Jay Feldman 0:05
Is vitamin A really toxic? And is it likely to be the cause of your health problems? We'll be answering these questions in today's episode of the energy balance podcast, a Podcast where we explore health and nutrition from the bioenergetic view, and teach you how to maximize your cellular energy, to maximize your health. In today's episode, we'll be going over whether vitamin A toxicity exists and whether it's something that you need to be worried about. We'll be discussing whether grant Genereux's claims about vitamin A deficiency are valid. We'll be talking about whether vitamin A is actually a poison rather than a vitamin we'll also go over what we think about the current state of the ray peat Forum and the research on vitamin A deficiencies and whether vitamin A deficiencies do, in fact, exist, as always. To check out the show notes for today's episode, where you can take a look at the studies, articles and anything else that we reference, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast and with that, let's get started.

All right, so it's time to discuss vitamin A toxicity, vitamin A deficiency, whether we should even be calling it a vitamin, or rather poison a or something like that. And that's for a handful of reasons. One, I mean, the kind of I think both of us have worked with clients and seen in the ether people discussing this idea of vitamin A toxicity, and people blaming this for their health issues and spending, sometimes years trying to resolve their health issues by reducing every possible amount of vitamin A in their diet, or beta carotene or even other carotenoids, and going to pretty extreme lengths. And obviously, as many people in the bioenergetics sphere know, the repeat Forum has essentially been taken over and rebranded as vitamin A toxicity forum, and that's really the main focus there. And the kind of original or the actual repeat views have largely been censored. Discussion about any, you know, disagreement here, and any idea against the vitamin A toxicity perspective is is generally censored, or has been censored in many cases. So this is something that's not only gained a lot of popularity, but is also just worth discussing because it's kind of in the zeitgeist at the moment. So we're going to be discussing that today. We're going to be focusing mostly on Grant Genereux's perspectives and some of the claims he makes in his book and also in interviews. And that'll kind of be our focus for today. This will probably be a two part episode or two part series, and then in the future, we'll dig into more like kind of other branching aspects of vitamin A metabolism, what our actual recommendations are considerations, you know, looking at vitamin A or retinol versus beta carotene and tons of other, you know, interactions with other vitamins and minerals, interactions with hormones like thyroid and tons of other factors that are really important to consider. But for these episodes to you know, starting today, we're just going to be focusing on some of the claims regarding vitamin A deficiency and whether it actually exists, as well as vitamin A toxicity, and, again, some kind of interrelated claims that are made there. But we're not going to dig into all those other factors. Otherwise this would end up being an extremely long series. So we'll break it up a little bit and start with these and Michael, let you go ahead here and share any other thoughts as far as an introduction to these topics.

Mike 3:29
So I think this has been a long time coming, this refutation of Grant's work, and there's a ton of glaring problems even before you read Grant's book, poisoning for profits, that are important to point out. But I think this episode that we're going to do is really going to get into the meat and potatoes of grant, like what Grant's arguments are to that is that people are using to promote this anti vitamin A stuff. And the reason why we decided to actually go into Grant's work, and to be honest, at least for me, it was extremely painful to read because it was not very well researched, nor was it very well logically laid out in terms of the arguments. But people will tell you, Oh, you just need to read the book. You just need to read poisoning for profits. You just need to dig in. And so what we decided to do is like, All right, we'll take you up on that offer. We'll jump in here. We'll go through the content, we'll go through Grant's arguments, and we'll see do they hold validity. And I've made videos on this on my own YouTube channel where I said, Look, I'm open to the idea that maybe the threshold for toxicity of vitamin A is lower than what is commonly established. And then, like, let's kind of figure out where that is, and maybe grant has a case. But upon reading the book, like you guys will see in this episode, the case is pretty poor. Now, before we even get in to the specifics, to the nitty gritty, there's a couple things that I think are really important. Important to dial in here and talk about. And I again, I've, I've talked about this in previous videos, but on my own channel, but I think this is really important to set up. Here is number one, the mentality inside the low vitamin A sphere is not a scientific, open minded mentality. It is a closed minded, borderline cultish mentality that's being that's being cultivated, where people are being banned, where they're being censored, where their perspectives are being shut down without consideration. And you have one side of this, this, this camp saying, Look, you, you just have to, you basically trust the science here. You have to just read Grant's book than any type of refutation that you bring to it, they just shut down and say, Oh, you just don't understand. You just You didn't read the book. Oh, you're, you're pro establishment or or whatever the thing is, and it's you're, there's not really a good conversation being had about that. So that's problem number one. Is the conversation is being shut down and it's being done so on the ray P forum behind Dr Peat's name, which is extremely disrespectful to his message, because this is not something he promoted, and it's laughable that anybody would even associate this with his name, because the quality of work to promote this anti Vitamin A stuff is kindergarten compared to what Dr Peat's work is, and the understandings and information that Dr Peat's presented. And I'm not exaggerating that I'm objectively like, when we go through the arguments and we talk about the stuff here, it's going to be pretty laughable. It's going to be pretty, pretty poor to even compare them to Dr Peat's work, and to even say, like, Oh, this is what we've been waiting for. We need to merge the low vitamin A stuff with Dr Peat's work, and it's going to make all this huge difference. It's like, the low vitamin A stuff doesn't even hold a candle to what Dr Peat has talked about. So that's another thing. You have this, this this ridiculous censorship mentality in that sphere, and then you have this comparison and integration with Dr Peat's work, which it does not integrate with at all. Which brings me to the next point, is that this perspective is a single line of thinking that is reductionistic, that is not comprehensive, and does not even begin to consider the multitude of different variables and elements that integrate and interact with each other inside our health. It's a very narrow, sided, myopic point of view the to and it's not even like it's not even realistic when we when we start looking at these things. So that's another piece. Now this is not to say that we are gaslighting people who are saying, I feel better when I went on the low vitamin A paradigm, this is not a this is not an assault on on people are just trying to get better, right? And the people who are just like I did the low vitamin A, and it works, and they haven't really delved through the research. It's not to say that it didn't work for them, but it is to say that maybe it's not because of the vitamin A, maybe it's because of a variety of other factors that have been shifted, besides just vitamin A by itself. In this low vitamin a diet that is having people have a ton of different benefits for their health. Maybe they don't do well with dairy. Maybe they were dealing with some metabolic issues and they didn't handle tons of saturated fat. So when they switched to more monounsaturated, lower fat, they did better. Maybe they needed more fiber, because the bioenergetic diet is very low in fiber, depending on how it's set up. So there could be a multitude of different things. And to be fair, inside Grant's book here, he specifically says, and he's literally points out in the studies, oh, you should only change one variable at a time, and then we have this low vitamin A diet which changes greater than 50 variables simultaneously for people and like, oh yeah, it was just the vitamin A now, I don't think grant necessarily is saying to people like, this is the diet that everybody has to do, and that this is how you set up the experiment. But separate from Grant's arguments, the people in the sphere are promoting the changes to the diet and saying, Hey, look, this is because of vitamin A purely. And I'm not necessarily 100% sure that Grant's making those arguments, so I don't want to straw man him and ascribe those arguments to him, but the mentality and the culture in the sphere is promoting that idea. And I think that we need to be clear, like even grant is saying, Look, we don't want to just we want to change one variable at a time and then go from there. And then, I also think there's some pretty problematic elements going on in here with these ideas of detox and these unfalsifiable hypotheses where we can't really get a good gage on people's vitamin A status, and even ability to determine that they were toxic, because the level the variety of symptoms is pretty broad that people are ascribing to toxicity, and there's not really good metrics to determine toxicity. And then people are changing 50 different variables and then turning around saying, hey, like now I'm getting better. So it must been the. Vitamin A. And even further than that, there's this weird dichotomy that's set up that if you get worse, it's because of detox, and if you get better, it's because the vitamin A stuff was correct. And it's like this that is, that is a like, a unfalsifiable perspective, like there's no way that you're wrong, because it's either detox or it's working. Now, I'm not saying that grant is saying this per se, but again, the culture and the sphere that's promoting that is highly problematic from a scientific perspective, and then from Jay and I perspective, like, where we can't really Gage, how are we help? Like, what is making the difference for our clients? Like, how if you can't gage and you can't see, have some reasonable metrics of understanding how, if people are improving because of some intervention, then you can't really say that that intervention is the thing that's working. And especially when you start to look at the timelines, detox timelines of years, it's like you're gonna really dedicate four or five years to your detox thing, this hypothesis without really having a good way of testing it and then, and then say that it's the vitamin A stuff. It's like, what happens if it doesn't work five years down the line? Then what do you Where are you at? It's like, was it the vitamin A? So that's why it's very important to really have a good gage on if something is working or not, and be able to test your hypothesis. It's not that it's a problem to make the hypothesis, but you don't want to create a hypothesis that you cannot falsify and you cannot objectively take a good perspective. So I think those are all huge holes inside the vitamin A culture, the anti vitamin a culture that's going on that is beyond, to some extent, Grant's work, and that needs to be specifically stated, which is why I've made previous videos on it, and why we're mentioning it here. And then we'll get into the actual specifics of Grant's work, showing why it's like, not like. For me personally, I was extremely disappointed. I'm just gonna put it that way. It's not a personal attack on Grant, but like, I was very upset that I had to I wound up spending the time going through this because the level of of research done here is is, for me, not up to the standard that I think is appropriate. Yeah, I

