Challenging Nutritional Beliefs and Reconsidering Vitamin A Toxicity Through Inherited Health Patterns - Dr. Garrett Smith

Can the very foods and nutrients we trust to keep us healthy be the silent culprits of our chronic health issues? Listen as we unravel this daring hypothesis with Dr. Garrett Smith, the Nutrition Detective. He presents a compelling case against the traditional war-on-disease mindset, asserting that our chronic health challenges are not merely battles against external foes but a complex inheritance of toxicities and deficiencies from generations past. Dr. Garrett invites us to reconsider our assumptions and urges us to notice overlooked patterns in health data, all while advocating for personalized solutions through meticulous testing.

In a thought-provoking discussion, we tackle the contentious topic of vitamin A toxicity. Dr. Garrett shares the astonishing reality of individuals thriving with undetectable vitamin A levels, pushing us to question its status as an essential nutrient. We journey through the history of vitamin A research, from early mouse studies to the present-day struggle of accurately diagnosing toxicity. With findings suggesting that many unknowingly harbor toxic loads of vitamin A in their livers, this episode challenges listeners to rethink the reliability of standard tests and dietary guidelines. Join us to challenge what you thought you knew about nutrition and embark on a path to better health.

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Chapters

• 0:08 Unraveling Nutrition and Detox Misconceptions
• 9:44 Exploring Vitamin a Toxicity Symptoms

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

hey there, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of pleasure principles. I'm your host, avik, and today we are diving into a topic that's as surprising as it is transformative. Imagine this like what if the foods you thought were nourishing your body were actually sabotaging your health? Mind blown right To help us unravel this tangled wave, I have brought a true health detective, dr Garrett Smith, so welcome to the show Dr Garrett.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Thank you for having me here.

Speaker 1: 0:44

Lovely, dr Garrett. Thank you for having me here, lovely, lovely. So, dear listeners, before we start, I'll quickly love to introduce Dr Garrett to all of you. Dr Garrett, aka the nutrition detective. He is the world's foremost expert on vitamin A toxicity and the game-changing toxic bile theory. So, with decades of research, personal experience and a knack for simplifying even the most complex health concepts, he's here to challenge everything that you thought you knew about nutrition and the detox. So grab a notebook and maybe even rethink that green smoothie, because we are about to go down the rabbit hole. So let's get started. Welcome to the show again. Yes, thanks, glad to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Lovely. How are you so, dr Garrett? What's the single biggest misconception people have about nutrition and detox theory?

Speaker 2: 1:46

Oh, well, in general, the biggest misconception about health completely is that people tend to think that they are somehow victims of their health conditions and that we are fighting some sort of war against viruses and bacteria and cancer and all these things, and so it's an us versus them kind of thing. And what is really going on is that the main driver of all the chronic disease today is what I simplify down to toxicities and deficiencies. So we have too many toxins in us of various sorts. Different, different people have different toxins and different arrangements of them. It's kind of like different recipes and then, based on what they eat and what foods they've had available and all these things, they have different deficiencies and also based on their their needs.

Speaker 2: 2:45

So one of the other things that people don't realize is that we are handed down toxicities and deficiencies from our parents. People would like to believe that we are just born clean slate you know tabula rasa kind of thing and we are, we are give, we have everything we need when we're born in terms of we have no deficiencies and we have no toxicities. When it is absolutely the opposite is true. Um, these things get handed down generationally. Your mother could not give you what she didn't have and you are made of what your mother was made of, so you inherit these toxicities and deficiencies and and so that is a big, that is a very big concept that people miss.

Speaker 2: 3:29

So that's that's why some people who are listening to this um, have been sick their entire life and they don't really know why they say I never really did it. I don't understand what I did to ruin my health, and it's it was given to you. So it it sucks. There's nothing we can do about the fact that it was given to you. All we can do is say well, here's where you are, here's where we're starting from and let's move forward from here. And it is it. It, as somebody said uh, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility if you want to fix it. So that that's that's the huge concept that people must grasp that it is their responsibility to fix. Doesn't matter how it got there, but it's their responsibility to fix. And it's not a war, it's it's taking care of your system, not fighting things in it.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So that's lovely, I mean that's fascinating. I mean, if this misconception is so widespread, um so, like what is? Why do you think, I mean, it's persisted so long? And is it a misinformation? Or I mean, be just too trusting of the health industry?

