Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of youf're the cure. I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. This episode and all episodes will be archived at our website, veritas wellness member.com Our goal is for you to go consume information, learn it and apply it. Learn how to steward your health so you can stay out of our, our medical clinic and stay out of every doctor's office. Your body is designed to defend itself against germs and toxins.
If you will give your body what it needs and avoid what it doesn't, it should function well all the days of your life. That's not to say you won't ever have a cough, cold or sniffle, but it means your body will heal itself. It's designed to heal itself. It will heal itself. Just like a paper cut, just like a broken bone, your body mends those things back together. It's an incredible design.
So check out the website. We have a wellness program there. We can teach you how to not be a standard American. Standard Americans get the worst health outcomes of any industrialized country. So don't be a standard American if you don't know what that means. If you don't realize that you're not eating real food because standard Americans, the average American is not even eating food anymore.
And we can teach you that. We can teach you, give you the knowledge and then we can walk with you and give you the practical steps. So check that out. Soon we'll be launching a program, a self guided module, multi module, 12 modules I think self guided, where you can gain this knowledge and get the practical steps on how to not be a standard American and how to stay out of the doctor's office. So be looking for that in the weeks and or months to come. Not sure when the launch date is on that. Okay guys, today we're talking vitamin A lot of misinformation or lack of knowledge, lots of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge about vitamin A, also known as retinol, I'll use that word kind of interchangeably. So if you hear retinol, vitamin A, cod liver oil is the best source of vitamin A. That's been known traditionally for a very long time, both professionally and in, in Dr. World and also just in the kitchen in the home. Ancestrally we've known this and I'm going to go through some of that today. Actually we're going to have Sally Fallon Morrell join us here in a minute from the Weston A. Price Foundation. She's the president of that foundation and her, she's full of knowledge and her website's full of knowledge. So that's the focus of today's show because we're still in the middle of treating measles out here. And vitamin A. Very clear in the literature that vitamin A deficient people have a very hard time with measles. Measles infection all by itself will deplete you of vitamin A. So we need a good, whole food based source of vitamin A, not a synthetic form of vitamin A. We'll talk about that in a minute. So that will be the focus of the show. But I do just want to say there's a way bigger story here and this way bigger story is going to get told. It'll be told over future episodes and maybe a documentary even, because this is such a massive story of healing that can come to our nation. And I think it's going to be clear when this story is fully told, it'll show the stark contrast. There's the kingdom of truth and love and there's this other thing driven by fear and it's not good. And the contrast will be set up so clear in this story that is going to unfold. But right now we're going to focus on this because there's families and kids that are still sick and trying to be healed, becoming more and more well every day. There's families that are, you know, still mourning the loss of their child. There was another child actually not reported in the news. This will be part of the story that we tell in the future. Another young Mennonite girl that passed away sadly this week and condolences to her family had nothing to do with measles but is related to this story. And I think the country's going to be shocked when the full story comes out. There's a reason for vaccine hesitancy. We need to be able to talk about that. Nobody should be scared to say the word vaccine hesitancy and have a conversation about what's behind it, what's driving it. You know, when the CDC reached out to me and said, hey, could you ask the Mennonite leaders down in Gaines county, what do they need? How can we help? And it was an honest, I believe a very honest and compassionate question from the CDC official that asked me that. And I'm happy about that. But the answer I got immediately from the community was, will they meet with us? We would like to meet with them privately, not with the cameras, but privately in a room and just bring our 12 injured vaccine, injured children just from our little community. 12, will they do that? Will they meet with us and just the fact I just said that right now on the show automatically right there, division. That can't be. There's no way. They don't know what they're talking about. They must be ignorant or dumb or they're anti vaccine or whatever. I mean we just immediately are going to start throwing labels around just based off the fact I said that. That was their one request, one and only request.
I think we should have that conversation. And I was happy to see Dr. J. Bhattacharya who's trying to. He was at his Senate confirmation hearing. I saw a headline, didn't watch his testimony. I was busy. But I read the headline. Basically said the vaccine injured in this country will have their day to be heard. That's all that they wanted in, in Gaines county. And they're going to have that day. We're going to tell that. They're going to tell that story. So that's why I've turned down interviews. All week long I've been turning down interviews, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NBC, cbs, Newsweek, BBC, cnn. Because I felt like the full story, the truth that could be the healing, the unifying story that can bring us together and bring the truth in love and compassion and restore integrity to my profession and healing to this country can be told by the Mennonites themselves. So that story's coming, guys. I just wanted to put that out there. There's just way more to this than what people realize.
You know, the vaccine hesitancy, vaccine injury, the second death, informed consent, inform, patient rights, lack of care.
Are vaccines appropriate for an acute illness or shedding from vaccine? I read a study, a third of the MMR vaccinated this was In October of 24, I believe the study came out. A third of them will shed. Well, what does that mean? What's the impact of that? Does that have any clinical significance? We should be able to talk about that.
But vitamin A, all the lack of knowledge on vitamin A, but the conversation that will be coming in the future, my hope will be a unify one, not a dividing one. All these conversations on vaccines are dividing. And there's a way that it doesn't need to be that way. And it's going to start with telling the truth, confession, honesty. And that takes humility. And there's a cancer, a terminal fatal cancer growing in our health care system. And it's pride, pride comes before the fall. And that thing is falling actually right now, I believe. But there's a way to come out of that and turn this around and heal and it starts, starts with humility and telling the truth and confession, transparency. That's what I hope we get. That's what I'm hoping this story that the Mennonites will tell will bring this country to. And one of the confessions we can start with right now is we're the sickest country in the world. There's just no doubt about it. The data is clear. Our kids are the sickest, not just our infants that die younger. And we have the highest infant mortality rate of any country. Even when you exclude the preemies that we try to heroically save, you exclude those, and we still have the highest infant mortality rate. More of our kids are sick than any other country. More prescription drugs given our kids than any other country.
Our overall life expectancy, we die younger than any other industrialized country. We're just sick across the board. There's no argument in that. Now, I think that should be a big red flag to healthcare providers, physicians in particular, that, hey, we're spending the most money doing the most pharmaceuticals, doing the most medical procedures, doing all this stuff, but we're coming in dead last place every single year. Let's step back and take a look at that one way. One thing we need to take a look at is evidence based medicine.
This is John Ioannidis from Stanford. He published this in 2005. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.
Here's another quote difference not from that study. It's simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. And that was Dr. Marcia Angel. Here's another quote. Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analysis and flagrant conflicts of interest. Together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. That was Richard Horton, editor in chief. Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet. Both those quotes from those two editors of these major well respected medical journals were pre Covid. There is so much evidence. There's a book called the Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine. We've got to look in the mirror and take a hard look at this evidence based medicine and who's given us evidence and who paid for the evidence. What kind of corruption is there that is where we're at. The people know it. That's why trust in doctors has dropped in a good part, it's from 70 to 40% in falling fast because this kind of knowledge is now coming mainstream. The people have found the truth that our medical system, this evidence based medicine. So the original definition of evidence based medicine is the best published research available in conjunction with clinical experience of the physician in conjunction with patient values.