Jay Feldman 12:11
think that's a good way of putting it. As you were saying, we definitely want to differentiate between what we're going to be talking about mostly here, which is Grant's work, and then the other aspects of the culture, other practitioners and how they're implementing it, people's dietary implementation here, which we have issues with independently. So those are not like, we're not pending that on Grant, but yeah, those, those things are all worth being said kind of going back through a couple things you mentioned, if we're going to kind of take on this idea that this is a multi year long journey, and you know you're going to have these detox effects over time, you're going to feel worse and all these things, then it better be built on a really good foundation, because you're dedicating and kind of giving up huge portions of your life and lifestyle during that time in the name of improving. And if it's built on a really rocky or foundation, yeah, very questionable foundation. Then maybe we don't want to take that sort of approach that's going to come at a significant cost and take a huge amount of time before you acknowledge that it is maybe not working. So that's something that's really important to highlight. There are a couple other things I want to mention. So one is, and I should have mentioned this as a disclaimer when we started a bit earlier, obviously. And this is really evident in the vitamin A toxicity world. This is something that is inducing a lot of tribalism, religiosity. People are associating this very strongly with their identities. And so there's you know when we've created, like, when you've created these videos, and other people have created videos about this, there's a lot of backlash, there's a lot of resistance, and I just want to make it known like this is we are only doing this to support the listeners, to support you guys who maybe are trying this approach and are open to considering that it might not be absolutely everything that you thought it was, and we're not here to criticize you as an individual, anybody who we're talking about, including grant. We're not here to, you know, bash you or or anything else other than actually trying to help and support you and trying to point out some things that maybe haven't been pointed out to you prior. And I think it's really valuable to expose yourself to to contrary information, to, you know, these sorts of things that you're implementing. And we know that there's going to be, you know, some sort of provocative title and thumbnail on this video. But the The goal here is really to look at this objectively. And, you know, as you mentioned, we're not pharma shields. We're not being paid by big retinol, you know, big vitamin A this is just looking at like we have no dog in the fight. And in fact, as you were saying, it was kind of disappointing, right? Like we're, we're open to the possibility that we don't have the full picture on everything. And so looking into this book that that we'll be digging into some of the kind of aspects of it would be. Great to have. I'm away with something that was actually helpful to implement with clients who maybe are struggling with different issues. But as we're kind of alluding to, that really wasn't the case. And so hopefully, even if you're coming at it from that opposite perspective, you can look at, you know, listen to this objectively and and come to your own conclusions. Again, we're not saying, and this is another really important point to mention, we're not saying we said this, so it's right, or someone else said it, so it's wrong. Come to your conclusion, we'd highly recommend you look through the different studies that we cite and and detail. And it's also a really, you know, something we talked about a lot on the podcast is the ability to think critically and evaluate different perspectives. And it's a really important skill, because, if not, you will just jump from one extreme diet or cult like, you know, intervention, to another, yeah, and tribe. And it's an invaluable skill to be able to look at what somebody's saying critically, and as you said, we need to have hypothesis that's testable and falsifiable, but we also need to consider the logic that's being used, the thought processes that are being used, the bias that's being used, and also the kind of appeals that are being used, right? There's a lot of appeals in the book that we're not going to be focusing on. We're really going to focus on the supported claims. There's a lot of appeals to to this. I mean, there's a number. It's a lot of like, kind of us versus them. They're out to get you. It's if you're you know, vitamin A is just purely a feature of the pharmaceutical industry, and obviously they're bad. So vitamin A is bad, and everything you've been taught is entirely wrong, it's all the opposite. And that is not to say that any of that is inherently right or wrong, but it's not a solid argument to to be basing such an such an extraordinary belief on and a lot of the support provided are weak arguments like that. Again, we're going to be focusing on the stronger arguments made, but it hopefully this, this is an example of and they can be used as a lesson in terms of how to evaluate something, maybe more critically, and hopefully to not be swayed by something like this in the future.

Mike 17:18
I think the biggest thing in the two biggest things that stood out to me in the book, there's a lot of fear mongering. So it's like, look at all these terrible things that vitamin A did to these animals. And it's like, Oh, wow. Like, that's really bad. But then it's like, what were the dosages, right? What's the dosage? So it's like, you get past the fear and then and minimize the fear response, and then start to look in the specifics and eat and I think even, like the other components that another factor that was used in the book heavily was this, matter of fact, like, of course, anybody could figure this out. Like, this is just so obvious, this type of mentality. And I I see this even inside some of the other practitioners in the sphere, like talking down to people as if, like, of course, it's just this, like, don't you know? And it's like, no, we don't know you and I didn't know that. Like, the perspective, like, it wasn't clear that vitamin A was just toxic. So it's like, no, we don't know. We're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna go through and look at this and not, you know, it's for me, that was something that I think initially really rubbed me the wrong way, is this mentality of the people, and this is not necessarily grant doing that to the audience when he speaks, per se in the book, there's a degree of this, but there's other practitioners in the sphere who and even on the repeat forum, some of the people on the repeat forum talk to people like, Of course you should know this. If you don't understand this, like I don't, I don't know what's wrong with you, this type of mentality, and that is, that's not helpful. This is not like the goal is to figure out what people need to get better. What do they have? Vitamin A toxicity? Because it definitively exists. So do you have it? Do you have a reasonable context where you could have developed it based on your dosing of liver and vitamin A supplements and the different dietary camps you're coming from, and multiple other factors, like, we're going to talk about that is that, is that, is that something that's relevant to you, or is it not really relevant in your case? Because, like, is, you know, those would be important things to determine, not just, yeah, everybody has it. Of course, it's this, the problem, like, how do you not know about this? Even my grandma could figure this stuff out as, like, those are not rational arguments. Those are not arguments at all. That's just and then even inside the book, The sad part about this is, and there's, there's a lot of stuff that we're not going to specifically cover from Grant's work, is because there's no support for it. He, throughout the book, he just straight up makes claims, draws some funny pictures inside his book, for different like for some of the autoimmunity claims with zero supporting evidence, it's just his hypothesis that's untested, completely untested and completely unsupported. So it's like when even with stuff like that, it could sound good, but if. It has no support for it. Then, until there is support generated, which the burden of proof is on Grant, then, then there's no reason to even address the claims. So that's what we're going to do now, is we're going to actually address the specific claims where support was provided, so that we actually have something of substance to interact with. Because that's that's what it needs to be. It's like, okay, you're saying X, Y and Z occurred in this way. Here's the studies that you're using. Let's actually, let's look at those studies and see what you're saying. And that's what we did, and we and to be fair, like I went into this with the idea that maybe I really didn't know the level of toxicity of vitamin A, and I need to reconsider my position. And I came out of this of, Wow, that was very interesting take, I guess. So I think the silver lining was we got to dive in a little bit more into the metabolism of vitamin A and start to understand, just like what the actual safety threshold are in detail, which can be helpful and also give people some perspective. But this was one of the more disappointing things that we've had to, like, dig into recently. So without that, I guess, but just, might as well just jump in at this point instead of talking around the problems. Yeah,

Jay Feldman 21:18
two really brief things I wanted to mention real quick. One is you were talking about claims with substance, and I think most people nowadays maybe, maybe this has been the case for a while, but I think it's much worse with social media and podcasts and things like that. The most people are not used to recognizing whether a claim is substance, like has substance or not. And you listen to people talk on podcasts, on interviews, on in social media, reels and clips and whatever, and and there's a lot of empty words, and that was, well, there was a lot of that in this book, and it's just an example of that. Again, it can be really helpful for identifying this one is coming at you from other places. So just wanted to throw that out there for one. And then last thing you know, in talking about the Ray Peat forum, just closing that part out, we wouldn't care what happens there and what kind of censorship there is, and who's running it, and any of the other and whether they call it vitamin A toxicity or not, if it wasn't associated with Ray's name, if it wasn't called the Ray Peat forum. And also, if lots of people don't still go there to learn about Ray Peat and his perspectives. I mean, the forum has always had its pluses and minuses. It's always had its faults. But this is, this is, it's gone to quite the extreme. And it's, it's irresponsible, it's, it's, honestly, it's embarrassing, if you're on the other camp, if you, if you, if you don't care about anything we're saying, and you're on the vitamin A toxicity side, which, again, we there shouldn't even be sides here, but if you're, if you're thinking of it that way, you shouldn't want it to be named to the repeat forum. You shouldn't want the censorship and religiosity and and all you know, tribalism that's going on there. It doesn't give you better information or a more balanced perspective. It doesn't, you know, or access to anything better, and it doesn't make it look better or more enticing to other people. It actually does quite the opposite. It really turns people off. So I think all parties would be much happier if there were some changes there. The very least, just switch the name, you know, go to a different forum, stop associating it with repeat. And you know, that would be fine. But anyway, I don't want to digress further and talk more about that, because I think I know you've got a video on this, and it's been talked about quite a bit elsewhere, but just wanted to at least throw my two cents in there. Yeah, we

