitaminosis A is prevalent, affecting approximately one out of three people, and underscores the importance of monitoring vitamin A intake to prevent long-term health repercussions.
Central to Torrens' argument is the role of the liver in managing vitamin A toxicity. Excess vitamin A burdens the liver, impairing its ability to detoxify the body effectively. This stagnation can lead to conditions like cholestasis, where bile circulation is hindered, resulting in various health issues such as migraines and skin problems.
"Cholestasis is basically, it's a stagnant bile, stagnant liver. It's basically in your blood. This is a toxin poisoning in your bloodstream." (16:34)
He critiques modern health practices that over-supplement without considering the liver's capacity to process these nutrients, leading to a cycle of dependency and chronic health issues.
Torrens is highly critical of current health trends and the supplement industry. He argues that many health gurus and biohackers promote excessive supplementation without considering individual needs or conducting proper testing.
"If you are selling supplements, even if it's a safe supplement, that supplement's only going to work for 70 to 80% of people... you can't just say, hey, take this at this amount and good luck." (24:28)
He highlights the lack of regulation in supplement manufacturing, especially those produced in countries like China, raising concerns about contaminants and inconsistent quality.
Torrens advocates for a low vitamin A diet as a solution to reversing toxicity and improving overall health. He shares success stories from his community, where members have experienced significant improvements by reducing vitamin A intake.
"A lot of our clients and community members are like, I can't believe how much more calm and at peace I am and how much less anxiety I have just from eliminating vitamin A as much as I can." (14:42)
He promotes his community, One of Ones, available at thortorans.com, where members receive guidance on maintaining a low vitamin A lifestyle, including courses on nutrition, exercise, and detoxification.
In wrapping up, Torrens emphasizes the long-term commitment required to reduce vitamin A levels, citing that it may take three to five years to see significant changes.
"What you have to lose of Trying a low vitamin A diet. The other thing to know is, what we're seeing is it can take three to five years to get your levels down." (50:15)
He calls on listeners to educate themselves and take proactive steps in managing their vitamin A intake to prevent chronic diseases and enhance overall well-being.
Episode #986 of Digital Social Hour presents a provocative examination of vitamin A, challenging widely held beliefs about its role in a healthy diet. Through historical analysis, personal experiences, and scientific commentary, Thor Torrens makes a compelling case for re-evaluating our nutritional strategies to prevent toxicity and promote long-term health. Listeners are encouraged to question mainstream health narratives and consider the potential hidden dangers of substances deemed beneficial.
For more insights and to join the conversation, visit thortorans.com.