Date originally written: Spring 2022
I’ve been eating Low Vitamin A for about four years now. Overall, my health continues to gradually improve. This past year I haven’t really been thinking about or researching or communicating on the topic of VA. I’ve gotten to a point where my health is good enough and my VA tolerance is high enough that I can be patient with the slow, gradual progress.
In a post like this I am measuring my progress by comparing it to the final goal of optimal health, . When, in reality, the improvements I’ve already seen have been amazing and are unprecedented compared to the kind of results that everyone else gets — in the mainstream and in other alternative health circles.
I will be happily and confidently continuing this diet, and I expect to see more gradual improvements in the coming years. And I have a feeling that even more unprecedented and nearly-miraculous health recoveries and improvements are still to come.
Highlights
- Myopia (Near-sightedness): 95% cured. My vision is almost perfect now.
- Tinnitus: 90% cured. Most of the time, I don’t hear or notice ringing in my ears anymore.
- Dry Eyes: 90% cured. I rarely ever get dry eyes while sleeping anymore, and if I do its very rarely painful.
- Canker Sores (Mouth Ulcers): 95% cured. These are very rare now, only get them if I eat the wrong foods.
- Mercury Poisoning: In 2020, I accidentally gave myself mercury poisoning from eating too much seafood. It gave me dizziness, loss of balance, and pressure headaches. Stopped eating all seafood, and all of those symptoms were cured within a few months.
- Insomnia: This got worse in 2020, and suspect it to be caused by something that changed during COVID. It the most bothersome issue right now. More detail below.
Myopia (Near-sightedness): 95% cured
My vision is almost perfect now. I never wear glasses anymore. Some days my vision is a little blurrier than the norm, but even on those days, I don’t need glasses and it’s not a problem that prevents me from being able to do anything, like reading or driving. I stopped wearing glasses during my 3rd year.
It can vary a little bit — some days I notice my distance vision is a little blurry, and its usually due to a temporary reaction to some “cheat food” with higher VA than usual, or something with eggs or dairy. I never need to wear glasses now. I haven’t gotten my eyes tested so I don’t know if my vision is 20/20, but I never wear glasses anymore, because even when its a little blurrier than on the clearest days, its still not bad enough to need glasses. I first got glasses when I was around 20 years old (I’m 33 now). I had myopia (or near-sightedness) so I didn’t always need to wear them, but I used always put on glasses or contacts when I left the house, especially when driving, and my most recent driving license actually has the vision restriction on it. My last prescription, from before I went on the low VA diet, was -2.5 in my left and -1.5 in my right eye.
This cure alone is worth having done this diet, even though it took about 2-3 years to cure myopia. It feels great to not need glasses anymore. I think that Vitamin A is the primary cause of myopia and probably most of the common vision problems and eye diseases.
Tinnitus: 90% cured
During my 3rd year on this diet I’ve experienced a gradual improvement such that tinnitus (ringin in the ears) has almost completely gone away. Most days, it has gotten so quiet that I don’t even notice it. But it can come back when I eat the wrong food. It used to be that I needed/preferred white noise when sleeping, because when there was silence, that’s when I could hear it the most, and it was annoying. At some point, it occurred to me that I didn’t even notice when I didn’t have any white noise while in bed waiting to fall asleep.
Currently, on the best days, I don’t hear ringing at all during the day when there’s always background noise, and even when there is total silence, I think I can hear a little bit or “fuzz” or “ringing” but its so quiet that I have to focus on it just to notice it, and if I’m not doing that, its not loud enough to bother or distract me. So I’m calling that 90% cured, because I do expect it to improve and go away completely eventually — might take another year or two, we’ll see.
Dry Eyes: 90% cured
I used to get dry eyes regularly while sleeping, sometimes even getting so dry that when I opened my eyes upon waking, there’d be not enough lubrication to prevent scraping or tearing the cornea — and that would be painful and would result in very blurry vision in that eye and in needing to keep that eye shut most of the day.
Now, I never get eyes that dry unless I eat something quite high in Vitamin A — intentionally or not — that would give me a really bad reaction. This has happened like once or twice in the last year.
When I eat a little too much Vitamin A, or I’m going through a period of higher sensitivity / lower tolerance than usual, I do sometimes get mild dry eyes when I eat a food that is higher in VA than my usual — for example: a fatty steak, or something with eggs or milk or cheese in it.