Mike 23:32
can. I mean, for me, my solution was basically, I personally won't be, like, using any life giving store products, which I think is associated with Charlie, and until he changes the domain name out off repeat form. Like, that's it. And that, again, that's my personal way of being like, Look dude. Like, I'm not cool with this, because there's a lot of people coming into this repeat sphere now from different camps. You have all these influencers jumping into bioenergetic and if you Google Ray Peat, like, Ray Peat form is going to come up, and you're going to go there, it's gonna be a bunch of to be a bunch of people talking about how Ray doesn't know what he was talking about. And toxic bio theory, and vitamin A is this toxin, and all type of stuff. And it's like that is, that is has nothing to do with Ray Peat, that has nothing to do with his body of work, that has nothing to do with bioenergetic principles. And it's not an extension of them. It is actually in opposition to them. And so it's like, it's pretty problematic to be, to be associating with them. It's almost like slandering, to some extent, Dr Peat's work and the perspective that has been discussed. So like, I again, like, I have no beef with Charlie or the ray Peat forum, as in, so far as, like, just stop making it the repeat form. That's just, it's, it's a really, a big problem. I think it's, it's net negative for people who are interested in one dynamic, and they have this heading and name on this dynamic, and then they're getting fed something else. It's like a bait and switch, which is, that's like, for me, that's a huge ethical concern, a huge ethical concern, especially because. But this perspective is not well backed, and it is possibly problematic with some of the interventions. So it's like, you know, at first, at least do no harm, and it's questionable if it's doing that

Jay Feldman 25:11
right. And also it's fine to house other views. That was always a part, you know, obviously, Ray always encouraged, you know, critical thinking, discussion of opposing viewpoints and all of that. That would be fine. If you discussed the possibility of rate of vitamin A being toxic on the forum, nobody would care. That's totally fine. Sensors a

Mike 25:30
thread. There was a thread there with 1000s of posts on the thread, the low vitamin A stuff for for years on the forum, and it was openly allowed to be discussed that, like, this is a it wasn't like it was there, the ray P forum was there, and everybody else was ignoring these other things. Those threads existed in opposition to his perspective, talking about Grant's work, and it's one of the largest threads on the forum,

Jay Feldman 25:55
right? And that's fine, like, it's a great, it's great to discuss all, you know, all sorts of different views. I should mention, also, just for anyone who doesn't know, the rate P form was never associated directly with Ray. It just was supposed to be discussion centered around his his perspective and beliefs. But yeah, it's totally fine if you wanted to do that. The real problem is centering the opposing views more than anything, and then basically branding it as vitamin A, toxicity as a, you know, but still keeping the repeat name, those are, I think, the major concerns, Yep, yeah. And then, as you were saying, advertising for your own products and life giving store, which is run by Charlie or owned by Charlie, and still using repeats name for your sales while you know, doing all these other things. All right, so I think we've done enough of an introduction. Let's dig into some of the details here. And so we're just going to be focusing on arguments made by Grant general, specifically in his book, and then in the other arguments that he's mentioned in podcast interviews, but mostly it'll be focused on claims he made from his book. We'll be including specific quotes from him, going through specific studies that he cited, and providing some other studies that that kind of further further elucidate the context.

Mike 27:18
And to be clear here too, we're going to be specifically addressing points where he actually uses sources, because there's a variety of points in the book where there's no information sourced, and there's base basically, there's non arguments being made because there's no support for what's being said. So we can only, we can realistically only focus on things that, like you can make an argument against, because that that's going to be our priority, so that's we're going to dive into?

Jay Feldman 27:47
Yeah, totally. And we also are not going to, we're not going to be going through every single point he makes that is supported, either we're just going through really some of the central ones that are kind of foundations that he builds on throughout the entire book. So things like whether the original studies showing vitamin A deficiency are valid or not. We're going to be going over the other studies on hypervitaminosis a we're going to be talking a little bit about retinoic acid and other metabolites. It's really just going to be the central points. It's not, it's definitely not worth going through anything more in there, if you if, as if, as the listeners, you felt there were other claims that were really well made, and you want us to discuss those, we'd be happy to but it felt like this was more than adequate. And so yeah, we're just gonna be focusing on those. And of course, as you've mentioned, but just one last thing, this is totally not at all personal to grant. This is just talking about the information, and we'd be happy to discuss this with him, too. If he wants to come on, we can discuss any of these things, and that's not a problem. So, yeah, awesome. All right, I know for the listeners, if they're interested in vitamin A toxicity, it's likely that they're dealing with lasting health problems, and when it comes to creating the optimal diet for resolving these chronic health issues. There's a lot of conflicting information out here, as we're discussing, and that's why I've created the energy balance Food Guide. It'll help you determine exactly what to eat to optimize support your metabolism and help you lose weight, improve your digestion, get amazing sleep, boost your energy and more. It's a one page infographic, and it organizes food on a spectrum based on how effectively they support your metabolism. And it also has a separate spectrum that adjusts the scale for you in the case that you're dealing with various digestive symptoms, and it accounts for, you know, various factors there. The Food Guide makes it extremely easy to get started with a bioenergetic approach to optimizing your health. So head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/guide to download your free energy balance Food Guide. So we're going to start out by digging into the original studies on vitamin A deficiency. These are studies from around 100 years ago, at least the initial ones even a little bit more than 100 years ago. And basically, Grant argues that many of the early studies demonstrating vitamin A deficiency were very heavily flawed. They didn't actually. Demonstrate vitamin A deficiency, and there were a number of confounding variables to the point where basically there's no support for vitamin A deficiency. That's that's his kind of primary claim. And so we're going to share a couple of quotes here and then go into some of these studies. So his first quote states firstly and this, so this is in regard to talking about some of the initial studies looking at vitamin A deficiency. Until he states, firstly, why use such a complicated diet at all, the artificial diet, this artificial diet is such a completely unnatural and even bizarre diet to try to feed rats on one in evolutionary history? Have rats ever lived on casein, lard and Vegemite? Isn't it a tad presumptuous to think that this human designed diet is going to be instantaneously adapted to by rats? So that's this first argument here is basically they're using purified diets in these studies. That's not natural for a rat. And so the kind of implication is that that invalidates these studies, because the diet is not going to be adapted to by by rats, and it's very different from their kind of evolutionarily consistent diet. Now there's a lot of things that you could say here. I think the clearest one, the clearest kind of refutation, is that these purified diets are used in 1000s of studies, basically anytime you're trying to look at the impact of different levels of vitamins or minerals or nutrients on an animal like a rat, they feed purified diets that are nearly the same as they were in the 1920s they've changed a bit. They've evolved a bit over the years. They look nothing like what anybody a rat or any other animal would eat in the wild, and yet, when given this diet, they're totally fine. The rats live a normal life. They don't have disease, they don't die early or anything else. And it is at least good enough that it allows researchers to manipulate the levels of different vitamins, minerals, whatever they'd like to do, or other aspects of the environment with a fully controlled diet, and then see the impacts of those other things. This is a diet, again, that has been tested in 1000s of studies. If it was inherently a problem for rats, it would not be used. First off, it would invalidate many 1000s of studies, but they wouldn't still use it, because they would see that the rats were getting diseases and dying when they were on this. This is just kind of the basic control diet, and so, I mean, that's, that's like the kind of clearest thing we won't sound things we're taking into whether you can adapt to a different diet, and things like that. I mean, it's, this is the idea.

Mike 32:30
This is a non argument. There's no argument against this. There's other studies where rats are eating relatively similar diets and do completely fine. And then right like you, if you take this perspective, you can pray, pretty much invalidate almost all rat research. So, right? Like it's that's not even an argument to be made. This is like, this is his personal qualm with evolutionary consistency inside rat studies. It's like, whatever man like you can have your perspective on that, but it we have, there's a lot of evidence to show the rats reading diets that are similar to this, that even if there is vitamin A in them and they do just fine. So I would, I'm not even worried about this. Like there's this, is this, I think, is a good example of some levels of argumentation and claims that he makes in his book that it's like this. It's just a non argument. There's, there's no reason to even dig in and refute it, because there's, there's nothing to actually refute, especially because a curse research, and any research be like, Oh, look, we gave them this diet, and it was, it was a starch, and it was a casein protein, and then it was a vitamin and mineral mixture. And then, like, whatever the fat is that they're gonna use, soybean oil, corn oil, lard, butter, olive oil, whatever the component is. So it's like, this is not even, yeah, this is, I think, a good example of things where like this is not worth even refuting heavily,

Jay Feldman 33:50
right? And if you were to say, well, then you do need to invalidate all of those 1000s of studies that have been done in the last hundreds of years using these purified diets, you would have to support that the purified diets are problematic in these studies, that that's actually shown that the control rats with no manipulation, just on the purified diets, are not normal and healthy and or, or are like severely diseased and ill, and that just doesn't, that just isn't the case. So, yeah, let's, let's move on. Even in

Mike 34:19
his vitamin A studies where they give them more vitamin A with these diets, right? They are healthy and they have children and all types of stuff.

Jay Feldman 34:28
Come on, man, children, yeah, well,

Mike 34:31
yeah. Pups, whatever you call baby rats,

Jay Feldman 34:37
yeah. So that was, and again, kind of a throwaway argument. There's a lot of those in the book, but let's dig into some that are a little more substantial this next one, not so much, but, but I guess after that, we'll at least share this one. So he says. But by far the most concerning question we need to raise is, how could these researchers have been so completely disconnected from the norms in nature as I was reading? The various reports I was thinking, Are you kidding me, all that disease and destruction caused by mere deficiency? I mean to me, at least the that is just so completely ridiculous. Additionally, all this lethal disease occurred in just 10 weeks or two and a half months because of a deficiency that is that too is so utterly illogical, because if these animals were so incredibly susceptible to this deficiency scenario, then they simply would not be on the planet as a species. Therefore, it should have been abundantly clear to every single one of these people involved in conducting the experiments that the animals were not responding to a deficiency at all. Nope. No way. Not a chance of it. These sick experiments were simply poisoning the animals. The animals were responding to a toxicity and an incredibly powerful toxin at that. All right, Michael, let you make some comments on this.

