The Shocking Science Behind Vitamin A Toxicity | Dr. Garrett Smith DSH #1329

The Shocking Science Behind Vitamin A Toxicity | Dr. Garrett Smith DSH #1329

April 15, 2025 54m
🚨 Discover the truth about vitamin A toxicity and how it could be affecting your health! 🚨 Join Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour as he sits down with the brilliant Dr. Garrett Smith, aka the "Nutrition Detective," to uncover the shocking science behind this misunderstood nutrient. From its hidden dangers in everyday foods to its role in chronic diseases, this episode is packed with valuable insights you won’t believe! 🧠💡 💥 Learn how vitamin A toxicity can impact weight loss, liver function, and even inherited health issues. Dr. Smith shares groundbreaking strategies to detox your body, optimize your health, and uncover the root causes of common ailments like acne, fatigue, and autoimmune conditions. 🙌✨ Don’t miss out on this eye-opening conversation that could change how you view "healthy" diets forever. Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets! 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more mind-blowing episodes on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:32 - Dr. Smith's Vitamin A Journey 03:06 - Sources of Vitamin A in Food 07:05 - Detoxification Timeline 08:02 - Inheriting Toxins from Parents 11:39 - Understanding Caloric Deficit 16:11 - Methylene Blue Explained 19:50 - Guidance for Methylene Blue Users 22:12 - The Myth of Herb Deficiency 22:38 - Cancer as Toxicity Storage 26:13 - Health Improvement Without Sacrificing Quality of Life 26:44 - Importance of Vitamin D 32:30 - Exploring Vitamin A Benefits 41:36 - The Impact of Seed Oils 43:16 - Detox Speed and Toxicity Levels 44:50 - Addressing Hormone Issues 47:50 - The Bile Paradigm Explained 49:29 - Finding Dr. Garrett APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: jenna@digitalsocialhour.com GUEST: Dr. Garrett Smith https://www.instagram.com/nutritiondetectiveworldwide https://nutritiondetective.com/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ The views and opinions expressed by guests on Digital Social Hour are solely those of the individuals appearing on the podcast and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the host, Sean Kelly, or the Digital Social Hour team. While we encourage open and honest conversations, Sean Kelly is not legally responsible for any statements, claims, or opinions made by guests during the show. Listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions and consult professionals for advice where appropriate. Content on this podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, medical, financial, or professional advice. #holistichealth #functionalmedicine #nutritiondetective #nutritionwithjudy #drgarrettsmith

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Full Transcript

They dump so much toxicity in their bloodstream, it just shuts it down. So the whole calories in calories out is kind of like, does it have an impact? Of course.
However, the body will resist losing weight if the toxicity coming out was going to be too dangerous, or if it shuts down things too fast, you just won't lose it. Yeah.
All right, guys, Dr. Garrett Smith here today.
We're going to talk about important health things.

Yes, I'm excited.

I think you're most known for the vitamin A stuff these days, right?

Yeah, that's kind of my thing. I'm kind of the expert in that.
Yeah, which we head into that

one. Yeah, let's start.
Okay. Well, so the big thing was, I kind of got started into what I

heard about a guy named Grant Jenner. I just had him on my podcast.
He figured out he had jaundice, which is where you turn yellow for liver messing up, right? He had chronic kidney disease and he had a really bad eczema. And he looked at about 10, the top 10 foods that triggered eczema.
And he figured out the thing in common of them was nine of the 10 had vitamin A in them. And he, as an engineer, he just thought, well, I'll just take that on my diet.
He made a diet for that. He did it.
He fixed all three of his conditions. He was the first guy who his nephrologist, his kidney doctors had seen fixed that chronic kidney disease completely.
Wow. So I started doing with my clients and I didn't want people to have to do exactly what Grant did, which was a very limited diet.
It was like, you know, five different foods. And I knew that I wouldn't do that.
I knew that I wanted to help people get better, but I also, I wouldn't do that diet. So I started looking into other low vitamin A foods and I kind of came up with this approach and I came up with, um, I looked more into the detox processes of vitamin A so we could kind of scientifically

figure out how to make this happen the best.

And now Grant's been doing it for 10 years.

I'm at six years and we have people healing all sorts of diseases that people think can't

be fixed.

