You cannot get vit A toxicity from food/liver?

(Michael) #1

I was surprised to first hear and then partially verify that you cannot get vitamin A toxicity from eating food, no matter how much liver you eat for example. Your body does not convert the pre-cursor (carotenoids/beta-carotene) from vegetables into Vitamin A fast enough to acquire toxicity through food. And similarly you apparently cannot get toxicity from an over consumption of liver (want better link/proof). You can achieve toxicity from preformed vitamin A supplements however. Does anyone have any links showing otherwise? Here are some links on vitamin A toxicity:

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminA-Consumer/#:~:text=dying%20of%20measles.-,Can%20vitamin%20A%20be%20harmful%3F,aches%2C%20and%20problems%20with%20coordination.


#2

If this is true I’m heading for a liver binge-fest in the very near future…

(Michael) #3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Weu_utiGMt4 Frank notes in a few videos that you cannot overdose of vitamin A from food, even liver. He could be wrong, but I could not find a food source of toxicity nor statements in the medical literature that it was a concern.

#4

Here’s hoping! :crossed_fingers:

(Michael) #5

Here’s another, but I always prefer medical journals over youtube videos

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #6

I find that, as much as I like liver, overeating it is very difficult.

#7

I think this may be true for beef and chicken but bear liver is more likely to be problematic… also seals…

#notaverylikelyproblem

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #8

Is bear liver so tasty that it’s easy to overeat? Or were the people who got into trouble having to subsist on bear liver because they had nothing else to eat? (I’m thinking of the trappers who died of rabbit starvation four hundred years ago. Rabbits are tasty, but not very nourishing.)

#9

But the articles say 3000mcg is the upper limit and it’s a very tiny amount of liver, super easy to go way over…

I don’t understand what is this with speed. If we overeat vitamin A (or D or E or K) all the time, it is supposed to cause problems, isn’t it?

#10

It was my thought too :smiley: I still don’t know why some animals have that crazy vitamin A content in their livers, what is the logic in it I wonder…

Even less need to overeat. You touch it, it’s too much as it’s INSANELY rich in Vitamin A.
A bit like pig brain and cholesterol, not like cholesterol is a problem like Vitamin A but the numbers are crazy. Maybe bear liver (I have read about polar bear liver) is even more insane, very many times as rich as normal liver…

#11

I have some lambs’ liver in (frozen), and I’ve just bought some Beef liver today (which i have never had before).
I’m interested to get tasting it so I can compare taste to the delicious lambs’ liver.
image

(Michael) #12

I used to eat small bit of beef liver daily. I switched to chicken liver every second day. My serum blood A was just measured as normal, not even halfway to the high of normal. I will probably go back to eating a small bit of liver daily, and I will start adding beef liver back into the rotation.

(Michael) #13

Last night I decided to get some lamb liver as I have never tried it, so same in reverse.

#14

I used to fry 500g chicken liver every week, it’s a quite small amount for two even if it’s not so awesome, we ate it up in 2 days… I got bored of this frequency but surely will do it here and there (but with 1000g as why to bother with a tiny amount even if it lasts for days, better to make a full pan and freeze some down :)).
Liver is a nice variety. Beef liver is my fav this far, I dislike pork and especially turkey (I like pork pâté but if I just fry some pork liver, it’s not nice for me) and never tried lamb.

I consider it one of my minor missions to try the liver of various animals. Maybe I can eat some emu liver this year…

I don’t know about any of my numbers ever as I avoided doctors all my life (I don’t even know my blood type) but I never noticed problems so eating liver in moderation (not forcefully tiny amounts but as I did) can’t be bad. Or my body will say something, it’s good at that.

I still don’t get why overeating Vitamin A from food is okay. What happens with it?

#15

spot on @Naghite
the crazy info that rolls out there is just insanity, we learn real truths and know and knowledge is power!!! good post.

#16

Bear liver–

Polar bears are top carnivores that bioaccumulate the vitamin A produced by marine algae lower down the food chain. Because vitamin A isn’t water-soluble, it can’t be easily flushed from the body and is stored in the liver instead. Bears and seals have generally high levels of vitamin A in their livers but polar bears have the most of any animal.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for vitamin A in humans is 0.9mg, and you can get that from eating just one-tenth of a gram of the liver from a well-fed polar bear. The entire liver contains enough vitamin A to kill as many as 52 adults! If you spread it out and ate just enough to get your RDA every day, that liver would last you 143 years!

I think the same is true of seals and just about any bears but this is not my area of expertise… apparently livers are so nutrient dense that they are generally good eating

#17

you think truth to it, go research it cause it ain’t truths at all right?
hmmmm

(Michael) #18

Interesting link here, which implies that it may in fact be possible with beef liver, or chicken livers. As @Fangs noted, it is so hard to get a firm clear picture with opposing viewpoints often shared liberally.

Anyway, interesting article regardless https://aasldpubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hep.1840080237?sid=nlm%3Apubmed

(Michael) #19

One more link, just to compare. https://k9joy.com/dogarticles/vitaminA.php

Beef liver 550 IU/g
Seal liver 450 IU/g
Halibut liver oil 30,000 IU/g
Southern Elephant Seal liver 1,160 IU/g
Arctic Huskies liver 10,570 IU/g
Arctic Bearded Seal liver 12,000-14,000 IU/g
Polar bear liver 24,000-35,000 IU/g

#20

Acute vitamin A toxicity occurs within hours or days after taking a very large quantity of vitamin A accidentally (usually in children). In adults, eating the liver of certain mammals can result in acute toxicity. These meats contain quite a lot of vitamin A, usually in the million of units!

Millions, no one is doing millions and trust the ‘healthy good fuctioning body’ to also ‘handle intake’ which is why we do this lifestyle…health means way more than one on any synthetic vit A or one with health med issues that are severe and on meds for life saving issues and more…so…

eat it up people, does the body good!!

this is one of those useless bit, tad of crap knowledge is ruling the world and have we seen that over and over and over again? just in general ‘dieting’ ‘nutritional knowledge’ out there? darn right we all know…weee

if it was never meant to be eaten a wolf, a big cat, a bear and more predators would leave it behind, it is never left behind…learn from nature but of course there is nothing with emphasis on nature in this world now.