Do you attribute this purely to low A? I will keep eating liver for the B vits, and selenium, and let red light and thyroid function help my body manage the Vit A situation.
JR: You’ve written Vitamin A can actually be toxic to us; should it be rubbed on the skin, as opposed to ingesting it ?
RP: My own experience with commercial vitamin A is that I used it for many years. But the product is being constantly being changed as they find cheaper ways to do it, and suddenly something about some of the products caused extreme sensitivity. I can use some forms of vitamin A wildly and generously with no effect, but some of them have additives that can make them very allergenic. And the basic toxic effect of giant doses of vitamin A, like several hundred thousand units a day, those invariably will reach a point where they will suppress your thyroid. Carotenes – the whole range of carotenes-aren’t really vitamin A. But they, even more than vitamin A, have an anti-thyroid, and potentially anti-steroid action by accumulating and displacing the vitamin A that’s necessary for metabolism in the skin, and making steroids. So you don’t want to overload, especially on the carotenes. But eventually , vitamin A itself can be an anti-thyroid, anti-steroid problem.
I got interested in vitamin A because I found that every time I worked outside in the summer, I got acne. And people had told me that sunlight was good for the skin, but I invariable got acne in proportion to my exposure to sunlight. And I figured there was some toxic effect of ultraviolet light. But then, one night I went to sleep reading with a very bright light shining in my face, and slept 8 hours with that light just a foot and half from my eyes, and woke up starting to get pimples. And I suddenly realized that it was activating not only my retinal vitamin A system, but via my eyes it was activating my hormonal system and consuming vitamin A. I found that in proportion to my light/sun exposure, if I increased the vitamin A, I could prevent acne. And it turns out to be protective in other ways. The nutrition researcher dentist Emanuel Cheraskin did surveys where he found that health complaints and symptoms decreased in a nice linear relation to increasing vitamin A, all the way up to 100,000 units per day. But anyone who is on the borderline for thyroid function, sometimes even 20,000 units will make their symptoms worse by suppressing their thyroid. So you just have to be very cautious and probably starting with 5,000 units and watching for allergic symptoms, and checking your temperature to see if it’s inhibiting your thyroid. Very often people have to get up to 20 or 30 thousand units a day, before their acne improves.