We've got to remember that full definition, clinical experience trumps evidence based, published, the best peer reviewed literature you can find. Clinical experience can trump that. And then patient values trump clinical experience. If the patient doesn't want to do it, you don't do it. Jehovah's Witnesses don't do blood products. So even if they're in a car wreck and they're bleeding out and they're showing up at the er, the ER doctor is not going to override their wishes. So as physicians, we need to remember that original definition. That would be a big part of this healing, humility, confession that we're probably doing something wrong since we're getting the worst outcomes and we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over. These guys have looked at this evidence based medicine thing, science and have concluded there's a major problem when half, over half of the research ends up being false. We need to step back and look at the entire system including vaers, the vaccine adverse event reporting system, which I misquoted earlier. So I'll start with humility right now. I was wrong. 94 deaths that I was using in my calculations for how many people die from the MMR shot that included international data. So if you just do Americans over the last 20 years, 106 people has been reported and verified by CDC on Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System VAERS. That's the CDC system for doctors to report on. 106 deaths over the last 20 years. 41 deaths over the last 10 years. Roughly four to five deaths reported per year from the MMR vaccine. But then the question is, how accurate is that reporting? Do all events get reported? Do half the adverse events get reported? What, what percentage is actually reported? It's called the underreporting factor. So HHS decided to study this. In 2010, a report come out, came out by Lazarus was an author and they used Harvard consultants to do the research and they concluded only 1%. VAERS captures 1% of the adverse reactions. Okay, so that's what, that's the clear data. We have five deaths a year from MMR. We have a report from HHS in 2010 saying that's only 1%. So that equals about 400 deaths a year. Before the vaccine rolled out, we had 100 deaths a year of measles. If you applied 350 million, that's what it would translate to today. 100 deaths per year from measles, 400 deaths a year from MMR based off the data. Now is that accurate? That's a good question, but that's just what the data is right now. So you can have an opinion that Lazarus was wrong. He. He was off by 50%. Okay, well, that would put it at 200 deaths instead of 400 versus 100 from measles. We. But that's an opinion. So we should do another Lazarus study. We should do a whole, whole lot better job with vaccine adverse event reporting. There's a way to do this right, so that's part of the conversation too. That needs to happen later. So this vaccine hesitancy isn't just because people are ignorant or they're just anti. Or what? I mean, all this language and all this division. Let's talk about it. Let's get to the root of what's this. What's this hesitancy all about? But guys, it starts with confession. It starts with just being honest and being able to come to the table and talk about this. And I hope and pray that this story that the Mennonites will be telling in the coming days and weeks and months will unify us for the sake of our children's health. And I do want to say a shout out, because the clinical experience factor on evidence based medicine. There's no peer reviewed study that I know of that says use budesonide and inhaler for measles. Measles.
But in my clinical experience, when I was evaluating patients this last weekend, it was clear that there was respiratory distress with a viral illness. Using my clinical experience from COVID 19, we saw the same thing, a major respiratory distress and inflammation and budesonide worked well. And since COVID now there's lots of published literature on that virus and budesonide and inflammation and decreased mortality, etc. So I use my clinical judgment, my experience to deploy that cod liver oil. We'll talk about that here in a minute with Sally Fallon Morrell. Same thing, clinical judgment based off my knowledge in the literature. And that's what doctoring is. You bring all this to the table and then when you see the outcome, a miraculous outcome right before your very eyes, you want your colleagues to know about it. Especially if there's hospitalized Children in a life threatening situation. You want to share that information with your colleagues. You want to share it with the health authorities in the state, you want to share it with the health authorities nationally, federally. And that's what I did.
And I did it for one reason, to try to help those kids in the hospital. And that's it. And so that's, and that's happening. And I want to say thank you to the local healthcare providers, doctors, hospitals that are using the therapy that we've, we found out could be very beneficial. We didn't know this before, those doctors didn't know this before. And now our clinical experience tells us yes, it can be helpful. And so, and now it's being deployed in the hospital. So thank you. There's very, very good care being given. There's very, very loving healthcare professionals and nurses. There was one story in particular. One of the Mennonite families told me that their daughter who hadn't eaten in nine hours, drank, was not given drink or food in nine hours at another facility, flown into the Lubbock facility. And a nurse heard about this and asked her, what do you want? And she said chocolate, cereal and milk I think is the story. And the nurse went and got that exact thing for her. And that child was so happy about that. That was healing in and of itself regardless of Budesonide, that baby just because she was loved and cared for. And I know there's a lot of that going on. So I want to commend that nurse and all the healthcare providers that are providing a compassionate, loving care these patients. I do want to say that same family, Budesonide was started within one treatment, her oxygen level improved. Within two more treatments, she was discharged home.
Hallelujah. And there's more that have come home. So I don't want to be divisive. I once meaning to be divisive. My, my intent was to help those kids and they've been helped and hallelujah. And I thank all the other doctors out there who are open and receptive to the clinical experience of the frontline workers who are working on this and have received that and are doing that. There's more, you know, I don't know it all. Obviously there's more I can learn in things with all this, but let's do it together. Let's come together and that story will be told. Guys, today, Sally Fallon Morrell's joining us to talk about cod liver oil and vitamin A and bring some knowledge to the table. The founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. If you don't know. Sally Fallon or don't know. The Weston A. Price Foundation. You're in for a treat today. It's one of the primary sources I go to to find out what were our ancestors doing when there was no such thing as chronic disease and when we were able to defend ourselves against various toxins and germs, I'll say infections. Weston A. Price was a dentist in the 1920s, 1930s, and he in Cleveland, Ohio, and he was noticing in his dental practice an uptick in chronic disease like hypertension and arthritis and heart attacks and malignancies. So he and his wife decided to travel the world and go find ancestral groups who did not see this increased incidence of chronic disease. But also on that journey, which was I think 10 or 15 years, and Sally can speak to that. But he noted, and I read his book, the book's called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He specifically noted villages it seemed to be resistant to tuberculosis, which is a very infectious agent and can be deadly. So it's fascinating work. I highly recommend it. If you've never heard of Dr. Weston A. Price, check out the website and Sally against the president, founding president of that association. So, Sally Fallon, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Thank you, Ben. Thank you for having me. Yes, Dr. Price, he was a dentist, so he was looking for a dental health.