Speaker 2: 4:40

well, the, the entire medical industry. You know, the medical industry complex kind of thing, and the chemical industry complex and all of these places that the doctors of toxicities and deficiencies is not very easy because it's years, it's years and years of these accumulations of, you know, deficiencies and toxicities. So they, we don't, and then there's a mixture of them. So in science they want it to be one thing causes this. You know that we want to an experiment, a study, where it's just one thing causes this and this and this, and then we we're not looking at all the other things and people want it to be a, you know, metabolic ward where they take people and they lock them into a, into a building and they see everything that goes into them and they see everything that they pee and they poop out and maybe even they measure their sweat, and they want it to be like science, you know, super scientific and over years, and there's nobody who's going to volunteer for that. So we have to look at what is out there and we have to look at patterns over and over, and pattern recognition is a huge part of my work, of seeing things in my, in my experience, and then seeing things in the literature over and over, is just catching these patterns. So we can then address them and do do the opposite, like intake less toxins and correct the nutritional deficiencies as we can assess them the best we can. Um, I mean, the best way to do it would be to take tissue biopsies, but nobody wants to have parts of themselves taken out in chunks, so we have to do things like hair and blood and sometimes we'll even get into urine and things like that. But we are trying to see what is in there. So we, as the saying goes, we test, we don't guess, and then we address. So once we find a deficiency, then we want to fix it, whether that's through food or supplements or whatever we decide to do, and how and the amount that it takes for a person to fix their deficiency is completely dependent upon the person.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Kind of like I tell people, as people would say, well, how much does everybody need of zinc? And I say, how, how many miles can you drive on a tank of gas? And then they start to go wait, wait. You can't answer that, because what kind of car do you have? How far do you need you know? What kind of gas are you putting in it? How are the tires Like how? How are you? How are you driving really fast, are you driving really slow? And I go okay.

Speaker 2: 7:19

So see, then there's all the variables. So one person may need very little to fill up their tank, and one person, you know, they may have a compact car that gets tons of miles per gallon, and then somebody else may have some giant heavy truck that gets five miles a gallon and it's just, it's not even comparable. So we have to, we have to try things with people and see how they respond. We can know they're deficient, but then we have to give them something, we have to test it, because they are an experiment of one. So this is where things get challenging, as we are trying to individualize medicine To each individual based on how they respond, not just saying everybody needs X amount of this. So that's.

Speaker 1: 8:04

That's such a wake up call. I mean, it's almost like we have been playing a health version of telephone where the message keeps getting distorted and as it passed along. So yeah, so also, like you are known for your work on vitamin A toxicity, so most people think of vitamins as inherently good, so can you explain, like, why this particular one might actually be harmful?

Speaker 2: 8:51

no-transcript. Well, that's when we first start, right. We don't know anything, so we make the biggest mistakes. Well, what was the first vitamin discovered? They named it A because it was the first one.

Speaker 2: 9:03

Now, I do also believe that we have been trained to say the word vitamin before all of these vitamins, so that we kind of hypnotize ourselves into believing that it is necessary and good. So even every time we talk about vitamin A toxicity, we start out those three words with vitamin, and so everybody is kind of locked into this thought pattern of oh, it's good and necessary, oh, but it can be toxic too. So it's very much kind of a psychological operation to get us to always think of these things as good. And they just aren't always good. Some of them are not, and as I've, as we are showing, with multiple people in their blood tests where their, their serum retinol, their blood vitamin A, is down as as low as the lab can measure. Like the lab says, we can't measure it accurately below this point. They call it below lab detection limits. And we have people down to that level and they are thriving in their health, they're not getting vitamin A deficiency symptoms and they effectively have almost no vitamin A in their blood. And to get there, you basically have almost no vitamin A in your liver and in your body fat, so you are vitamin A as close to vitamin A free as you can get, and then we don't see the deficiency symptoms. And if that could happen in one person, then the status of a vitamin being essential for everybody else comes into question. The fact that we have multiple people who have gotten to this level means that it's not necessary for us at all. Now the thing that people are confused about is they'll say, well, I took vitamin A for this and it did this. Or you know these other things will say, well, this taking this seemed to fix this. This can happen.