Mike 35:47
I mean, I think there's, there's a couple things here that are like, there's tons of throwaway arguments, so I'm not even going to get into those. But there's a couple things here that make this like kind of a ridiculous statement. So one, we have other toxicities, right? Scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, which cause devastation to animals in similar timeframes, if not shorter, and in humans. And we'll talk about the human timeframe in just a second, like scurvy within a couple weeks, I think it's like 10 to 14 weeks, or something like this, massively destroys human health. And like, the ranges of variety of different organ systems, of different components. And very, very pellagra, similar things. With Berry Berry, you have like, heart failure, and you have like, at like destruction and damage to the nervous system. And in pellagra, you have like, damage to the GI tract, the skin, all types of crazy problems. So the like, there's no basis to be like, Oh, well, this could never be a deficiency scenario. It's like, there's tons of deficiency scenarios that absolutely ravage organisms because of how central some of these components are to the general functioning. It's like your car is not going to function if you don't have spark plugs. It's the same thing with the deficiencies. If your mitochondria do not have NAD, which is supplied by niacin, by vitamin b3 you will not produce energy and you will die. So it's like the deficiency piece non argument, like, there's no argument against that here. The next thing is, it's like, these are where we're seeing all this stuff. Is like, it should be abundantly clear to every single one of the people involved in these experiments and animals were not responding to a deficiency. It's like, actually, it is abundantly clear that they are responding to a deficiency. Because when you add the components back into the diet detox in the toxin, a back into these diets, which we will go through in the studies the animals get better, so despite having more of the toxin. And then there's backwards rationalization by Grant that basically trying to say, Oh yeah, like it's because of these other reasons. And at this level of argumentation here is counter runs in opposition to the argumentation he tries to make later, when he's at when they when they're setting up these diets. So basically, what he's saying here is like, are the diets disconnected from the norms in nature? And rats, sure, but rats are still healthy, healthy to a large extent. Eating these diets are diseases and destruction caused by mere deficiency like this. Possible. Yes, we have many examples of this documented in human literature and in animal literature. Then the next thing he goes into is the fact that it occurred in just 10 weeks. Well, let you talk about this Jay. But the equivalency, but for 10 weeks in rats versus humans, is years. And then the next thing to keep, keep an eye on here is that, like these sick experiments were simply poisoning the animals. It's like, he makes zero proof for this. And if anything, when they add in the poison, poison a in the experiments that this guy CITES, the animals get better, and then he tries to rationalize it away. So it's like, there's just, it's basically him just saying, I don't believe this can happen, and then looking at the research and trying to make backwards rationalizations that this couldn't happen, and we're clearly seeing it happen in very well designed studies even 100 years ago, and then we'll even have studies that we talk about that are more current. So again, like this is a great example of 90% of the book is Grant just sitting there saying, I don't believe this could happen. These researchers should have obviously seen that this couldn't be the case, and then not providing a single shred of evidence, and then looking at the studies and making backwards rationalizations. And again, I'm not just saying this, we're going to show you this, but there's a lot of logical flaws in here,

Jay Feldman 39:50
right? Yeah. I mean, those are all important points, as you mentioned. So a couple important things. One is the equivalence between rat lifespan. And human lifespan is 30 times. Humans basically live 30 times as long as rats. And when you look at kind of standards for comparing the amount of time that a rat undergoes some intervention, you multiply each day by 30. So in other words, every day that a rat experiences something is the equivalent of one month for a human. So in this case, when we're talking about 10 weeks, this would be the human equivalent of five, five and three quarters years. So this is not at all a short period of time, considering the lifespan for a rat. So that's one thing to consider. As you said, there are lots of deficiencies that can be induced in short periods of time, even in humans. So not talking over five years or nearly six years in humans, but just in a matter of weeks. So that alone is not a reason why this isn't a deficiency. Of course, deficiencies can occur in short periods of time, more so with non fat soluble vitamins. So it is true that in a human that has good vitamin A stores, you're not going to create a deficiency in 10 weeks. That's because we store a lot. And that's something that they note with the rats as well, which is a lot of the research. They're looking at very young rats that are not yet adults, because if they have them having enough vitamin A up until the point where they're adults, it takes way longer to create a deficiency, because a lot of vitamin A gets stored during that time. So if you're talking about a young rat, especially, it's very easy to cause a deficiency in a short period of time. And this is not a short period of time that he's mentioning here.

Mike 41:24
No, by almost six years in humans, it'd be the equivalent of depleting humans with vitamin A for six years, which you can deplete them much sooner than that. And they have studies looking at this directly, and like bringing liver, the stores of vitamin A and the liver down, and they're doing that through radio labeling. We're not going to cover that here, but there are studies. There are studies looking

Jay Feldman 41:44
at that. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So we're going to start to dig in next, into one of the early studies identifying vitamin A deficiency by wolbach in 1925 but one thing to mention before that, so it's really hard to conceptualize the doses of retinol used in a lot of these studies, and so we're going to be mentioning those doses, but also doing equivalents in terms of beef liver, because beef liver is basically the most concentrated source of retinol that anyone eats, on average, and you and just for reference there, the amount of retinol in one ounce of beef Liver is the equivalent of the amount in 40 eggs, 71 cups of milk. And then, when we're looking at beta carotene in carrots and sweet potatoes, if you convert it to retinol equivalents, this is the equivalent of about six and a half carrots or nearly three sweet potatoes. So we're going to be talking about this in terms of, you know, this many IU or micrograms of retinol, which is the equivalent of X ounces of beef liver. So I just wanted to mention that now, and you can conceptualize 40 times that amount for eggs. And you know, of course, people aren't eating that much beef liver on on a typical basis. So the amounts that we're going to be talking about are really astronomical. And same with eggs and milk and all these other things, you're really never going to be eating the amounts that are used in a lot of these studies. So we'll be, you know, it'll just help kind of conceptualize some of those, those values and

Mike 43:05
something to put in, put into perspective here, just for people who are doing the low vitamin A stuff, just as an example in in the research for toxicity, unless you're using supplements beef liver or cod liver oil or like fish liver oils, it's you actually have to try to really cause toxicity problems because of, because of how little vitamin A there is in other components, and then especially because beta carotene is not comparable directly to preformed vitamin A as retinol. There's a lot of different elements affecting its conversion, its activation, its absorption, is excretion and things like this compared to retinol. So it's the it's really the toxicity area is really around people eating very high volumes of liver supplementing high doses of vitamin A supplements, or taking cod liver oil supplements, or things like this, and then adding those other things on top. If it was just getting it through egg yolks, like it would take a decent amount, like, it'd be a big, decent effort. And I want to, I think it's important to put that perspective, because a lot of people are saying, I can't have any egg yolks at all because I'm vitamin A toxic or something like this,

Jay Feldman 44:13
Right, yeah. And we'll, we'll be talking about the doses that are required for that, how quickly, you know, the rats recover, and a bunch of other things. So but anyway, we'll start with some of these vitamin A deficient study, deficiency studies, starting with the one by walback in 1925 titled tissue changes following deprivation of fat soluble a vitamin. And this one grant has some qualms with that. We'll discuss just to kind of set the stage. So the way this study was set up was that both rats were put on a vitamin A free diet, or, sorry, both groups of rats and the diet consisted of casein that was treated to remove the vitamins. We'll come back to that starch, salt, lard and brewer's yeast, and then also, like a mixture with salt and some other vitamins, I believe, or that might have all been in the in the brewer's yeast. Right? And then the control diet was the exact same as that, except they used butter instead of lard, considering that butter has more measurable retinol in it compared to lard. So basically two groups both on this purified diet, one has butter, which is supposed to be the one that has vitamin A, and then one has lard. And what they found was that the rats on the group that was on just lard develops signs of Vitamin A deficiency, which have since been acknowledged and replicated, things like poor humped posture, emaciation and a lack of growth, atrophy of organs, and then also death for a number of them. Whereas when they were on the control diet, they didn't have any issues, and if they took rats that were on the vitamin A deficient diet, the large diet, and switched them over to the control diet, there was pretty immediate reversal of the negative effects that were brought on by the lard diet. Now, as grant points out, this experiment is not perfectly constructed. Part of that is because it was done in 1925 not every single vitamin and mineral had been identified at that point, it was hard to isolate things, so they had to use things like butter or lard instead of exact measurements of something like a vitamin A supplement. We will be going through studies later that very clearly show what happens with and without vitamin A and they don't use something like butter instead of lard. So it really removes all those confounding variables. But even in this study, the lengths that grant goes to to kind of refute it are pretty significant and and far fetched. It's quite a stretch, and so we're just going to talk about those. And many of the claims he makes his kind of refutation are pretty much invalidated by many other studies that we have. So I'll let you go ahead, Mike, and start out with with the first argument made by Grant, which is that the casein that they used would have had retinoic acid in it, because there would have been retinol in the casein, and it would have been converted to retinoic acid when it was basically processed to remove the vitamins, where they add ethanol and maybe they heat it up, or, I don't remember the exact processing, but anyway, that's kind of his first, His first argument here.