And he found 14 groups that had perfect dental health, no cavities, no infection, and no crowded or crooked teeth. Beautiful broad white smiles. And this went along with excellent physical health, ease of childbirth, ease of reproduction, and no chronic diseases, as you say, no cancer, no heart disease. And all of these diets were different. There was the people living in the Alps and there were people living off the coast of Scotland and there was the South Seas in Alaska. And so the diets were all different, but the commonality was very high levels of fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamin A, 10 times higher than what was in the American diet of his day.
This was not vitamin A from pills, though, it was vitamin A from food. It was vitamin A from fish livers, it was vitamin A from butter, vitamin A from shellfish, vitamin A from organ meats, especially liver, the highly prized liver. These foods were valued for having healthy children. They ate more of these foods to prepare for pregnancy.
This is a subject very near to my heart. And when you talk about measles, the symptoms of measles are the symptoms of vitamin A deficiency, especially the conjunctivitis, Right.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: And I remember in Weston Price's book, one of my favorite stories, he conveyed And I may butcher this a little bit, but basically there were a couple of explorers or surveyors going across the, the plains, I think in Canada in the wilderness, eating canned food, modern food basically. But one of them became blind and lots of pain in the eye. And basically, as I recall in the story, he just sat down in the wilderness and was ready to, to die. I think there was a bear maybe close by and he was crying, he was in pain, he couldn't see. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder. A native indigenous person found him and tried to talk to him, but they didn't speak the same language. But basically, to cut to the chase, the indigenous man went down to the stream, built a little rock canal in the. And he, he shuffled so he scared some fish into this little rock canal or corral he made, got a fish, told the man to eat the, the flesh of the eyeball, yes, from behind.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: The highest concentration of vitamin in the body. And he, he, his sight came back and he was saved. You know, this is very interesting because my husband grew up in New Zealand and this is back, he's a bit older than me and it's back in the 1930s and when he went fishing with his dad, they always opened up the head first and took that little piece of flesh behind the eye and ate it. They knew that this was really important for their health. And he said it was so rich that you could only eat a tiny bit of it. But they always did that when they went fishing. So here is the same practice halfway around the world in New Zealand, but somehow they knew to do this.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I was reading also, I think it was from your website or the Weston A. Price foundation website, which is Weston a price.org everybody. You can go there. You can type in on the search bar Vitamin A. And there's lots of great articles. The one I was recently reading from was Vitamin A saga. But in that story it talked about a physician actually who was trying to help figure out night blind blindness on these ships that would go out for months at a time on the ocean. And he talked about, I think it was 75 sailors out of a crew of 300 plus would just go blind at night and would have to be led around on the deck and down to the bunks. And he figured out, I think it was ox liver maybe that he took with him and fed to these guys. And it reversed it again, liver retinol. So there's, there's a really interesting ancestral story and some wisdom that was lost.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: My own story is the Same I can't drive at night unless I take cod liver oil. And then my night blindness close up.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: So this was the vitamin A. It's a first letter in the Alphabet. It was the first vitamin that was discovered and it's not called retinol for nothing. It's because the retina needs this vitamin and the modern diet is woefully depleted of vitamin A because people think they shouldn't eat butter. People aren't taking cod liver oil. Nobody eats liver anymore. And the, the form that's in the vitamin pills is, is toxic. There's actually, it's the watermeasible form and there is an article 2003American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Okay. Water, miscible, emulsified and solid forms of retinol supplements are more toxic than oil based preparations. Now the title is a little bit misleading because the oil based, the kind you get in cod liver oil and butter and liver is not toxic at the kind of doses that anyone would take. But what they're giving, especially to these children with measles, they're giving 200,000 units of the toxic form of vitamin A. This is not the way to do it. If you give cod liver oil, Your dose is 10,000 units. It's not very high and it's not toxic that way. But somehow they have not learned about vitamin A in medical school and how to give it.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah, and well, I do want to comment on that because I certainly didn't learn about vitamin A, well, nutrition in general. And, and I think the latest I've heard from other speakers is maybe up to 80% of medical schools don't teach nutrition now. And I know when I was there I got about two hours of nutrition lecture in four years and I can recall most of those hours being spent on actually vitamins and a portion of it on the toxicity of certain vitamins. And. But my point is a physician's probably not the person to go to, to gain knowledge on nutrition, on food supplementation. There has to be.
That's exactly why I'm, I pointed that out and actually sent that article to some health officials throughout this measles outbreak because it's a well cited article. And in fact on the toxicity part, I was just rereading it again and it was talking about the Merck manual describing vitamin A toxicity. But again, synthetic, A hundred thousand IUs of synthetic A per day taken for many months even is what the Merck manual said would have to get the toxic level.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: And it quickly resolves when you go off. It's not permanent, Whereas long term B12 deficiency is permanent. But the vitamin A, if you're giving too many, I mean, no one would get this much in a traditional diet. They get a lot more than we get. But nobody's taking 100,000 units. The average intake in the Eskimo diet is about 50,000 units per day. And that would be the very upper limit of what anybody's getting in a traditional diet.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Right.
And I believe on that article it talked about an Arctic explorer that was consuming a very high quantity. I don't know if it was. I forget what animal product he was eating, but that was.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: They say that that's from polar bear liver. Everybody's taught not to eat polar bear liver, but it was probably a toxin because at certain times of the year they don't eat polar bear liver because it has a toxin in it. So I don't think it was vitamin A, actually. I think it was some kind of poison.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Okay, can you speak more to more on the ancestral part of this story, what Dr. Price found in these various tribes as far as women of childbearing age and the consumption of particular things in the diet so that the babies would be healthy.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Yes. Everywhere he went, and these are populations separated by thousands of miles, there was a custom to prepare for pregnancy by eating certain foods. And when Dr. Price analyzed these foods, he found they were particularly rich in the fat soluble activators. This is vitamins A, D, and another one, he didn't know what it was, but turns out to be vitamin K2. And we get these only from animal fats, organ meats and certain types of seafood. Fish eggs is another, a wonderful source. So for example, in Switzerland, they ate butter from the cows who went out to pasture in the early spring when the grass was growing really rapidly. And when he analyzed that, it was very, very high in A, D and K. Many cultures ate liver to prepare for pregnancy. They ate the fish liver oil, either cod liver oil or shark liver oil.
Fish eggs was another preconceptual food. And this is something that we really must get back into our culture.
The idea that you prepare for pregnancy with nutrient dense foods. And I can tell you the babies who are born to the parents wise enough to do this are just beautiful babies. They're happy, they're smart, they don't cry, they meet all their milestones.
This is where our emphasis is at the Weston A. Price foundation, is having healthy babies. Because as you know, we have an absolute crisis today. Our babies are not healthy. We have the worst record in the whole world for babies. And one in two children has some kind of medical problem. One in 36 has autism, which is like a living death, not only for the child but for the parents.
We've got to turn this around and the only way we're going to do it is with food. We're not going to do it with vitamins. We need to do it with nutrient dense foods.