Speaker 2: 10:56

The entire basis of pharmaceutical medicine is effectively giving poisons to people that do things. So can a so-called vitamin be a toxin and do something? Sure, absolutely. I mean, that is what pharmaceutical medicine is, and people don't realize. Realize it. But that's what a lot of herbal medicine is. They're giving plant toxins to people that do things. So just because something does something doesn't mean that it's necessary.

Speaker 2: 11:29

In the early um vitamin a studies with with the mice, they were giving them a fat free diet. So because they they, because they didn't know what vitamin A was, so they couldn't have taken vitamin A out. They just took out all the fat entirely, and then they saw that the mice got problems. And then, when they put some of the fats back in, or they put in various forms of fat, some of which had vitamin A in it, then that's how they eventually came to the conclusion that it was vitamin A that was the magical thing. Well, you can't give vitamin A without giving fat, so it's a fat soluble, or as I call it, fat storable vitamin, and it's going to come with fat. So then they're going to be giving the mice fat with this so-called vitamin, and they couldn't isolate it because they didn't know what it was.

Speaker 1: 12:22

So anyway, yeah, wow, that's, uh, that's really awesome. I'd say yeah and um. I mean, how do you even begin to identify if someone is suffering from vitamin a toxicity? Are there any symptoms? That something we might easily overlook or misattribute?

Speaker 2: 12:46

Well, this is kind of a dangerous. I say dangerous in terms of people might hear what I say here and they go oh well, I don't have that, so I must not have this problem. So pretty much okay. The gold standard of testing for vitamin A toxicity is to do a liver biopsy. They're going to put a big, big needle into your liver. They're going to take a chunk out of your liver with that needle and then they're going to analyze it. And even still, it's been said in the scientific literature that many pathologists don't understand or are not good at analyzing it for vitamin A toxicity. So you're going to do an invasive test and then you're going to hope that the pathologist doing the analysis is good at their job. I mean, they'll also do a chemical analysis of it, but they do look at there are appearances of vitamin A toxicity in the liver that you would like to see too. So anyway, that's the gold standard.

Speaker 2: 13:47

Nobody does that. Studies don't like to approve. They don't even want to approve studies to do biopsies of people's livers. What they tend to do is they tend to take dead people, people who have recently died, and then do those analysis on that. Now I've done a lot of research on that and the research came out straightforwardly in a study of 33 Americans who had passed away from various causes. A full one-third of them or is it 27? It's 27 people, a full one-third of them, nine of them when they diagnosed their liver people a full one third of them, nine of them, when they diagnosed their liver were vitamin a toxic in their liver. So that doesn't mean they died from the vitamin a toxicity. That just means they were walking around with it. Um, so then we? So we have that. And then I've looked into other countries africa, several african countries. Back in the 1950s and 60s they they had a full 50 percent of the livers that were biopsied vitamin A toxin. So in terms of figuring it out like that's the gold standard, nobody's doing that. There's some isotope tests that they do in research where they can they put in a marked like a deuterium marked vitamin A, and then they see how much it comes out and where it goes and all that stuff. But that's only in research.

Speaker 2: 15:05

And actually a new study that came out showed that we use something on the order of some tiny amount of micrograms. Supposedly they're saying we use a tiny amount of micrograms a day of vitamin A, nothing like what they say is our RDA, our recommended daily amount, or the RDI. So when I'm talking to people, I mean we will get their blood work on vitamin A, we'll get a serum retinol. Okay, do I trust that number? That number doesn't tell me anything. So people out there listening they might go and get their vitamin A in their blood tested and they look at it and they look at the range and they get it back and they go. I'm normal. I guess I don't have this problem.