Canker Sores: 90% cured
I used to get these every month or two or three, which might not seem like a lot, but if you’ve suffered from these, you know that just one of these can pretty much ruin your week — and depending on their placement can make it painful to eat and even to talk. It used to be that if I accidentally bit the inside of my cheek, thus creating a small open wound, that 9 times out of 10, it would turn into a canker sore / mouth ulcer. Now it’s more like 1 time out of 10 that that happens. Rarely, I can get one that just appears, but its usually after I ate some higher-than-usual VA food that I could not tolerate.
I’ll say this is 100% cured when I can go a whole year without getting even one, but I’m not there yet. Still, I’ve seen enough improvement to prove (to myself, at least) that VA is the cause of canker sores, and its only a matter of time before I’ll never get them again.
Numbness in Hands or Arms Upon Waking
I don’t get this symptom any more unless I have unusually low tolerance for a time, or eat a food too high in VA. I had this like once in the last 6 months, the night after eating a grilled fatty pork steak during a low tolerance phase, because other times I can eat steaks no problem.
Mercury & Seafood
Somewhere around the beginning of my 3rd year on this diet I started getting symptoms of dysequilibrium a.k.a. loss of balance and dizziness (especially when I moved around quickly) and my head felt heavy like there was internal pressure. I did some research and found that these symptoms can be caused my mercury, and I had an intuition that might be the cause. At the time I was regularly eating tuna and tilapia because of its low fat/VA content — but it did not seem like crazy or excessive amount to me at the time, I was eating one seafood meal every 1-2 days.
But I theorize that being on this low VA diet, and being in this sensitive / low tolerance “detox” phase, made the mercury affects worse. Because of this experience, I suspect that mercury and VA have a synergistic effect. A person’s mercury burden in their body, and mercury intake (from seafood or from mercury amalgam dental fillings) may be one of the significant factors that results in significant differences in people’s experiences on this diet. And it may apply to all toxin exposures and toxin accumulations in our bodies.
But yeah, so I don’t eat any seafood at all anymore — and I haven’t had those symptoms ever come back since then. So yeah, I cured myself of mercury poisoning by eliminating all seafood. And perhaps I’d be faring even better if I didn’t have three mercury-containing amalgam fillings. I’ve been considering getting them removed, but haven’t done it yet.
Higher Tolerance
Generally, as I suspected, my tolerance for VA in foods has improved with time and I don’t have to be so strict anymore.
In the first two years, I was much more sensitive to even small amounts of VA in foods. There was a time when I couldn’t tolerate chicken, but now I can eat chicken with no problems. There was a time when the small amount of either milk or egg in the batter of typical fast food fried chicken would give me a bad reaction, but I can eat that now too. There was a time where I could get congestion just from adding mayonnaise to my burger, but now I eat a normal amount with my burgers, and it causes no problems.
I’ve done a lot of little experiments just because I don’t have the self-discipline to eat the same things everyday. Small amounts of milk, cream, butter are okay. Small amounts of cheese are sometimes okay, sometimes not. Cheese seems to be the most troublesome. Interestingly, I have tried no-fat whey protein from milk (mixed with water, sugar & chocolate powder) and I can tolerate that with no bad effects at all — and have done so many times.
But since I still get negative reactions / symptoms from small amounts, I haven’t bothered to try going for large amounts — like eating a whole cheese pizza or an egg omelet with cream and melted cheese (which I used to eat for breakfast often).
Male Pattern Balding
Halted, but still not reversed. I think it is actually a big deal just to stop hair loss, even though it hasn’t reversed. Unfortunately, I already had enough hair loss to be classified as bald/balding — but I know it hasn’t gotten worse, because A) the hairline of that pattern has not moved at all and B) I still have sparse hairs within the balding area that still remain, even though they would have seemed to be doomed to disappear next.
I haven’t said much about this, but I do suspect that VA is the primary cause of most cases of male pattern balding. Which is to say, I bet that if excess systemic VA were prevented, I would guess that perhaps the majority of MPB cases would not occur.
And I’m still waiting to see if I will get hair regrowth, in which case, I will definitely report much more detail.
Gynecomastia
Halted, but still not reversed. I had a relatively mild case, but just as with balding, I do think it’s a big deal just to halt it, and have it not get any worse. It has not gotten worse in the 4 years since I started this diet. This suggests to me that excess Vitamin is a primary factor. It may not be the direct mechanistic cause, but it may be the primary cause of the hormone imbalance that causes it.