One of the things that means is getting our animals back on pasture because butter from pastured cows, cows much higher in ad and K than butter from confinement cows.
So this is our push at the foundation to teach young people these basic rules. Another rule that's very interesting. In Africa and the South Seas, it was considered shameful to have a child more than once in three years.
And they had various ways of spacing their children. All very interesting. But the point is that this allows the mother to recover her nutritional stores to get over the stress of pregnancy and ensure that every child has the same, you know, gifts to start with, the same gifts of good nutrition.
I can tell you it really cuts down on jealousy in the, in the family when the parents have spaced their children and made sure that the mother was thoroughly nourished for each pregnancy.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that whole concept was. I didn't learn that in medical school. Again, didn't learn really any nutrition in medical school. I can tell you that I am biased but in the last few days of treating measles, I don't haven't counted lately over 150 cases. And I did have one just yesterday where it was a very, very mild case. And I asked the mom, I said, you know, the diet high in butter and cream and liver and cod liver oil and these animal fats. And she said, yep, that's all we eat all those things. And again, that was one case. But this kid was, and I was noticing this in the breastfed babies versus because I started adding that to my questionnaire during my exam. Is this a bottle fed baby? Breastfed baby? What's the diet like? So just for my own personal kind of tracking of this, not an official study, but there was definitely a divide and to where I would start to be more aggressive in my treatment of a child down in Gaines county when they just had the appearance of just being more frail, their, their skin color, their hair, just their overall frame, they just kind of a look of more maybe undernourished and frail. And then of course I would ask questions about diet quickly and I would automatically be more aggressive with that child. I was just seeing that correlation just in a Few days down in Gaines County.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: You'll need to write a paper on this or an article for the Journal. This is fascinating. You know, we're talking about making America great again. Making America healthy again. I can tell you we can do all sorts of things, but until we get a really good nutrient dense diet back into our families and abandon the horrible dietary guidelines, they're just designed to make us unhealthy.
We're not going to be great. We're not going to be healthy again.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Yeah, well, Sally, could you speak some if you're able to. And again, guys, the article I keep referencing westonaprice.org and you can just search Vitamin A saga. But in that article it seemed like this controversy came from 1995 study by Tufts University put it out on vitamin A. That kind of seemed to scare everybody.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it was kind of a deliberate scare. This is the article by Russell and it was on pregnant women. And those with the higher vitamin A intake had more birth defects of a certain type. There were fewer birth defects of another type. But the vitamin A they were looking at was the vitamin A that was added to breakfast cereals and, you know, processed foods. And as I said that that is toxic.
We need the vitamin A that's in the fats. We need the vitamin A that's in the foods. And two other studies that followed that one did not find these results and in fact found that women getting vitamin A from foods at very high levels did not have more birth defects and fewer. That article by article on our website is called Vitamin A for Fetal Development.
And I also have an article on measles. It's called Measles. It's at my blog nourishingtraditions.com and I quote the some of the studies showing how helpful vitamin A is for measles. There are about 500 studies in the literature.
Please don't say that. There's no, you know, research on this. There's a lot of research on it. And just to give you.
Let me just give you an example. Low serum retinol is associated with increased severity of measles in New York City children.
Vitamin A administration reduces mortality and morbidity from severe measles. Vitamin A for the treatment of children with measles A systematic review. And vitamin A deficiency is a recognized risk factor for severe measles. It's all out there in the literature, but we're going about it in the wrong way as usual. In trying to treat the measles with couple of extremely high doses of the toxic form of vitamin A. Yeah, and you're very right, Ben, to do this with cod liver oil.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Thank you. Well, I learned it from you and the Weston Price foundation and all the research. This isn't just somebody's blog and just some, you know, opinion.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: It's in the literature and we're supposed to be science based. Please guys, let's, let's follow the science here. It's, it's all there in the literature, so.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: Yeah, well, a couple other interesting studies. This was one, the Rome study and then the Switzerland study. I was just grabbing these real quick and they're in the article. Guys, you can go get the actual study. 120 infants, 50,000 IUs a day, no congenital malformation. There's a Switzerland study looked at blood levels of vitamin a in women. 30,000 IUs, no birth defects. Again, the actual details of the study are, are on the vitamin A saga article on Weston A. Price.org so Sally, in your opinion, if you were in charge of the Food and Drug Admin or the USDA or any food related organization in the government, what would be your step 1, 2, 3 to try to turn around this disaster of childhood illness that we're currently seeing?
[00:36:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I would definitely just scrap the dietary guidelines. They are not based on science.
It's a horrible diet that just pushes people into the arms of processed food and they. One of the people on the committee stated, we're not going to let butter back on the table.
We need to go back to our ancestral foods. Why the big campaign against butter? Butter is the fat in nature for the growth and development of all mammals, including humans. So there can't be anything wrong with butter. Our children need butter to grow and develop and human being develops up to the age of 18.
We need to be making baby formula with whole milk, not skim milk. And we need to be giving butter to our children, putting it on their baby food.
We need to have butter in the schools. We need to have whole milk in the schools, not skim milk. It's just a travesty the way we're feeding our children today. Let me tell you something interesting. Okay, no, go ahead. When you buy milk replacer for calves. When you buy milk replacer for calves and everybody listening can look this up. The third ingredient is animal fat.
And that's because the animal scientists know that if you do not give animal fat with cholesterol in it to calves, they will not grow.
And yet we don't have any animal fat in infant formula. There's no cholesterol in infant formula, babies can't make cholesterol.
Now we've veered a little from the topic of vitamin A, but growing babies need cholesterol. They can't make it themselves. And mother mother's milk is very high in cholesterol and contains special enzymes to ensure the 100% assimilation of that cholesterol. They need cholesterol for growth, for their guts, for their brains to make brain cells. They need cholesterol to make hormones. And babies make hormones. The testosterone levels in little boys are as high as those of an adult male for the first six months of life. And this programs the baby to express male characteristics at puberty. If he's not getting cholesterol in the infant formula, what's going to happen?