Speaker 2: 15:45

Oh, no, over and over in the research it has been said that people can be vitamin a toxic. Okay, when their blood vitamin a is in the normal range, because what is in your liver and what is in your body fat is not necessarily going to show up in your blood. And I've had people where well, I mean we have multiple research studies where it should when they tend, when researchers tend to find vitamin a deficiency in large amounts, in large groups, they tend to be in countries where they are, you know, malnourished, kind of like third world countries, and those people by definition are, are generally, if they're malnourished, they're not getting any, or hardly any, meat ever. Well, it has been shown in multiple studies that if they're undernourished and they're under protein fed and or they're under zinc fed and the best source of zinc is meat then they can see their vitamin A levels supposedly go down. And then when they start giving them more protein or more zinc, they see their vitamin A levels come up into the normal range, even though they didn't give them any vitamin A.

Speaker 2: 16:55

And I've had people where we start doing their diet better and then we see then their vitamin A levels were in the normal range and they're eating a very low vitamin A diet and then their vitamin A levels go above the reference range. So then they show that they're high. And then their vitamin A levels go above the reference range. So then they show that they're high. So the blood test for vitamin A is it's something that we you know I use more than anybody else I still know that we can only track them over time. We can't. We can see how it goes over time and eventually, when they really empty out their liver and their body fat, that number will start crashing down. And this is known in the literature. Researchers didn't like to do a lot of human vitamin A deficiency studies where they put people on a low vitamin A diet because they said in the literature that the level of vitamin A in the blood can stay very steady for years and not drop. People are not eating it, so that shows how much is in the liver. You know they're. They're not eating any and they're still maintaining their blood levels at the same thing as they started for years.

Speaker 2: 17:55

So it becomes really, when people come to me, I mean I know, okay, so headaches are classic, chronic headaches, classic vitamin a toxicity. Um, psoriasis, eczemaema, classic vitamin A toxicity. Basically, anything where any part of your body is turning yellow vitamin A toxicity, sacroiliitis. So people who have chronic low back pain, especially if they go to their chiropractor, and the chiropractor is always like well, your SI joint, your sacroiliac joint, is always out Well, they have the classic vitamin a toxicity. That's a accutane, which is which is an active form of vitamin a. It's all over the literature that it gives sacroiliitis. So, um, what else is there? I mean, I go, I go over a lot of conditions on my, on my live streams, but those are just some of the most. Oh, seizures, any kind of seizures. So so most of these are really big people Like I mean, what did I fix in myself.

Speaker 2: 19:00

By going low vitamin A I fixed my chronic insomnia, I fixed my my early I mean I was in my twenties getting prostate type symptoms. Um, I fixed my psor. I mean I was in my 20s getting prostate type symptoms. I fixed my psoriasis, so yeah, and so those were three of the big things and my electromagnetic sensitivity. So as I did these things over the years, I fixed those issues.

Speaker 2: 19:20

Now if you go in the literature it's going to be hard for you to find connections between those and vitamin A toxicity.

Speaker 2: 19:27

So we just kind of assume that if you're sick, you have some amount of vitamin A toxicity probably copper toxicity, maybe iron overload and we just, we just treat, we just have people do a diet. So this is this is the funny thing Our dietary approach, which is individualized too. People have to figure out what works for them. They do the diet that works for them and then, if they're deciding to work with me or one of my other practitioners, then we do the supplements, that and we see how they tolerate them and what they need. And then we just over time, as they're on a low vitamin a diet and they're doing the other things that we do to help pull toxins out of them, which is very simple. Then they start to get better. So it's kind of like we don't have a great test for these things. We just say if you're sick and you want to get better, do this and you will likely get better. So that's what we got.

Speaker 1: 20:26

Wow, that's. That's really an eye opening, I would say. I mean, this has been a mind expanding conversation and you have definitely shown us what we think we know about health might just be scratching the surface or even steering us in the wrong direction. So thank you so much for bringing your passion, expertise and that detective mindset to the devil. So yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:51

And listeners like what's the one thing that you are willing to question about your health journey today? Maybe it's a supplement you have been taking or a healthy habit that you have never thought to re-evaluate. So start small, stay curious and remember that your health is a journey and not a destination. So if you found this episode available, do not forget to hit subscribe, share it with your friends and leave us a review and hey, like, if you are brave enough to rethink your green smoothie, then let us know. Until next time, keep seeking pleasure, keep seeking truth and keep living your best life. So thank you so much.