Mike 46:59
Yeah, so I think the biggest and most glaring consideration here with the casein front is that both groups were fed casein. So both rats received casein in the both the large group and the vitamin A group. And so Grant's argument is that when you heat the casein up to you, they basically were heating the casein up to strip the vitamin content from the casein to really make sure that the casein doesn't have any vitamin A at all, then that they were creating retinoic acid. But there's a there's a couple problems with this. The first one being both groups got fed the casein, so the rats should have both technically gotten the toxicity symptoms, which both groups did not. So that's problem number one. And like, that's pretty much a mic drop from like, from the get go. There's other arguments that he makes to kind of backwardsly rationalize the perspective, and we'll talk about those. The next the next thing is the actual vitamin, a content of casein, especially if it's been stripped, is negligible, like it's absolutely negligible. Even if there is a portion being converted to retinoic acid, the amount would have had to been in infinitely small, because the amount already in casein is small, and then they also were treating it to remove a portion of the vitamin A. So that's the next, the next problem. And he doesn't even cite anything to show that the there's a high amount of retinoic acid in casein. He just basically says that retinoic acid isn't doesn't fluoresce, and so they wouldn't be able to tell the content of the retinoic acid encasing if you were to test it through a fluorescence or chromatography. So maybe there's some in there, even if the vitamin, the overall vitamin, a content is lowered. So it's, again, like, not really a significant argument being made here, and it's very easily refuted, even beyond, even beyond, like going in depth research, once you see, like, both groups received casein. So it wasn't like one group got casein and one group didn't. So then you could prove the art, the poisoning perspective, and if the again, like, if the retinoic acid was that toxic, then it should have technically poisoned both groups. So there's, again, a lot of glaring problems with this setup. Yeah.

Jay Feldman 49:21
So a lot of good points there, and I'll just kind of add some clarification and dig into some details. So as far as the casein argument, what he's basically saying is there is retinol and casein, when it was processed, that retinol would have been converted into retinoic acid, but the retinoic acid is not able to be measured, so you don't actually see any vitamin A in the casein, so they test it for retinol. They say there's no retinol in there, but it must have all been converted to retinoic acid. Well, we know that that's not the case, because in new studies, basically since 2010 where they are using vitamin A free diets with casein, they don't actually treat the casein anymore to reduce the vitamin A because they find. It's not necessary because there are only trace amounts of retinol in the vitamin A to begin with. So this is a quote from a study titled diet, titled diet in vitamin A research from 2010 and they state standard casing is used vitamin free or vitamin tested casing and alcohol stripped casing are more expensive and were not found to be necessary since the retinol content is extremely low. So could there be a very tiny amount, basically immeasurable, of retinoic acid in the treated casein? Yes, is that? Could that possibly be responsible for the toxicity here? That is extremely far fetched, if that is the claim that someone's making. And again, there's no you can make the argument that there's an extremely low amount of or that there's casein or that there is retinol in the casein, but grant doesn't cite a single study to show that, and that's because, at least from what I've seen, it doesn't exist. Because the amount is basically negligible. It's such a trace amount that you can't find anything showing that you have this many milligrams of retinol per 100 grams of casein, or something like that, because it's negligible. And you can look at the vitamin content and mineral content for casein and for tons of other things, it exists. There's a reason why the retinol one doesn't, and that's because there's basically no retinol in there. So this is a pretty far fetched argument, and is acknowledged now because they do vitamin A deficiency studies with just standard casein. So that's one thing to consider. The other thing, as you were saying, is, if the if this was so toxic, the amount of retinoic acid in the casein, then not only in this study, but in other studies where all the groups are using the exact same casein, and there's no change in lard or butter or anything like that, you would see that toxicity present. And that doesn't happen even when they're using the treated vitamin free casing, there is no there's no situation where it's ever been shown to cause that toxicity. And he makes the argument that the reason you don't see that in the butter group is because the saturated fat and cholesterol, or the extra amount of those, which we'll talk about, is protective enough that you're not actually going to see the toxicity. But there are tons of other studies, some that we'll go through, and others that will cite that use the same vitamin free casing without any extra saturated fat or cholesterol between the groups. Some of the studies use very, very low amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. They use, you know, seed oils and things like that, and yet, there's no toxicity seen in the control groups from the vitamin free casing. So there it's a it is a very clearly poor argument. As far as the the retinoic acid concern in the casing,

Mike 52:30
there's no argument, basically,

Jay Feldman 52:32
right, right now, the next argument he makes is that in the lard, there would have been a lot of retinoic acid, and that was largely responsible for the negative effects of the experimental diet, so more than the casein. He really blames it on the retinoic acid in the lard. Of course, he says that you can't measure that amount, because we can only really measure the retinol, but it must be there. And then he's he basically is arguing that by reducing the lard and providing the butter, which does have retinol. He's just saying it's not as bad as the lard, and there are some extra saturated fats and cholesterol in there that the butter is so protective. And as you mentioned partially by allowing for the emulsification of the retinoic acid from the casein the diet's already had that. That is why the diet with the butter is so protective. That's why there's no toxicity issues. That's why they recover so fast. And so I'm just going to share his quote stating this. He says it should be very clear that it was not so much the substitution of butter into the diet that had promptly, promptly ameliorated the disease conditions. Rather, it was the removal of the lard with its hidden retinoic acid. The researchers had simply removed one of the primary sources of the retinoic acid toxin from the diet. Therefore, while being fed lard, the rats were simply being poisoned to death. However, I have no doubt that the higher density fats and cholesterol of the butter helped significantly by emulsifying the retinoic acid hidden within the casein the beneficial and protective aspects of these fats would have far outweighed any additional risk its own vitamin A content would have presented, or may have presented. Now two things to note here. One, we're going to be looking at other studies where there's no lard with its hidden, toxic retinoic acid. So it's there are lots of studies, and we'll go through a couple showing vitamin A deficiency without that. And then the other thing is, he says that the butter would have protected against it, despite that, it actually has retinol. You're adding retinol in, but there's an increase in saturated fats and cholesterol, and the amount is pretty small. Basically, in lard, you have about 40% saturated fat, and it might have even been more at the time of this experiment. And in butter, you have about 60% saturated fat, and then cholesterol, you go from about 95 milligrams per 100 grams to 215 so you're increasing a bit of saturated fat and cholesterol, but you're also adding in retinol, and he's basically arguing that that is protective enough that that is going to fully ameliorate all of the negative effects removing the lard and providing the butter. We'll come back to that. But one other thing that you touched on is that emulsifying the retinol actually increases its potency, and so this. Is shown in in studies looking at retinol and different preparation, and what they find is basically, there's an increased absorption, increased absorption of the retinol about tenfold, to the point that if you are taking very high doses of retinol, you'll reach toxicity 10 times as fast with a with an emulsified form of retinol. And I'll, I'll share a site, a study about this in the notes, and that's normally looking at retinol, not retinoic acid, because retinoic acid is already partial. It's already a bit more water soluble than retinol. The amount of increased absorption is less. So it wouldn't actually be tenfold of an increase in absorption, but there would still be an increase in absorption, because the emulsification of a fat soluble substance allows us to better absorb it. So his argument here is that somehow it's protective, but actually would just be increasing the amount of retinoic acid that gets absorbed. So and again, there's no like citation for his point here. There's no support for him saying that that's the case, but any support that that you would provide would actually suggest, really the opposite. So that's kind of the main things, but there's two other things to mention. So if providing the butter and removing the lard can completely protect against the retinol content of the butter and the retinoic acid content of the casein, then for one, how toxic could the retinoic acid and the casein and the retinol content and the butter really be like and if we, you know, in terms of our all of us are vitamin A toxic, we need to remove every source. It sounds like we could be totally fine as long as we're having a bit of saturated fat and cholesterol even even though it's actually increased the absorption of retinol and retinoic acid. But as long as long as we've got a bit of those, we don't even have to worry. We can fully reverse vitamin A toxicity pretty rapidly. They note that the recovery was very rapid just by adding in retinol, with some with a bit extra saturated fat and cholesterol and taking out lard. So if that was the case, and this is such a concern, then you know, why? Why are people needing years to recover from the vitamin A toxicity? Why do we have to avoid every tiny, little amount of vitamin A, of retinol, of carotenoids that we could find in our in our foods? I mean, it's those things are really not lining up here. And again, it's a bit of an extension. It's just kind of an aside, because the the central point here is he's making claims that are are fully countered by the evidence we're mentioning here and some of the other studies we'll mention and also are largely just unfounded at all. And again, just the last thing I'll mention here is we're going to be looking at some other studies that use the same vitamin free casein. They don't have any differences in fat or cholesterol between the groups, and it makes it very clear that the casein itself is not toxic here, whatever retinoic acid isn't in there because there's no support for that. And the support suggests otherwise. The evidence suggests otherwise, and again, it also will make it clear that the extra saturated fat and cholesterol in the butter and the removal of the lard is not responsible for what's going on here. So that's kind of the last things I'll mention. So with that, Mike, feel free to share any other thoughts you have about this wobeck study from 1925 and then we'll dig into some of the other studies showing vitamin A deficiency.