But getting back to vitamin A, you need vitamin A to make hormones. Also all, all the sex hormones, stress hormones, adrenal hormones are made from cholesterol and require vitamin A for them to be formed.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yep. And vitamin A and vitamin D work kind of hand in hand, hand in glove do.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: And we're another big mistake we're making is giving these huge doses of vitamin D. And when that happens, it's synthetic vitamin D. Up to 10,000 units a day is incredible. It's way too high. And that causes depletion of vitamin A. Yeah. So not only are we not giving the vitamin A, we are actually depleting it with the very high doses of vitamin D. And then they add vitamin K to that and that further depletes vitamin name.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: Yeah. The ratios found in nature, found in real food, about a 10 to 1 ratio. I believe, if I'm remembering right, A and D, A and D need to be together. They need to be in this natural form found in food. That is the design. There's a design to this thing. And, and Sally, I'm glad you veered into the cholesterol a little bit. I'm quoting from the Journal of American College of Cardiology. August of 2020, they published this, the name of the article, Saturated fats and Health A Reassessment and a proposal for food based recommendations. The conclusion in this study, it was a review study looking at saturated fat and the dietary recommendations to avoid it. And here's the quote. Several foods relatively rich in saturated fatty acids such as whole fat, dairy, dark chocolate and unprocessed meat are not associated with an increased cardiovascular disease. No. There is no robust evidence that current population wide arbitrary upper limits on saturated fat consumption in the United States will prevent cardiovascular disease or reduce mortality. And there are a number of other Other studies. This isn't a cholesterol talk and heart attack talk. I do. That's another talk. And guys, if you're a member of our wellness program, you can go watch the cholesterol and heart disease lecture that I give. And it goes through a number of studies to address this cholesterol saturated fat. So I just wanted to throw that in there.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the reasons we need saturated fat is because we're warm blooded animals. Fish have a lot of unsaturated fat. They're cold blooded animals. It's almost like antifreeze in their bodies.
But we need saturated fats because if we don't have saturated fats, everything's too runny, too floppy in our bodies, the cell membranes. So because we need saturated fats to function, the body has a backup plan. And that backup plan is that your body can make saturated fats out of carbohydrates. So if you're not eating saturated fats, you know, butter, meat fats, coconut oil and so forth, your body makes you crave carbohydrates like sugar.
And you can make saturated fats out of sugar. And that's what happens. But of course the sugar is empty. There's no, there are no vitamins in there.
So you're just eating empty calories when you could be eating nutrient dense calories.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And I, I think it's a good time to remind the audience. I've talked about this before, but the 99, 98% drop in infant mortality, which was very high in 19, late 1800s, around 1900, especially in the big cities, New York, Boston, the very high infant mortality rate. And then we see this huge drop prior to vaccines rolling out on the market because of the very thing we're talking about. Once we figured out to keep the clean water, the sanitation clean. But nutrition, a lot of people forget what the nutritional status of these inner cities, especially because all the fresh food was out in the country. So can you speak to that a little bit? The nutritional depletion? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, I mean, food was coming into the cities. A lot of it was terribly adulterated. But the key factor for the decline in infant mortality was the replacement of the horse with the car. The cities were stinking cesspools and mountains of horse manure everywhere. And they didn't have sewers and they didn't have refrigeration. There was no cleanup. I mean, this stuff was on the streets everywhere. You can imagine how it's smelled. And health officials at the time said what are we going to do about this? We can't have any more people moving to the cities. They're just filthy. Then the car came along. I know there was problems with the cars, but it got the manure off the streets and out of the water.
And that's a very overlooked factor in, you know, the improvement in our health. The other thing was that there was a big campaign to get people to take cod liver oil. Health officials. Can you believe this? Department of Public Health was pushing cod liver oil in the refugee camps of the Great Depression. They gave cod liver oil. If you went to Sunday school, you got cod liver oil. All the moms were told to give cod liver oil to their kids because they knew it protected them against measles.
And after the Second World War, that all went away, although in Britain, they continued. The children got a ration of cod liver oil until about 1952 or 1953, but it stopped in the United States right after the Second World War.
So my parents, and probably your parents, probably parents of most people our age, they got cod liver oil. Growing up, we never got cod liver oil. Nobody mentioned it because the government stopped talking about it.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: Yep. I just had a patient this week. He's in his late 70s, and he talked. He remembers his daddy coming to him. He said, I still remember the blue, dark blue spoon. He described Daddy coming at me with that blue spoon with cod liver oil every day.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: And you don't have to do it with a spoon. What I did with my boys, I put the cod liver oil in a shot glass and I added orange juice to it, fresh orange juice. And I called it their cowboy whiskey. Then they had to come up to the kitchen counter and get their whiskey. And I told them when they were young that it would make them good in sports and smart and healthy. And when they got a little bit older, when they were teenagers, I told them about other benefits of the cod liver oil, which I won't go into, but they thought that was funny. Mom was talking about these things now.
[00:45:24] Speaker A: Well, we've just lost. We've been so disconnected from our ancestral way of doing things and, you know, back to the saturated fat and heart disease. I love to remind people that the first heart attack in America was in 1912. It's the number one killer.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: 1921. First recorded one. Yeah. And it was heart disease went up in lockstep with the vegetable oils.
[00:45:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:45:52] Speaker B: And in the opposite direction of butter consumption.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: So one thing we know for sure, it can't be butter that's causing the heart disease.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and if, if cholesterol were the issue, then we should see a dramatic drop in heart disease deaths with everybody taking the statins. And now, and we've, there's a review study, I believe this was, I don't, it's off the top of my head. I think it was a journal of American College of Cardiology, but it may have been jam. In 22, they did a review study of all the statin data for primary endpoint reduction and mortality for primary prevention. It was 0.8% absolute risk reduction. So if drop in cholesterol with the statin were the answer, we would have seen a bigger reduction in this heart disease. So there's more to the story.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: And all cause heart disease, all cause deaths go up with the statins.
Intestinal diseases, kidney diseases, and especially cancer goes up, up with the statins because saturated fats protect you against cancer.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: Right.
The saturated fats are the backbone for the immune system, the neurological system, hormones. It's just essential. And there are many studies that show the higher your cholesterol, especially in the latter parts of life, latter decades, 80s and 90s, you live longer with less dementia, less infectious disease, death, less cancer.
It's just such a, a topic that hasn't been fully educated in our, our healthcare system. I'd say, I'll say I have, I.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Have a presentation called the Oiling of America and that's on our website. You can watch that. And I also have a book called Nourishing Fats which goes into all of this saturated fats, why we need them, the history of the vegetable oil industry and how they manufactured this campaign against the saturated fats, the statins, how they were discovered, how toxic they were, and nobody thought there was any use for them. And then Merck got approval with unexplained speed and started pushing these things.
And they have terrible side effects.
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, they.
Muscle wasting is one of the side effects of the statins. And I know, I saw my father decline. He was in terrible back pain for years.
And I tried to convince him to get off the statins, but I was no match for his doctor. And the doctors prescribe statins because of something called incentivized medicine. They get their bonus. And the bonus of the whole practice is based on their number of prescriptions they write for statins. So if you refuse the statin, they usually kick you out because they want their bonus, you know?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Right. And I did Find that article. JAMA Internal Medicine 2022 Authors Paul Bryan by RNE the name of the study evaluating the association between low density lipoprotein cholesterol reduction and relative and absolute effects of statin treatment. A systemic review and meta analysis. And again, I go through all these studies extensively in, in my lecture on cholesterol and heart disease and I do want to mention this, and actually the.
