{"id":1643,"date":"2021-04-14T04:05:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T04:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gagestrengthtraining.com\/move-aside-vitamin-d-this-vitamin-is-more-important\/"},"modified":"2021-04-14T04:05:41","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T04:05:41","slug":"move-aside-vitamin-d-this-vitamin-is-more-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gagestrengthtraining.com\/move-aside-vitamin-d-this-vitamin-is-more-important\/","title":{"rendered":"Move Aside Vitamin D, This Vitamin is More Important"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last weekend, I attended the Weston A. Price Conference down in Allen, Texas. For those of you unaware of the organization, they promote what would be called a \u201cancestral diet,\u201d which focuses on how our hunter-gatherer and early civilization ancestors would have eaten.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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One of the common themes throughout this weekend was vitamin A.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Before this conference, vitamin A was kinda a boring topic. You get it from eating carrots and it\u2019s good for your eyes. And when you look up the nutrition facts, a single carrot has well over 100% of your daily needs, so you\u2019re good right?<\/p><\/div>\n

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Nope.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Over the course of this past weekend, I had about three hours of education on this subject and my guest on the Monday Q&A gave one of the talks on vitamin A. So I\u2019m going to condense some of this info for you so you can get a brief idea how important this once kinda boring vitamin really is.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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What Does Vitamin A Do?<\/p><\/div>\n

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If you\u2019ve read what I\u2019ve written about vitamin D, you\u2019ll know that every single cell in your body has a vitamin D receptor. Vitamin A plays a role in every single vitamin D transcription, so it indirectly plays a role with every single system in your body.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Vitamin A plays a direct role in the regulation of over 500 genes in your body.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Obviously, we know it\u2019s good for your eyesight. But it also plays a role converting cholestrol into sex hormones, and it helps with your stress hormones and thyroid hormone.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Low levels of vitamin A increase your chances of getting an infection because your immune system will be weaker, but low levels also increase your risk auto-immunity because it keeps your immune system from \u201cfreaking out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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In both sexes, low levels can lead to fertility issues and can lead to low testosterone levels in men.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Low levels of vitamin A can cause skin issues like acne, eczema, and flaky scalp.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Signs of Deficiency<\/p><\/div>\n

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Deficiency is thought to be rare. However, the RDA is set at a level to prevent deficiency is defined as \u201cdiminished retina sensitivity to light.\u201d What that means is if you have too low of levels, you start going blind. However, what we\u2019re trying to find out is if this level is enough for every other body system (it\u2019s probably not).\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Currently, 35% of American\u2019s don\u2019t get enough vitamin A in their diet. If you avoid fortified foods, that number jumps to 65% of that population (note: this doesn\u2019t include using supplements containing vitamin A). This is just using the RDA, which is already a pretty low bar to hit.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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So, how can you tell if you might be deficient? It\u2019s as easy as driving at night. If you are driving and someone passes you with their lights on at night, and you\u2019re temporarily blinded for about two seconds, you most likely are deficient.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Other signs of deficiency? Poor night vision, bumps on skin where your hair comes out (follicular hyperkeratosis), dry eyes, frequent colds, allergies, sleep problems or insomnia, problems seeing with bright light or photophobia, chronically dry skin. A lot of these are pretty common.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Factors that can deplete your vitamin A levels are: daily use of vitamin D supplements over 2000IU, eating lots of polyunsaturated fats, too much sunlight\/getting sunburned, using cortisone, high protein diets, eating large amounts of beta-carotene (more on this later), and eating lots of high fiber foods.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Absorption<\/p><\/div>\n

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Okay, so before you run out and eat a bag of baby carrots, just eating beta-carotene isn\u2019t enough. You need fat to absorb beta-carotene and other carotenoids (like lycopene). A study done back in 2004 showed that if you eat no fat with fruits and vegetables, you absorb practically nothing. You need about 28 grams of fat to maximize absorption.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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If that\u2019s not enough, depending on genetics, you will absorb between 10-90% of what you ingest under ideal conditions. So a big variability there.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Other factors that and decrease absorption of carotenoids include: zinc and iron deficiencies, having your gallbladder removed, being hypothorid, and having gut dysbiosis\/inflammation all lead to issues with absorption.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Genetics<\/p><\/div>\n

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A note on beta-carotene. This is what is found in plants and is a precursor to what animals (including humans) use, which is called retinol.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The gene that converts carotenoids into retinol is your BCO1 gene. Fifty percent of the population have SNPs (genetic variations) that decrease conversion by 50%! And half of those people have a decrease conversion by 75% (I\u2019m one of those). You can find out your BCO1 SNPs by putting your<\/p>\n

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23andMe<\/p>\n

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or<\/p>\n

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Ancestry.com<\/p>\n

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data into<\/p>\n

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StrateGene by Seeking Health<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Since most of your vitamin A is stored in your liver, blood tests don\u2019t necessarily tell you whether you’re deficient or not.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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And the solution isn\u2019t to dump beta-carotene into your diet by eating carrots, sweet potatoes, and butternut squash because lots of beta-carotene can actually cause issues with conversion into retinol.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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Food<\/p><\/div>\n

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So, if you\u2019ve read this far, you\u2019ve probably realized that vitamin A is way more complicated than what you pictured before this email. One reason it\u2019s so complicated is that traditional diets were high in animal foods containing retinol. This allowed for the SNPs in the BCO1 gene to stay with us to this day instead of those individuals dying off due to survival-of-the-fittest.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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So, what foods are the best source of retinol?\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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The RDA for men is 900 mcg and women is 700 mcg<\/p><\/div>\n

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