Mike 58:08
So there's two things that I wanted to add here. One is that Grant talks about the development of retinoic acid in lard, which we actually don't know the actual content, but he says that it develops because the lard is heated and exposed to oxygen. The butter in the study, they specifically say was, let's see here, they say control rats in the same diet, but with butter, fat prepared from fresh butter by melting and washing it in hot water in place of lard, grew normally and have been maintained in normal, healthy condition for a year. So basically they heated up the butter. So technically, the butter, which it was heated up and exposed to oxygen and has a much larger retinol content than does lard, should also have created some degree of retinoic acid, which would have meant that the butter should have further poisoned them, right? Because you have a higher retinol content with arguably or possibly more retinoic acid concentration in the butter than the lard. And then the next thing is, Grant actually cites the retinol content, or the vitamin A content of lard. There's a very old study where they look in this from herb et al, and they say, according to herb et al, lard contains point five to two IU of vitamin A per gram, which is of the same order of magnitude what we found in beef, beef fat, mutton and fat mixture. So basically, the lard content is extremely low in vitamin A, or the vitamin A content in lard is extremely low. And when you look at the rat's diet, the rats are given five grams per day, 24% of that is lard. So they got 1.2 grams of lard per day. And if we look at the vitamin A content, you have point five to two IU of vitamin A per gram of lard. So the rats would have been getting between point six to 2.4, IUs of vitamin vitamin A per day from the lard by itself, which if we. When we think about the dosages that we're looking at in the other studies, is an extremely minuscule amount. And then even with that, like, it's like, what percentage of that is going to convert to retinoic acid? So we are arguably looking at less than one IU or point three micrograms of retinoic acid per day for the rats, which is not a toxicity threshold for the rats by any means. So even using Grant's own citations, it doesn't support his perspective, like there's, he's citing things to make an argument, and it's, it's, it's, it disproving his argument as he's citing them as he goes through this process. So there's just, there's so many gaping holes inside the argumentation perspective, it's it's insane, like it's insane that he even went through this level of argumentation. Because it really just seems to me like backwards rationalization. When you start breaking down all these pieces, both groups are getting casein, the casein, the the casein, the vitamin A content of casein is negligible. The vitamin A content of lard is negligible. You add a higher source of vitamin A that would technically be more emulsified, and emulsification makes it more toxic, and the rats recover.

Jay Feldman 1:01:16
And then the not more toxic, just better absorbed. Just

Mike 1:01:19
yeah, better absorbed. And the rats recover. So it's like, there's in all of these cases. What we're seeing here is, wow, the rats really did develop vitamin A deficiency, and the butter really did rescue them from the vitamin A deficiency pretty, relatively quickly, which they talk about in this woolback study. It's like, and he even says in the there's a quote in the book that is that is pretty interesting, where he basically is making the case. He's like, this is, this is great. Like, this must sound fantastic. And it's like, yes, grant, it is fantastic that having a bit of butter save these rats from, like, a really terrible death from being vitamin A deficient. So it's a for me, it's like, when I started doing this as, like, what this is where at my level, this is where I started to feel the disappointment, because I was like, I was really expecting some high level arguments, and then we just got, like, some guy who thinks vitamin is a toxin, and is just trying to figure out every single way that he can argue that it's a toxin from in whatever way possible, even if it doesn't necessarily line up or make sense and even if it's incongruent with other perspectives that he holds in his whole paradigm.

Jay Feldman 1:02:30
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And these next studies make it even more clear, right? When we look at studies that were not done 100 years ago, but were done just a little bit more recently, it makes it very clear that you vitamin A deficiency exists, and you don't have all these kind of fabricated confounding variables that don't really matter. But it becomes clear when we look into these, these next studies, and we'll start with one of the studies that we alluded to earlier, which is titled diet and vitamin A research. It's from 2010 and they're talking about the use of new diets, or kind of updated formulas, updated purified formulas, to induce vitamin A deficiency. And they state the use of a purified diet, such as AIN 93 is recommended for retinoid research because the diet is defined. The onset of Vitamin A deficiency is reproducible, and graded levels of vitamin A can be added to control the animal's vitamin A status. Now the diet contains basically corn starch, casein, sucrose, soybean oil and fiber, alongside added vitamins and minerals. And as they mentioned here, they'll talk about how they don't use the vitamin free casein anymore, basically starting since this diet, because it found, they found that it wasn't necessary. So they state standard casein is used vitamin free or vitamin test at casein, and alcohol stripped casein are more expensive and were not found to be necessary since the retinol content is extremely low. So up until this point, all the studies were using those vitamin free caseins, but now they don't do that, because it's not found to be necessary because there's basically negligible, negligible amounts of retinol. And then they talk about the use of this diet and its effects in inducing vitamin A deficiency, and they state, to obtain a reproducible time course in the development of Vitamin A deficiency, we begin feeding vitamin A deficient diet to the lactating mothers of nurse nursing pups. This significantly reduces the transfer of vitamin A from mother to pups. The pups are then weaned onto the same vitamin A deficient diet, or onto a vitamin A containing diet, according to the studies designed with this protocol, growing rats fed the vitamin A deficient diet are biochemically depleted of vitamin A looking at liver retinol concentration of less than five micrograms per gram of tissue and plasma retinol of less than three micromoles by seven weeks of age For males and eight weeks of age for females. External signs of Vitamin A deficiency become apparent approximately a week later for both sexes, signs include slowing or cessation of growth, somewhat rougher and occasionally a red crust around the eyes andor nares a staggered gait and locomotor impairment is seen rather late in the course of Vitamin A deficiency the. Locomotor dysfunction has been attributed to changes in striatal neurons, implicating vitamin A in the maintenance of basal ganglia motor function in the adult rat brain. Internally, nearly all of the animal's visceral fat is depleted, and thus the adrenal glands can be easily seen in the remnants of the peri renal fat. The thymus may be smaller and less white in color. So these are all just descriptions of Vitamin A deficiency that occur when using the diet that they described, standard casein, not vitamin free, plus those other aspects of the diet, the corn starch, soybean oil, so don't have to worry about the saturated fat and cholesterol, sucrose, fiber, vitamins and minerals, which are now all identified. You know, unlike 100 years ago, and you take that same diet, give it to both groups. With one group, you add vitamin A independently, and the other group, you don't add any vitamin A, and they don't add it in something like butter. They just add it maybe in the same typically in the same soybean oil, or sometimes it is cotton seed oil. And then they'll give the same amount of cotton seed oil to the other group to make sure it's fully even. And the group that gets the vitamin A is fine, the group that doesn't has all of these symptoms, and

Mike 1:06:01
they're determining vitamin A deficiency by looking at liver retinol concentrations, which is the best way to determine vitamin A's status, in conjunction with also looking at plasma. So they are truly determining vitamin A deficiency, and they are only changing one variable here, and that is whether they're adding vitamin A into the fat or not. But there's one thing Jay that you need to know that that's very important is that sucrose has a hidden source of retinoic acid, and we have to, we have to change the carb source here. You can't use sucrose, the cane sugar, just it like steals retinoic acid and puts it inside of its side of itself.

Jay Feldman 1:06:42
But even though both groups have the sucrose, that's still still a problem here, yes,

Mike 1:06:46
because the the the casein is actually protective of vitamin A, because it binds it up and then it protects it inside the body.

Jay Feldman 1:06:58
Right, right? Yeah,

Mike 1:06:59
that's just like, like, like, you should have known this. Jay, you should have known this. It's obvious. It is obvious. My grandma could have figured this out. Jay,

Jay Feldman 1:07:10
yeah, all right, on to the next one I will. I'll kind of start it start off and explain the background of what they're doing in the study, and then you can get into some of those details. Mike, so this title is, this study is titled The biological function of vitamin A acid. And so in this case, we're starting to look not just at vitamin A deficiency and retinol, but also replacement with retinoic acid. And they are looking, basically they do two different experiments looking at the kind of replacement of retinol versus retinoic acid and deficiency. In the first experiment, they're using retinoic acid, which basically has been shown to prevent all the effects of Vitamin A deficiency, except for night blindness, and it also doesn't actually increase the stores, because the vitamin A gets stored as retinol, so they then are extremely deficient when you stop the retinoic acid. So we'll dig into that. And then the second experiment, they were just looking in more detail with more animals and comparing the effects of retinol versus retinoic acid. So this first experiment, they were using decently high doses of the retinoic acid in order to determine its effects in terms of replacing the vitamin A deficiency. And they mentioned that, and this first quote, they state, since in these experiments, we were interested only in maximal effects of vitamin A acid, excessive doses. Were given three feedings a week, provided a dosage level equivalent to at least 50 micrograms a day. If you look at that dose and then consider the size of the rats, which was 66 grams for the biggest rat, the other ones were smaller. But if we just assume they were all 66 grams, and you convert that to a human equivalent dose, we're looking at 8600 micrograms a day. And for an average weight human, you know, 60 of 70 kilograms, and it's basically the equivalent of about three ounces of beef liver a day, or 120 eggs. But essentially, we're talking about a pretty good dose here of retinoic acid. Obviously, if it was toxic, you would expect negative things to happen, as opposed to positive, but that's not at all what they found. So Mike, do you want to go ahead and share that, and we'll also dig into the figure associated with the graph.