[00:49:15] Speaker B: Latest one Ben, is that the statins accelerate our calcification of the arteries.
They don't prevent calcification of the arteries, they speed it up.
[00:49:26] Speaker A: And, and this really got kicked off. It was the late 50s or 1960. Ish. President Eisenhower had his heart attack. Ancel Keys. Everyone turned to him to ask him what's. What's the answer? Why, why did, where are heart attacks coming from? Ansel Keys proposed a theory.
That's a big word. We need to understand much of modern medicine or theories. This, the amyloid beta plaque theory of Alzheimer's, which is recently shown to be. That's a consequence of oxidative stress. It's not a cause of Alzheimer's, it's a marker. There's a theory of the serotonin, you know, chemical imbalance on depression that was published I think in 22 that came out. There's not great evidence for that. So back to the theory of this saturated fat. Ansel Keys, that was his theory and he published a study called the seven countries study. And it has this graph there that's very convincing. The countries that eat the most saturated fat have the most heart attacks. The countries down here with the least amount have least. And you see that graph, you'd be eating margarine all of a sudden. But then it came out later. It wasn't a seven country study, it was a 22 country or 21. Fifteen countries were left out, including France. Who had the highest saturated fat, the least amount of heart disease. I didn't learn any of this in school, so that we're kind of going on this saturated fat tangent here. But it's important because that'll be one of the arguments. Besides, vitamin A can be toxic. And we've talked about that's a synthetic form, not a whole food form. But the second argument is going to be, well, saturated fat's gonna kill you from heart disease. These are big topics and, and I just want to submit to my colleagues to consider. Guys, we are the last place team.
United States doctors, the United States healthcare system. We get the worst outcomes of any industrialized country and we've consistently been in last place. So we spend the most money on healthcare, go to the doctor the most, take the most Prescriptions. And to get the worst outcomes, we need to take a dose of humble pie and just step back and say, wait a minute, what is going on here? How could we be the sickest, but we're going, utilizing and spending the most money. Well, maybe because the whole foundational theories on some of these primary drivers is often it's what Bobby Kennedy and and friends are talking about. It's cellular dysfunction because of mitochondrial dysfunction. And that mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cells, supposedly. I mean, that's kind of the nickname of stewarded. Well, it needs sunshine, it needs good oxygenation. It doesn't need stress.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: Vitamin A.
[00:52:04] Speaker A: It needs minerals. So Weston Price, he was on it right when this food started changing. They started removing the animal fats, processed sugar came in and processed grains, those three things at one time, and boom. Escalation of chronic disease that now we know is all rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction because that mitochondria is starved. The cell is starved for energy. So it is vitamin A we need from real food, and we need other nutrients from real food. And you don't just eat like your ancestors. That's the main story here. But, Sally, they.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: They asked Dr. Price to endorse, I think it was Wonder Bread because of the added vitamins and minerals, and he refused.
And when that happened, he sort of became Persona non grata. They also asked Dr. Price to endorse fluoride in the water, and he refused. He said, I've studied all these healthy people with perfect teeth, and none of them have fluoride in their water. And I really shouldn't be using the word fluoride. What's being put in the water is a fluorosalicic acid. It's a toxic waste that we import from China, from all their industry there.
So he was pressured to endorse these. These kind of toxic remedies. And he was a man of principle. He said no.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: Yeah, well, guys, around 1910 or so, 1911, 1912. Ish. There was a study called the Flexner Report.
And basically, in a nutshell, all the different medical education schools and curriculum out there, because there were homeopathic medical schools back then, I think 23 different homeopathic medical schools in late 1800s. American Homeopathic association, aha. Predated the AMA. There were herbalists, there were naturopathic schools. There were all kinds of healing modalities and arts that have been around for hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: By the way, President Lincoln helped found one of those homeopathic schools. I believe it was in Cleveland, actually.
[00:54:04] Speaker A: So we used to have a more diverse and a different perspective when it came to health. And really in my how I'm looking at this, all these other ways, the healing arts all kind of lined up with, came in parallel with supported the natural innate ability of the body to heal and defend itself. But Flexner recommended that medical education in this country be standardized to an allopathic model, which is pharmaceutical based. And that's it. So we've been in 100, 110 years roughly. So all the money went to those schools and those research institutions, those facilities. The licensing of doctors went that way too. And a lot of these other modalities were marginalized or even criminalized. And so we've been on a grand experiment for the last 110 years of allopathic only. And there's a time and place, but for chronic disease, well, we changed our health care education to the doctors and we change the food production. And here we are.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Here we are. And you know, there's a place for allopathic medicine when you need surgery, even just going to the hospital, they're clean. And what do they give you in the hospital? They give you saline drip and that's very life saving, very life saving.
So we don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. But I think most doctors know themselves. They're just helpless in front of all these chronic diseases. They don't know what to do. They just write prescriptions. Write prescriptions and we're going in the wrong direction. And this will not be solved by the doctors. It'll be solved by the people. It'll be solved by the parents who figured it out for themselves to become members of the Weston A. Price foundation and receive our literature, receive our journal. And by the way, we have a system of almost 500 local chapters worldwide. And the local chapters can help you find the. They all keep a list of local foods, where to find them and local doctors who use natural methods. I'm sure you're on the list of our local chapter. So they're a tremendous resource and they're all posted on our website.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: So Sally, if this was the first time anybody's heard of you heard of Weston A. Price, heard of your web, the website Weston A. Price found or Weston A. Price.org There's a mountain of information. Where should they start?
[00:56:34] Speaker B: Well, go to our website, westonaprice.org and there's on the right hand nav bar, there's a tour that they can take because the website is huge. Everything we've ever published is on this website and it's absolutely free to the public. But there's a tour you can take with an introductory article by myself and an article on western and price and some of the, the basics. We also have some wonderful tools. We have a pamphlet that kind of gives our basics. We have wonderful little trifolds and we also publish every year a shopping guide. The shopping guide has thousands of products listed in it and where to get them approved by us. And that's updated every year.
[00:57:23] Speaker A: Okay, awesome. And guys, like I mentioned, you can go on the website WestonAirPrice.org type in vitamin A in the search bar. I just did it. And I can't even count the number of articles. They're just on vitamin A, how many articles there are. So if you want to have a different perspective, and especially I encourage you healthcare practitioners to consider expanding your education, do some continuing medical education, get on the website and start reading about vitamin A today. It could be life saving.
