Preamble

This is my first published post on the hypervitaminosis A problem, even though I started writing drafts back in 2019! Ironically, I believe that an acute vitamin A poisoning the prior year may have contributed significantly to the health crash that I struggled with for many years, leading to chronic fatigue and ultimately stalling me out on posts on this topic and other written works that were in progress then. I will come back to that story eventually in another post.

Since then, the lore and level of argumentation on the topic has expanded tremendously, leaving me feeling like I don't even know where to begin anymore. So after this introduction, I'll probably start in the middle and I'll leave lots of teasers that will have to be filled in over time.

How I became interested

I discovered the theory of vitamin A as a toxin in 2018 because someone somewhere in the blogosphere mentioned an intriguing new post by Matt Stone, Vitamin A: Vitamin or Villain?. In it he introduces Canadian Grant Genereux who had already written out his theories on this on his public blog and two free ebooks (which others have since liberally borrowed from and made lots of money playing guru over -- we Canadians have a different model of the world, I guess). It was all certainly interesting! But I probably would have thought it nothing more than a curiosity if Matt Stone hadn't connected this to the Carnivore Diet.

In his blog post, he showcases the Andersen Family, whom I had encountered virtually on the original ZIOH forum starting back in late 2008. They had already been on an all-meat no organs diet for several years at that point, and were respected as the most experienced veterans we knew after Owsley "The Bear" Stanley himself. Stone's theory was that perhaps the reason the Carnivore Diet was so reputedly effective for not just metabolic problems but immunological problems such as Charlene Andersen's asthma and eczema, and the many seemingly miraculous effects on skin health and autoimmune disease the Carnivore community had been experiencing, is because it is very low in vitamin A, and so it was allowing a population of people with chronic, subclinical hypervitaminosis A to recover.

Given my contemporaneous interest in the micronutrient implications of Carnivore Diets, I felt this was extremely important to look into. (For some of my work on this subtopic, see my CarnivoryCon talk on RDAs, my paper Can a Carnivore Diet Provide All Essential Nutrients, and chapter section 2.4 of the textbook "Ketogenic" (Implications for nutrient needs).)

It bears repeating here that at this time, the Carnivore Diet was decidedly against the idea that you would need to eat organ meat to succeed. Vilhjalmur Stefansson famously declared it a common mistake to believe it is necessary to eat organs on an all-meat diet, although he did report liver eaten in some cases by the Inuit, so he could not have been totally against it per se. The Bear specifically called liver "the one meat that needs to be eaten sparingly", citing glycogen and vitamin A as potential problems. Although some of us ate liver from time to time (it is, after all, an Animal Source Food), most simply didn't, and it was deeply discouraged to think of it as some kind of virtue to eat something for the vitamin content rather than because it tasted good.

So when Matt Stone characterized the Carnivore Diet as being very low in vitamin A, he was at that time correct. It is only a modern corruption of the diet to insist on eating liver, and in fact every influencer who jumped on the Carnivore wagon since 2018 and added to it their medical opinion that nose-to-tail was necessary ("and if you don't like the taste here's a link to my liver supplement/grassfed liver store!") was in and out of the community within a couple of years, claiming that Carnivore didn't work, made them sick, or what have you.

But really? Don't we know it's a vitamin, not a toxin?

My current working idea is that vitamin A is not strictly a toxin, as some would have it, but that it operates somewhat similarly to linoleic acid. That is, we have a strict need for minute amounts, amounts that are difficult to avoid in practice such that deficiency should be rare, and that it causes health problems at much smaller amounts than generally believed. But I'd like to go through the evidence thoroughly here at some point and see if that hypothesis can stand.

Topics I'd like to explore in this series

• How I OD'd on vitamin A and a potential connection to what followed
• Yes, you can get too much vitamin A just from eating liver
• Is it a vitamin or a toxin or both?
• Why do Carnivore Dieters seem more susceptible to hypervitaminosis A?
• What's better for vitamin A elimination: carnivore or high carb?
• The curious question of eggs
• The connection between aldehyde and histamine sensitivities and hypervitaminosis A
• More ways in which vitamin A is similar to linoleic acid
• How hypervitaminosis A could lead to gout
• How hypervitaminosis A could lead to scurvy