Mike 1:09:11
Sure. They said two animals, litter mates, were placed on an efficient diet, supplemented in one of them with vitamin A acid as described. Both animals grew at about the same rate for five to six weeks. Then the unsupplemented animals stopped growing rapidly, lost weight and died on the 57th day of the diet. The other animal continued to grow regularly and appeared to maintain in prime condition as a photograph taken on the 157th day of the diet intended to show this animal, though normal weight and appearance was highly night, blind and I, again, like they were repleating with retinoic acid, as you, as you mentioned, Jay, but the retinoic acid doesn't actually store like retinol does. So the animal, if it does like it, can run out of the vitamin A relatively quickly, because it doesn't actually have a high amount of tissue. Stores,

Jay Feldman 1:09:58
right? Right? Exactly. And they show it nicely here. And that first study looking at these rats in figure one, and they basically have the rat that was given no supplement. And you see the weight increased, increased, increased. And then starting maybe around day, like 35 or so, weight started to decrease and and then the rat died, which is the x and then you see the rat given the retinoic acid, the toxic retinoic acid, that did totally fine. Now, based on that experiment, they then wanted to look at this with a lot more animals, as opposed to just the two litter mates. And so in the second experiment, they state weaning weanling rats were divided into three groups, all placed simultaneously on the standard vitamin A deficient test diet. One group was supplemented with vitamin A, the second with vitamin A acid. Both were dissolved in cotton seed oil, and the third group was given the same amount of conceit oil alone, no confounding variables. In this regard, the growth of these animals is shown in figures three for the first five weeks on the diet, all three groups grew out equally. Then the unsupplimented animals stopped growing. Declined rapidly in weight, and by the end of the eighth week, all had died. The animals receiving supplements of vitamin A and A vitamin A acid that's retinoic acid, grew equally well throughout the experiment of 140 days. And they have a nice graph here showing that this time they were looking at a total of it looks like 20 animals and then the vitamin A deficient ones, you can see very quickly or very clearly that they didn't make it too far, and they all died pretty early on, whereas the ones given both either vitamin A or retinoic acid did totally fine and were normal and healthy. Yep.

Mike 1:11:33
And they died about the same time as in the other group. And the other study right about the other one was 57 days. At the end eight weeks is about 57 days,

Jay Feldman 1:11:44
right, right? Yeah, good point.

Mike 1:11:45
So, and the other thing is, those rats in your figure that the end of the study, the study goes up to 140 days. There 140 they're still alive. After that, they just stopped the study at 100 they're doing totally fine. Yeah. So, yeah, pretty toxic stuff. And to be what the dosage, does it mention here the dosage of retinoic acid? Yes,

Jay Feldman 1:12:09
it's the same. It's the same, 50 micrograms. Okay,

Mike 1:12:11
so just to put this into perspective with Grant's crank claims around lard, the lard contains, again, about point five to two IUs of vitamin A per gram of lard, right? And so the rats were, the rats were fed a gram, basically 1.2 grams of lard. In the study where they where he was saying that the lard was inducing the toxicity. So it's not basically you're getting a much higher dose of retinoic acid here two rats like that is measurable, and it's not killing them or creating a high level of toxicity or any of the symptoms. Whereas Grant was trying to claim the lard was causing the retinoic acid and the lard was causing this problem in the previous study, it's like, clearly it wasn't, especially when we start to compare the actual dosages,

Jay Feldman 1:12:59
right? And I know Grant was kind of arguing that there's more hidden retinol and retinoic acid in the lard that is typically accounted for even in that study. But again, it's, it's totally irrelevant. When you look at a study like this, and they're adding in lots, like quite a bit, of retinoic acid, as they say, it was pretty extreme doses because they were really wanting to see, yeah, they say excessive doses were given because they were just wanting to see the maximal effect. So if there was toxicity, it definitely would have been seen here. And then, you know, maybe you could say maybe it wasn't really retinoic acid, maybe it wasn't really retinol. Let's look at the actual levels of retinol and retinoic acid and things like that. And I'll let you go ahead and share the quote. And then we'll, we'll look at the figure. They say

Mike 1:13:39
vitamin A content the liver was measured and correlated exactly with diet with retinol, but no supplement with retinoic acid deliver retinol content was actually still depleted, and there was no evidence of retinoic acid storage either. Without the retinol storage, rats and the retinoic acid diet had immediate symptoms from stopping retinoic retinoic acid, whereas with retinol stores, it takes longer before symptoms appear. So they this is nice, because again, the gold standard at this point in time for determining vitamin A status is looking at liver stores and then also serum values. And what they're seeing here is that you're feeding these rats retinoic acid and retinol. And the retinoic acid, despite getting this content are still depleted of their retinol stores again, because the retinoic acid doesn't store in the liver like retinol does because of the form that it's in. And so again, we're not seeing they're clearly getting retinoic acid, and they're clearly getting retinol, and they're not dying of toxicity, and they're getting it in levels significantly higher than could have been gotten from either the lard or the casein in the study that grant tries to disprove, yeah.

Jay Feldman 1:14:46
And so you see very clearly here massive amounts of of retinol in the liver relative to the both of the other groups. And yet you can take both those groups with drastically different amounts of retinol in the liver, one still being supplemented with retinoic acid. And the other one being supplemented with retinol, both were totally fine. And then again, you they looked at retinoic acid in the liver. Didn't see any but when you compare the retino retinoic acid group versus the vitamin A deficient group, of course, the vitamin A deficient group died. Retinoic acid group was totally fine. It's just so clear here. And then you see it also, you know, they talk about how they then took the rats on the retinoic acid. And then, in a separate experiment, they then had them stop taking it, and they then had symptoms of Vitamin A deficiency and had issues, and I believe, died. Let me double check yes. So, so and I'll I can include figure five as well, where, basically it says, after three to five weeks, the two animals that had been using the retinoic acid and then stops. They died due to severe vitamin A deficiency, and then they took one of the other animals and provided them more retinoic acid again, and they were totally fine, no issues, totally recovered from their their vitamin A deficiency, the retin deficiency, so so many layers here, very clearly supporting the existence of retinol deficiency, the lack of toxicity for retinoic acid and retinol, at least, relative to deficiency, and the fact that retinoic acid basically restores normalcy in deficiency, other than the night blindness, it's very clear here in multiple you know, they did some really well constructed studies clearly demonstrating it,

Mike 1:16:28
yeah, just to lay it out for people, they had rats that were vitamin A deficient. So they had three groups, one group got retinoic acid, one group got retinol, and one group got nothing. The group that got nothing died within eight weeks. 57 days, 56 days, the group that got retinol was fine. The group that got retinoic acid, which has a very doesn't get stored in the body, so as soon as you stop taking it, you start to get deficiency, if that's your only source of vitamin A. When they remove the retinoic acid, the rats get vitamin A deficiency symptoms. And then when you put the retinoic acid, and they, as they continue not having retinoic acid, they die. And then when you put the retinoic acid back in, they get better. So it's like, and it's there, there, there's no lard here. There's no butter, it's soybean oil. And then they're adding in seed oil, or conceit oil, excuse me. And then they are adding in retinoic acid or retinol. So the only variable that is changing for these rats is whether they are get like everything else, the same. The diet is the same. Environments the same is whether, whether or not they're getting retinoic acid or retinol. That's it. And then when you're removing and adding back in retinoic acid, you're if you remove it, they get sick and a die eventually. Or if you add it back in, they'll, they'll get sick and then they recover. So it's like, there's, I don't know, they're, I don't know a way that you are going to, like, somehow, backwardsly rationalize this, and then, especially because they're looking at liver levels and content of these metabolites, and it's known that the livers the main storage site of vitamin A, so it's like we're clearly seeing vitamin A deficiency, with all of the symptoms, the categoric, categorical symptoms that develop when you develop deficiency and in recovery of that by adding in so called this Toxic retinoic acid in doses that would be significantly higher than the doses that you would Are you could reasonably argue would be in casein or in lard, which we know on all all pieces of data so far, is extremely low, to the point that you can establish deficiency with those diets. And so like, there's literally, there's no arguments like that. This not a it's that's not a niche, really interesting piece of information that grant found. It's just made up stuff that that has no support. And there's tons of evidence showing counter, like showing the counter this that doesn't have the problems that he tries to cite. So it's, I mean, it's, it couldn't, I don't know, it couldn't get clearer with this oven again. It doesn't mean that there's not a toxicity threshold for vitamin A it's just that we do see that there actually is vitamin A deficiency, and then it does improve these symptoms. And then it even had some of these dosages that grant would consider toxic are not even close to toxic in the animals, if anything, they develop normally, grow normally, and they don't have health these, these same level of health problems. So it's like, it this is like, these are multiple nails in the coffin. Like, we're bringing it to another level to show like there's, the argumentation is like, there's, there's not an argument here for this perspective, especially against the deficiency studies that grand is citing,

Jay Feldman 1:19:41
right? And we'll dig into the hypervitaminosis, a the toxicity studies in the next episode. But here just looking at deficiency, this is very clear. We still got one more study to go through. But not only is it very clear from the deficiency side, but as you're saying, these are very large doses of retinoic acid and retinol. So it does also provide some support. As far as them not being toxic and still very, very high doses. So, yeah, all great points there and again, to clarify the diet used here was the standard vitamin breed, vitamin A free diet, which included the vitamin free casein, you know, the like salt mixture and then cottonseed oil starch

Mike 1:20:18
and then yeast extract vitamins. Yeah, right, exactly. So

Jay Feldman 1:20:22
talking about the same supposedly very toxic diet to begin with, but if you, if you have retinol, retinoic acid, of course, you're fine. So that brings us to the last study to discuss here as far as Vitamin A deficiency goes. And this is a study titled vitamin A deficiency and fetal growth and development in the rat. And in this study, of course, as it sounds, they're basically looking at the effects of Vitamin A deficiency on pregnancy, fetal growth and development. And they have a couple of different studies here where basically all the rats are given the same vitamin A deficient diet with the vitamin A free casein peanut oil, in this case, glucose, corn starch, cellulose, and then the vitamin and mineral mixes. And they did two different studies and so on. The first study, they're just looking to compare retinoic acid versus retinal acetate, basically retinol on pregnancy field, growth and development, considering that we don't effectively store and in this case, they kind of suggest that the vitamin A doesn't get passed on to the offspring in the retinoic acid group. We're just going to mention this briefly, because it there are some important things to consider here, but really study two that they do is is kind of more important here when it comes to the vitamin A deficiency question. But Mike, do you want to go ahead and share these quotes? You