[00:57:52] Speaker B: And we have a lot on cod liver oil too. We, we have, there's four recommended brands. These are brands that are processed with low temperature and so still retain all the natural vitamins. So we have quite a bit on cod liver oil.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: And probably the last thing I'll say, we'll wrap this up. But I've been down in the Mennonite community, Seminole, Texas and Gaines county in general down there. And I will say, and not, it's not just there, I think it's across, across the country. But we think we're well nourished. I mean, I saw some comments or heard some comments from some other physicians. Hey, we're in America. This isn't a third world country. I, I didn't have time to run blood tests on vitamin A levels of some of these kids. But I, I'm quite certain that even in this country we have kids that are vitamin A deficient. And the way some of these kids were responding, number one, how sick they were and how, how well they responded, I'm quite certain we were dealing with some undernourishment and some vitamin A deficiency and measles, all by itself will deplete you of your vitamin A.
[00:59:03] Speaker B: Yes, and, and if it goes too long, the side effects are very severe. Blindness, seizures, and they can be, you know, permanent. So it is very serious. And it's so important that we know what we're doing, not give a huge dose of toxic synthetic vitamin A, but understand how to do it. But we need to be giving these kids cod liver oil, that's for sure. And by the way you don't have to use a spoon, you can take an eyedropper and put it under the tongue.
That's probably the best way to do it for a child.
[00:59:36] Speaker A: Okay, awesome. Well, Sally, I really appreciate you coming in. I know it was real last minute with everything going down in Gaines County.
[00:59:43] Speaker B: My favorite subject. Happy to talk about.
[00:59:46] Speaker A: Well, that's why I turned to you. And guys, again, get on the website westnaprice.org and go have a heyday on vitamin A there. They're all referenced articles and you can go dig into all the science.
So enjoy that. Sally, thanks again for joining us today. Thank you.
[01:00:01] Speaker B: Thank you, Ben. I hope to see you soon.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Yes, ma'am. Okay. Yes. All right, everybody. Well, let's mention that real quick. Y'all have a Wise Traditions Conference every year, correct?
[01:00:11] Speaker B: We have a yearly conference. This year it will be in Salt Lake City October 17th through 19th. And we have fascinating speakers. But the best thing about our conference is we serve real food. We conference fee includes five wonderful Wise Traditions meals.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: And yes, it is wonderful. I've been blessed to be a speaker at that conference before and it was amazing. So y'all check that out. Wise Traditions Conference in Salt Lake in October. Okay, everybody, that was Sally Fallon Morrell, Weston A. Price Foundation. Weston A. Price.org she's the founding president and current president of that foundation. I highly recommend you go find these articles. Vitamin a saga by Dr. Mary Enig. 18 references on that article Vitamin Amazing by Pam schonafeld. She's got 31 references on that article. And because we have just a little bit of time left here and because you may not go read these articles, I'm going to read just a few highlights just to drive some of these points home.
And I like history. I've become a fascinated by medical history. So I'm going to read a little bit about some historical accounts with vitamin A and liver and some diseases. So all cultures, all traditional cultures recognize that certain foods were necessary to prevent blindness. And here's some examples.
And using liver as an excellent source of vitamin A for various types of blindness. The Egyptians described this cure liver at least 3,500 years ago. Similar practices have been described in the 18th century. Russia in rural Java in 1978 and among inhabitants of Newfoundland in 1929. All these are referenced in the article. Other cultures use the liver of Shark Hippocrates. 460 to 327 BC he prescribed liver soaked in honey for blindness in malnourished children. The Assyrian texts dating back to 700 B.C. and ancient Chinese medical writings from the 7th century A.D. both call for the use of liver in the treatment of night blindness. A 12th century Hebrew tristes recommends pressing goat liver to the eyes, followed by eating of liver. In the Middle Ages, the Dutch physician Jacob Van Learned 1235-1299 wrote the following. Who at night does not see right, eats the liver of goat and he will then see better at night.
Night blindness was a reoccurring problem among sailors on long voyages. And by the time of the advent of the great European navies, the wisdom of traditional liver therapy was largely ignored. It took brave dedication to the scientific method to confirm the validity of the ancient treatments. The first to do this was Dr. Edward Schwartz, a ship's doctor on an Austrian frigate that was sent out around the world on a scientific exploration. Before his departure from Vienna, several physicians had asked Schwartz to test the old folk remedy of boiled ox liver against night blindness. On the voyage, 75 of 352 men developed the condition. Every evening when dusk came, they lost their vision and had to be led about like the blind.
Schwartz fed them ox or pork liver and found that night vision and all of the afflicted was restored.
The cure was, quote, a true miracle, said Swartz in his published report, which stated emphatically that night blindness was a nutritional disease. For this he was viciously attacked by the medical profession, which accused him of frivolity and self aggrandizement. Three years after his return from the expedition, the discredited physician died of TB at the age of 31.
Side note. The use of vitamin A rich foods for tuberculosis had not yet been discovered. In 1904, the Japanese physician M. Mori described xeroxthalmia in undernourished children whose diet consisted of rice, barley, cereals and other vegetables. Xerophthalmia is a condition that progresses from night blindness to dissolution of the cornea and finally the bursting of the eye. He treated the children with liver and also cod liver oil with excellent results. In fact, he found that cod liver oil was even more effective than liver in restoring visual function. Mori described it as, quote, an excellent, almost specific medication. Indeed, in most cases the effect is so rapid that by evening the children with night blindness are already dancing around briskly to the joy of their mothers. And that when I read that, it reminded me of the siblings of the little girl that passed away. Her dad contacted me the night after they started their cod liver oil and told me he woke up in the night panic because his house was so quiet for the first time where the previous nights all the children, there were four other siblings. All the children had been coughing all night and that was with one dose of cod liver oil and a dose of budesonide. And by the second day, he told me, they were laughing and playing again.
Back to the article. At the end of the First World War, a physician named Blotch discovered that a diet containing whole milk, butter, eggs and cod liver oil cured night blindness and karate Malaysia. In one important experiment, Block compared the results when he fed one group of children whole milk, the other margarine as the only fat in their diet. Half of the margarine fed children developed corneal problems, while the children receiving butterfat and cod liver oil remained healthy.
Weston Price considered the fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamin A, to be the catalyst which all other biological processes depend.
Here's my commentary real quick. Since the low fat diet recommendations came out a few decades ago, and since we replaced our traditional animal fats with margarine and vegetable oils, we've seen a huge escalation in chronic disease. If Weston Price was correct, that vitamin A in particular, but all the fat soluble vitamins that are found in animals fats tend to be the catalyst for all biological processes.
Hmm, I wonder if this is a piece of the puzzle of why we're so sick. But going on to the article. Efficient mineral uptake and utilization of water soluble vitamins require sufficient vitamin A in the diet. So guys, these are the backbone of, of the building blocks of the body. Water soluble vitamins, minerals, fat soluble vitamins. And what Weston Price is saying is it's the fat solubles that are the key to activate the minerals and activate the water solubles. So if you're missing your fat soluble vitamins, there's potentially disaster looming. Back to the article.
