DEFENDING VITAMIN A: PART 2

To continue with my disagreement with the negative information on vitamin A put out by the Vitamin D Council and repeated by Dr. Mercola on his site.

 

Fortunately for us the Vitamin D Council already has a natural enemy that immediately responded to these attacks, first in December 2008 and recently in March 2010. Because the “Weston A. Price Foundation” is a big proponent of using both vitamin A and D, together, especially in the form of cod liver oil, they were particularly upset by the conclusion of the Vitamin D Council that one should “avoid cod liver oil like the poison it is.”

 

Fortunately, for me, they have a stronger scientific bent than I do, so I invite you to read the material that the Vitamin D Council puts out and contrast it with the responses from the Weston A. Price Foundation. For my part, I will address some of the issues raised that are within my abilities, even if it is only to point out flaws in logic or debatable interpretations of the science that has been put forth as “truth”.

 

The Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org) is based on the work of Weston A. Price, a fascinating medical pioneer. In the mid-nineteen thirties as a dentist, he started to question why his patients in North America had such bad teeth. He traveled around the world observing different cultures that followed their traditional diets, and surprisingly, found a relationship between the health of one’s teeth, and general health, and what constituted a “natural” diet.

 

While I disagree with the extremely negative view that the Price Foundation has of soy foods (articulated in Health Secrets Volume One, and in a previous blog, “Soy Food Blues”) I do agree with the majority of their opinions on diet. Except for the necessity of eating meat; and as I’ve stated before, I believe the “Blood Type Diet” helps us to determine which cultures our gene pool originated from, and so narrows down our dietary choices to a more individual level.

 

Now, one of the big things that the Price Foundation believes is that humans ate the livers of birds, fish and mammals since time immemorial. And I totally agree: I believe that the massive deficiency in vitamins A and D have occurred because we have ceased eating livers. Of course, we stopped with good reason, since the liver processes all toxins that go through the body, and in modern times, with all the antibiotics and hormones that farm animals are fed, the liver is currently perceived to be a dirty organ best avoided, unless you can get it organic.

 

However, the Price Foundation points out that this is not totally true, since the liver processes the blood to clean it but it does not store high amounts of these toxins. Rather they are later stored in fat cells of the body, which is why it is so difficult to remove heavy metals and such poisons from our bodies. Nonetheless, I would still strongly suggest that if you choose to eat liver that it be organic.

 

Two more posting on Defending Vitamin A and then we’ll move on to new subject matter.