Mike 1:21:39
have one group on a retinoic acid diet, so 12 milligrams per kilogram of diet, and the other group is on retinol acetate, which is six milligrams per kilogram of diet. So the females in the retinoic acid group were shown to be fully depleted of vitamin A in the form of retinol or retinol esters, by their low serum 2.0 micrograms per deciliter and liver point 02, micrograms per whole liver, vitamin A content. In contrast, the retinol Ester fed group had vitamin A levels of 2.0 milligrams of vitamin A per whole liver and 35.6 micrograms of vitamin A per deciliter of serum. So basically, when you're looking at the liver content in the retinol ester fed group, the retinol acetate, what you're seeing is the vitamin A levels were two milligrams for their whole liver versus in the retinoic acid fed group. You're seeing the vitamin A con in the liver is point 02, micrograms per whole liver, which is 100,000 times different. So 100,000 times more vitamin A in the liver of the animals feather retinal acetate than the animals feather retinoic acid, and then in the serum, you're seeing 35.6 micrograms of vitamin A per deciliter in the retinol acetate group, whereas in the retinoic acetate retinoic acid group, you're seeing 2.0 micrograms per deciliter, which is 18 times less vitamin A in the retinoic acid group than the retinal acetate in their serum. And they go on to say the retinoic fed rats had between eight and 11 viable fetuses per dam at all of the time points examined. The retinoic acid fed rats, on the other hand, failed to maintain the number of growing fetuses after day 14 of gestation, and exhibited extensive resorption and fetal death in the females examined on days 1618, and 20 of gestation. So basically, the rats that were fed the retinal acetate were able to have, you know, able to have pups, not, I was going to say, children, but pups, and then the animals fed the retinoic acid, which, again, the retinoic acid has that it's not stored. So you could argue that half life is very, very short. You run out very quick. They were unable to actually have, have pups. Have to produce offspring, which is basically signifying the like, how fast the vitamin A gets depleted inside the retinoic acid group, and it's showing that it there's not enough vitamin A with the retinoic acid to actually successfully produce offspring because of how fast it gets depleted,

Jay Feldman 1:24:13
Right. And it doesn't seem to actually make it to the fetus for development. It's not actually being properly used. We know from the last study, the retinoic acid is not toxic. If the rat is not pregnant, they do totally fine, just as well as the retinol group. But in this study, there's again, or this, this experiment, in the study, the first thing that they're noting is that basically there's no negative here from the retinol, right? Having 100,000 times more in your liver and 18 times more near serum, and you're totally fine. So you know, as far as development, fetal development, pregnancy, all of that. And then the other point is that the retinoic acid group doesn't do well in terms of fetal growth, development, pregnancy. Again, that doesn't mean the retinoic acid is actually problematic. We already went through that last study instead, it's just showing it doesn't have. Of the benefits of the retinol. This will be important looking at the next study, but this is shown very clearly in this figure here, where they basically show the dark graphs. The dark bars on the graph are the retinol groups, showing that basically there was a very successful pregnancy, and not so with the retinoic acid fed group. So again, this is really just a prelude to the second experiment that they do, where, in the second experiment, the rats start out the same way that they did in the first study, and then the group that was on retinoic acid was split into four groups and was given different amounts of retinal acetate. So the one that is supposed to lead to does lead to successful pregnancy, normal pregnancy, but they're very low amounts. So the amount of retinal acetate given were 08, 16 and 42 micrograms per kilogram. So they're trying to basically restore retinol levels by providing these very small amounts of retinal acetate. The groups, the control group, which got retinal acetate the entire time, they got 400 micrograms per kilogram, as opposed to the 08, 16 or 42 and just to kind of create an equivalency here, so that ends up being 65 micrograms per kilogram in a human equivalent dose. And if you consider an average human weight of 70 kilograms, that ends up being 4500 micrograms a day, which is the equivalent of about one and a half ounces of beef liver per day. So we're looking at a control group with the one and a half beef ounces of beef liver per day, equivalent versus these other four groups with very small amounts of retinal acetate following the retinoic acid. And what they found is that none of the females in the vitamin in the vitamin A free or fully deficient group delivered and three of these rats were found dead on days 1922 and 25 one rat in the vitamin A free group did not conceive. Several females in this group had large, malformed fetuses in the uterus upon examination. So first thing that's clear here, we know that the retinoic acid doesn't actually lead to better storage of retinol. So they were immediately retinol deficient, and when they weren't given any more retinol, they either died or basically had unsuccessful pregnancies. And when we compare that to the groups getting very small amounts, what they found, they state that, as shown in table four, both the total litter, litter size and the number of live pups, pups were significantly reduced by the restriction of vitamin A intake. The two groups with the lowest vitamin A intakes of 16 or eight micrograms of retinal equivalents per day per kilogram of body weight, had significantly fewer fetuses and newborns than the control group. And they have this all written out here in Table four, where they, you know, they show different characteristics here between the groups. So we have on the left the control group, which remember they were getting the equivalent in human doses of one and a half beef liver ounces per day. But this was 400 micrograms of retinal equivalence per day per kilogram. And then they compared that with 4216 and eight. They don't even show the zero group here, because they didn't have successful pregnancies and died and but you can see in a kind of graded factor, graded spectrum that when you look at more retinol versus less, the less had more negative effects, smaller number of litters, less successful pregnancies and smaller litter sizes, smaller numbers of live pups that were born and also had lower weights of kidneys and livers as well. So just showing kind of a graded effect here, where the more vitamin A, the more protective it was of pregnancy, fetal development and and success of reproduction. Basically, yep, that,

Mike 1:28:37
I think that this goes so the part of the argument is that vitamin A is a teratogen, right? Meaning that it has damaging effects on the fetus. And what we're seeing is that there's likely a Goldilocks zone. So there's a level where there's too little vitamin A for the animals, and then there's also a level which we're not showing here. We'll talk about that in the future video, where there's you can actually get too much vitamin A for the for the animals. So basically, your number one, you're not seeing that the retinal acetate, retinol, retinoic acid is toxic. If anything, you're seeing that you need vitamin A to have successful offspring, to have successful pups, here with the rats. And so that, again, more evidence, basically flying in the face of it being this, like the vitamin A, being this super toxic thing, and also showing that deficiency of of the vitamin A has pretty significant effects on physiology. So something important to consider if you're consider becoming very deficient, especially if you're considering becoming pregnant by being really low vitamin A,

Jay Feldman 1:29:46
definitely. And again, we will be talking more about recommended amounts in the future, and talking about vitamin A and pregnancy at some point as well. But in this case, again, looking at human equivalent doses, they were doing the human equivalent dose of. Uh, 65 micrograms per kilogram of retinol, which for an average human of 70 kilograms, that's 40, 4500 micrograms per day, which is the equivalent of one and a half ounces of beef liver. And at least according to all the data we have here in terms of the pregnancy for the rats, everything was, was perfect, uh, compared to the much lower amounts.

Mike 1:30:18
So, yep, yep.

Jay Feldman 1:30:22
All right. So obviously we were focusing here on kind of introducing the concerns surrounding vitamin A toxicity as a whole, to culture and all of that. And then we wanted to focus on the studies showing vitamin A deficiency. In the next episode, we'll be digging into the research behind vitamin A toxicity, basically excessive levels of vitamin A, and we'll also go over whether vitamin A is really a poison. We'll also be discussing whether you need to be concerned about the use of Accutane, whether retinoic acid is really a chemotherapeutic agent, and whether grant Genereux's claims about the toxicity of vitamin A are valid. So we'll be talking about all that in the next episode. And Mike, can you share with the listeners where they can find more of your work. They

Mike 1:31:03
can find my work at my YouTube channel, Mike fave, and they can also find it at my website, mikefave.com and I do have two videos that are covering some of the components where, in terms of the general premise and hypothesis of the vitamin A toxicity, and also one on the state of the forum. And I will be making another video going through some of the because I did promise this my previous videos going through some of the studies as well, so a bit separate ones and what we discuss here, but also be having some information on that, so you can stay tuned for that.

Jay Feldman 1:31:37
Great. And we'll link to those videos that you already have up in the notes here, and speaking of which, if you are looking for the studies, articles or anything else that we cited throughout this episode, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast, to take a look at the show notes. If you did enjoy today's episode, please leave a like or comment. If you're watching on YouTube, if you're listening elsewhere, please leave a review or five star rating on iTunes or Spotify. All of those things really do a lot to help support the podcast, and are very much appreciated. And assuming that you're still listening, I'm assuming you're pretty interested in the concept of vitamin A toxicity, maybe because you're dealing with lasting health problems and looking for a solution, an optimal diet, to resolve those issues. Obviously, there's a lot of conflicting information out there, and so if you're looking to optimally support your metabolism, resolve these chronic health issues, lose weight, improve your digestion, get amazing sleep, rebalance your hormones, boost your energy, or recover from various other chronic health issues or conditions. And you'd like to have clear action steps and strategies alongside personalized guidance. For me, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/solution, where you can find all the information for the energy balance Solution Program. This program includes customized health coaching, a video library with videos on how to restore gut health, how to regulate your blood sugar, how to lose weight without destroying your metabolism, how you can boost your metabolism, get amazing sleep, rebalance your hormones, and tons of more. It also includes resources like sample meal plans and a supplement guide, as well as a private community so again, head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/solution, to check out all the details, and with that, I'll see you in the next episode. You.