The tenfold disparity that Price discovered between indigenous diets and the American diet in the 1940s is almost certainly greater today as Americans have forsworn butter and cod liver oil for empty processed polysaturates. My commentary again. There's an article from 1997 published out of UT Austin. The researcher looked and compared 43 different garden crops for nutrient content and he found a dramatic decline in vitamin and mineral content. And I remember one example it took, I think it was 26 apples in 1997 to equal what was in one apple in the 1950s. So yes, our diets have been very much depleted. Back to the article.
During times of stress, vitamin A stores are rapidly depleted. Strenuous physical exercise, periods of physical growth Pregnancy, lactation and infection are stresses that quickly deplete vitamin A stores. Children with measles rapidly use up vitamin A, which can result in irreversible blindness.
The antivitamin a campaign began in 1995 with the publication of a Boston University School of Medicine study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Teratogenicity of high Vitamin A Intake. This was by Kenneth Rothman and his colleagues and it looked at correlation, not causation correlation Vitamin Vitamin a consumption among 22,000 pregnant women with birth defects occurring in subsequent offspring and obviously it's important to take a look at this correlation study because there are many, many other studies that said the opposite. And just ancestral historical history tells us, as Sally Fallon mentioned, the women of childbearing age were specifically given liver and the high vitamin A containing foods. Back to the article. There were a number of flaws in this study and you can read all about them in the article. But the primary flaw was that researchers failed to distinguish between manufactured vitamin A found in supplements and fabricated foods versus natural vitamin A present with numerous cofactors. And that's the thing about food. You're going to get numerous cofactors, all the different phytonutrients. They work together as a team.
It is well known that synthetic vitamins are less biologically active, hence less effective than naturally occurring vitamins. This is especially true of fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A because these tend to be more complex molecules, molecules with numerous double bonds and a multiplicity of forms including isomers, aldehydes, esters, acids and alcohols.
Distinctions between synthetic and natural vitamin A have been absent in the extensive media coverage of this study. The Merck Manual Kind of the bible for doctors, the Merck Manual describes vitamin A toxicity in less hysterical terms. Acute vitamin A poisoning can occur in children after after taking a single dose of synthetic vitamin A in the range of 300,000 IU's or a daily dosage of 60,000 IUS for many weeks in adults. According to the Merck Manual, vitamin A toxicity has been reported in Arctic explorers who develop drowsiness, irritability, headaches and vomiting with subsequent peeling of the skin within a few hours of ingesting several million units of vitamin A from polar bear or seal liver. Again, these symptoms cleared up with discontinuation of the vitamin A rich food. Other than this unusual and extreme example, only vitamin A from mega vitamin tablets containing synthetic A when taken for a long time like a hundred thousand IUs daily for many weeks and months, can adjust induce acute toxicity.
Again, guys, all this is referenced in the article if you go look that up.
Also of note, blood tests or serum levels, blood levels of retinol or vitamin A are not very helpful because 70 to 90% of the vitamin A is actually in the liver. So it's not going to be in the blood.
That's another discussion I don't want to get into. Now continuing on. Vitamin A is necessary. Is necessary. This is really important for almost every aspect of your immune system. So you have three main aspects of your immune system. First is your barriers. That's your skin and the internal skin. It's called mucosa. So if you look at your cheek, there's skin. Well, that skin wraps around on the inside of your cheek too, and it keeps going down your esophagus, down your stomach, your intestine, to the rectum. It's skin on the inside respiratory tract. Same thing when you breathe in your nose, through your sinuses, down your windpipe, to your bronchial tubes, all the way down in the lungs. It's skin. It's an internal skin called mucosa. And vitamin A is essential for a healthy mucosa, healthy mucus production and healthy cilia. That's a little hair fibers. And for that mucus to contain the right components, the antimicrobial components, you need vitamin A.
Back to the article. Here's what happens to your immune system when you lack vitamin A. The first line of defense becomes compromised. Your skin and all the mucosal tissue become dry, so they don't create a good barrier. The barrier isn't as moist and smooth as it should be. In addition, the cilia, the little hairs lining the respiratory tract aren't created normally, so they don't work normally. The number of goblet cells which produce mucus is reduced in vitamin A deficiency. Our mucus becomes thicker and that can breed germs. There's a compound in the mucus called lysosome, which is antimicrobial. It kills bacteria. When we lack vitamin A, the synthesis of lysosome is reduced. The second line of defense, that's the first responders, that's the cells. Think of the little snipers along the border to shoot the invaders. The number of natural killer cells, macrophage and neutrophils, are reduced. When you lack vitamin A, you don't have as many snipers on your border. When you don't have enough ima, the ability of the macrophage to capture the intruding germ declines and the antimicrobial activity is reduced. In neutrophils, the third line of defense. These are the antibody producing cells to give you lifelong robust immunity.
The third part of the immune system, the adaptive immune system, vitamin A increases the number of B cells by supporting their maturation and their survival. This is essential for production of all the antibodies. It helps you convert T cells into regulatory T cells and these T regulatory cells activate your B cells, the antibody producers.
Also of note, part of your immune system has a special antibody called IgA that's found in saliva and all the mucous membranes and it traps pathogens and it also traps toxins and grabs them quickly and neutralizes them. Newborns actually get secretory IGA from breast milk.
Interesting note. We need to breastfeed our babies. Okay, there's a lot more in these articles. Again, I recommend you go read those yourself. They're all referenced. 18 different references on Dr. Mary Enig's article Vitamin A saga and then 31 different references on the vitamin. Amazing article by Pam schoenfeld. Weston A. Price.org all right guys, we are here to educate you and inform you so you can make a wise decision for you and your kids and your family. Get fully informed. I'm not anti anything except anti informed consent, anti education, anti knowledge. Let's get all the knowledge and then you decide how to steward your health and what combination of things that you believe will give you the best health outcomes. You're in charge. You are the one in charge of this body making decisions for that body. Veritas wellnessmember.com you can go there. We have health coaches called Wellness Navigators and their whole goal is to teach you how to not be a standard American so you don't get standard American health outcomes which are the worst in the world. We're going to teach you to become a more ancestral non standard American and the goal is to keep you out of our doctor's office, out of my office and out of all doctor's offices and just be healthy. Healthy. That's how you were designed to be. You can be. We've lost some knowledge. We're here to impart that knowledge and wisdom back into you and we're still learning all the time. We don't have it all figured out but we've learned a lot and we've seen thousands of patients put chronic disease into remission based off stewardship. So it's awesome. We love it. We're going to have a program coming out soon. It'll be a self guided 12 week module type program with the knowledge and the practical. How do you actually do this? How do you eat this way, cook this way, move this way, think this way. All the things hydrate the right way. So that'll be coming soon, in the coming months, be looking for that. Veritaswellnessmember. Com. You can join today and start getting started on educating yourself. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. Remember, you're the cure. We'll see you next time.
