Before I went carnivore for the first time in 2018, I was experiencing pretty bad joint pain every day. Bad hip pain made getting out of the car an embarrassing event. Excruciating sciatica pain would hit me every now and then, out of the blue. Or bad shoulder pain. Knee pain, elbow pain, stiff neck — there was ALWAYS something. Always some pain somewhere and it was getting worse. It all stopped once I switched to the carnivore diet. Within just a few days. Mind boggling. Here is the interesting part though: Before I went carnivore in, I had been on the paleo diet since around 2009. So my diet had been already pretty good. I was eating - 100% home cooked meals - 0 sugar - 0 fruit - 0 gluten - beef every day - 0 medications of any kind I was basically eating steaks with some sauteed carrots, beets, or celeriac. That was it. This was a pretty healthy diet by any measure. It was still causing me sometimes excruciating pain in my joints. It all stopped once I eliminated the plants and went 100% meat. (And then it all came back again once I started adding liver. And then it all went away again once I stopped eating liver.) Knock on wood 🪵 it stays that way. But so far so good 🤞.

Grant Genereux's 10+ years low-vitamin A experiment is without a doubt ground-breaking. His case undermines one of medicine's nutritional paradigms. Grant was able to nearly completely deplete his vitamin A stores (verified by multiple blood tests), yet in that time he was able to: - REVERSE advanced kidney damage - REVERSE his mild color-blindness - maintain perfect eye health (at >60 years of age) - REVERSE a painful, highly debilitating eczema from hell. A truly remarkable feat. He did this following a diet consisting mostly of beef/bison, white rice, and black beans. No supplements (beyond the first year). This puts into question whether: - vitamin A is an essential nutrient (it may not be) - vitamin A is necessary for eye health (it may not be) BUT, his experiment also comes with some major problems. Namely: - It does NOT adhere to the scientific method. When Grant switched to the low vitamin A diet, he changed more than just one factor. It's not clear what diet he was on before he eliminated vitamin A foods, but he almost certainly did more than one adjustment (correct me if I'm wrong on this and if there is a detailed account of what he was eating prior to the start of his experiment). - At one point during his 10+ years-long experiment, Grant made a change and started eating bread made from fortified flour. This resulted in no measurable increase in his vitamin A intake, but it did trigger the return of some troubling symptoms (although to a much milder degree). This makes it unlikely that the symptoms were caused by vitamin A. His conclusion was that it was due to the added niacin (B3), but given that the bread was fortified with around 4 different agents (including iron), it's impossible to pinpoint it to one factor. - Something similar occurred to him after the consumption of a low-fat pork dish. Pork has around the same vitamin A content as beef or bison, a type of meat that Grant has been consuming without problems for the length of his experiment. Grant, in fact, admitted at some point, that he has no good explanation why he reacted to pork: xitter.cf/thepowerofozone/status… - Several polls conducted by Grant among fellow low-vitamin A dieters did not support the idea that vitamin A was the Source of All Evil. There were some marked improvements among adherents of the diet, but in no way to the degree one would have expected if vitamin A was the monumental bad guy Grant was convinced that it was. Something he also observed and commented on without having an explanation for it. (Those polls were by the way also the reason why I never went whole-hog on the low vitamin A diet idea. I immediately realized that they unveiled a potential major flaw in the theory, but was nevertheless willing to give it a try.) - Grant admitted several times that the muscle meat carnivore diet seems to render significantly quicker or better results than his own fiber-focused approach: xitter.cf/thepowerofozone/status… Which is in conflict with several of his own tenets. If there is no difference in vitamin A levels between his fiber-based approach and the muscle meat carnivore diet (one could actually make a valid point that the carnivore diet contains slightly more vitamin A than the meat+rice+beans diet), then it's clear that it's not the vitamin A that accounts for the different outcomes. Something else is. Also: if a diet devoid of any bile-binding fiber (which is paramount to detox vitamin A from the liver, according to Grant) renders better results than a fiber-based diet, then the logical conclusion would be that people do NOT necessarily get better because they detox vitamin A, but due to other undetermined factors. Or does it mean that fiber is not the best way to pull vitamin A from the liver? Also, do muscle-meat carnivores fare significantly and consistently better than carnivores who incorporate eggs and butter? There is not enough data to be able to say so, as far as I know. - It's not clear what role the regular blood or plasma donations play that Grant has been doing on a regular basis. Blood donations are a highly beneficial therapeutic intervention, able to significantly reduce the risk of many chronic illnesses. Is the same true for plasma donations? Hard to tell, there is much less research on the subject. So, it's impossible to tell what impact they had on Grant's outcomes. In any case, I'm grateful for Grant and his ground-breaking endeavor. Unfortunately, with the passing years, there have been many low vitamin A dieters who had to jump ship. Many highly dedicated, highly motivated years-long low vitamin A dieters encountered major health problems (after initial improvements). So it seems that the low vitamin A diet is NOT a reliable solution for most people's health issues, but could potentially make them worse or create new ones. Admittedly, this may be more so because Grant's original approach (meat+rice+limited beans) has been subverted into "meat+tons of supplements+lots of beans and other high copper foods", by people who claimed to have improved his approach, but really made it worse.