Weight
Still overweight, no significant gain of fat, but no significant improvement yet either. I am hoping to get improvements in this area eventually, but like with the issues above, at least it hasn’t gotten worse — and that’s without calorie restriction, without going hungry, and without any exercise regiment. I don’t do any exercise for the sake of exercise. Most days. I don’t have the energy or the desire. But on the rare days where I feel great and the weather is great too, I do find myself naturally having the energy and desire to go outside and go for a hike through the woods, or a bike ride or something physically active. But that is not yet a regular or reliable thing.
Sleep / Insomnia
For some reason my sleep took a quick turn for the worse in Spring of 2021, around the time that the populous would have reached significant levels of corona vaccination. For weeks it was pretty bad relative to my experience: i.e. not being able to fall asleep till 4am, and only being able to sleep for 2-3 hours at a time. Also I would get night sweats. After doing some research, I started taking melatonin and niacin which helped a lot. It still hasn’t resolved completely yet though. As of right now, I still take melatonin, and I can fall asleep reliably at a normal time between 10pm – midnight but the typical problem is that I usually wake up once per night, after about 4-5 hours sleep, usually needing to urinate.
Still trying to figure this one out.
Colds & COVID
Apparently I’m not susceptible to getting colds anymore — not even during the winter. I can’t remember the last time I had a cold. I’ve had some cases of sore throat from inflammation, and some temporary rashes, and temporary digestive disturbances. But I don’t remember getting even one case of the standard cold or flu in these 4 years. And I never got COVID even though I never wore a mask in public (not even once) and never took any vaccines.
I suspect that excess VA is also the primary cause of the common cold (even if its just in an indirect way).
Depression, Anxiety, Mood, Energy Levels
These all tend to rise or fall together for me. On average, I’d say there’s been a small improvement over last update.
I’m having fewer depressed days than ever, and they are mild compared to what I used to have — a down/depressed day for me now is like just feeling low-energy and a down mood like you might have on a rainy day. And I usually feel better the next day. And I usually feel okay or good on sunny, blue sky days (my mood/energy seems to correlate with the weather too closely to be just a coincidence but I’m still working on figuring out a physical explanation for that).
So my baseline is to feel okay or pretty good, so I would not really say I’m suffering from depression any more. And my energy levels are lower than I’d like, but still much improved from the severe fatigue I used to have. But, those 10-out-of-10 “great days” of high energy/motivation/mood have shown me how good I can/could feel, and I want to feel that way all the time or most days, and I won’t consider myself to have optimal health until I do feel that way most days.
Diet
My current diet is mostly meat and starches. The meat is about 60% beef, 30% chicken/turkey and 10% pork. The starch is about 60% wheat (mostly white bread), 30% white potato, and 10% white rice. I pretty much never eat whole wheat, or brown rice.
For example, when I have burgers and sandwiches usually it is just bread and meat and mayo. I eat fries plain without ketchup. When I have a chicken or beef stew its just meat and broth and garlic and onions and I’ll eat it with white rice. Or I’ll have a steak and mashed potatoes. Or I’ll have a taco with just meat in a tortilla, and if I’m feeling adventurous I’ll be getting some extra VA from some kind of sauce When I have chicken wings I’ll eat them with ranch sauce and that amount of dairy is usually not a problem.
The only vegetables I eat are garlic, onions — and mostly in powder form as seasoning. Once or twice I had a some iceberg lettuce on my burger, but that’s the only leafy greens I’ve had in 4 years. If I do eat one of these low VA veggies its like a couple times a month.
Rarely eat any fruit, but if I do it would probably be an apple, and it would maybe average out to like one or twice per month. I could eat more low-VA fruit, I just don’t miss it when I don’t. Also I don’t miss veggies either, in case you’re wondering.
This is way of eating feels natural for me. Meat, to me, is the main food. And I like starches with it too. I never wanted to eat veggies any, especially not leafy greens. Never liked tomatoes beyond ketchup. Never liked spicy food or peppers.
The only things I do wish I could eat would be eggs and dairy, especially cheese. But for now I can only tolerate them in small amounts, and if I eat too much I get some negative symptom like nasal congestion, or drier eyes, or louder tinnitus.
This year my only consistent supplements have been melatonin and B vitamins, mostly just niacin, thiamin, and riboflavin individually.
No medications. No vaccines.
After that mercury incident, I started drinking distilled water to avoid flouride and any other metals or toxins in drinking water. I still drink soda and juice though, which are made with local public water, so I’ve not been able to avoid tap water completely.
Truth of Health 