Now we do, we do more than just low vitamin A diet, but that is a huge foundation of it taking, cause a lot of people think vitamin A is healthy and we don't. And I think a lot of people in the health field don't get better because they're actually eating things that are toxic while trying their, their intention is good to get better.
The problem is their method. It's not working the way they want because they're putting in some, they're encouraged to put in a poison that's actually getting in the way because it's in a lot of multivitamins right oh man multivitamins are real bad i mean they i mean it's in it's in prenatals there's only one vitamin that women are told not to take or not to overdo during pregnancy and that's vitamin a really yeah so when you hear about things that cause birth defects you should immediately be going those aren't good for adults either wow doesn't that make sense though like it's just it affects the babies the most because their their cells are dividing the fastest and that's when you can have the most problems occur dang so just because adults are more developed it doesn't mean that it's not bad for us it just takes show up.
So yeah. Now, how is it getting in these foods? Cause it's, it's a man-made vitamin, right? Well, no, no.
Vitamin A is it's, it occurs naturally in foods though. The way all vitamin A, what people will talk about plant vitamin A or carotenoids, which is like beta carotene.
You might've heard of that. And then they talk about animal vitamin A, which is retinol.
Okay. There is no retinol in animals anywhere without carotenoids first.
Carotenoids come into us or an animal. We have an enzyme that can chop it in half, and then we get two retinaldehydes, and then we get that can turn into retinol.
So basically, it's a plant-based toxin. We always have to remember that plants, they don't have claws.
They don't have teeth. They can't run.
So the only defense they have against the world is chemical warfare. And that's part of what is going on with this.
Right. So yeah, it is natural.
It's in foods. It's in supplements.
It's in things like cod liver oil and dairy and butter. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of dairy has a lot of vitamin.
Damn. I love cheese.
Yeah. It hurts my heart now.
It, uh, what about raw though? Well, raw. Okay.
The detox process of vitamin A is actually one of oxidation. We were talking about that a second ago.
Oxidation moves vitamin A along the detox process. So raw versus let's say heated vitamin A.
It's just, it just moves it down some steps. The problem with vitamin A that people don't realize is as it goes through the detox process, it actually gets more toxic.
Damn. So technically could raw vitamin A in food be, be in that form, be less damaged? Sure.
Okay. But it's going to go through the same detox process in your body as cooking.
It's all, we very much get into kind of the actual science of detox and it starts to make sense and then we can actually impact it at specific areas. Like an enzyme I work a lot on is LDH.
It's aldehyde dehydrogenase. And so we're actually scientifically making sure we're not slowing down detox and we're giving the body what it needs to move through it.
Wow. Damn.
I got to chill on the pizza then, huh? You know, it's a lot of human disease is just accumulation of toxins because a lot of these things are fat soluble. Vitamin A is fat soluble.
When you think of the word fat soluble, you want to think of fat storable. So if you take in more of these things than you get rid of, you're going to store them in your fat and you're going to slowly accumulate them.
And this is why we tend to think of aging. You know, people are just aging.
They just go, you're just getting older. It just sucks.
Well, the thing about aging is you've accumulated more toxins over a longer period of time and then things stop working so well. They actually show that people's serum retinol, which is your blood vitamin A, goes up as people get older, it tends to go up because they're accumulating toxins in their system.
Interesting. And this is just a big thing we're just working on.
It's very much like a checkbook or a checking account.

We are trying to, you know, if you wanted to make your checking account grow, you want to make more money than you spend, right? Okay, well, we're trying to get rid of more toxins than we take in. It's just math, right? So that's what we're trying to do.
How difficult is it getting rid of those toxins if you have a lot in your body right now? Well, what we have seen, if somebody really does the work, typically, I mean, they can see improvements. We've got people who see improvements in a couple of weeks, in a month, but if they really want to get to the deep stuff, I mean, we have people coming who are, I mean, some people said, I basically helped them save their life.
They were, they were just bed, bed bound. Those people are to really fix everything.
We're talking like two or three years to really fix it. And it may even be a little longer, but the whole time they can see improvements, right? It'd be just like lifting weights, right? If you say, I want to lift a certain amount of weight, it might take you years to get there, but all along the way, you're going to get stronger.
Yeah, that makes sense. So we can detox people.
They, they get rid of their health issues along the way, but their biggest one, their biggest concern, their, their biggest health issue may take the longest. Yeah.
Yeah. Cause that's the deepest thing to fix.
This is interesting. Cause I've heard of heavy metal detox.
I've heard of parasite detox, but I've never heard of this type of detox. Well, I mean, we're doing, we're doing all of it.
Like we are working on all the, all the angles that we can. I mean, we're trying to work on getting rid of aldehydes out of the diet.
We're trying to work on, we work on heavy metals. We work on the vitamin A stuff, the fat soluble stuff.
And we're, we're trying to hit multiple angles. Some people try to reduce me to just vitamin A and I'm like, no, that's, I mean, there's other people out there who think that's what I'm about.
And I go, you don't quite know the extent of all the things I've never been a, uh,

one angle type of guy. I saw here's this angle and how does this start relating to everything else? Yeah.
Cause one angle is probably not enough these days. No, the, the, the toxicity coming at us is so many, so many angles.
And the one thing that blows people's mind is that we inherit toxicity from our parents. Really? Like, yeah, I showed this in a couple studies on my last, my last live stream.
Yeah, we actually inherit toxins. They're not everything, right? But we inherit toxins.
They're handed down through the generations. So if somebody says, well, my great grandma did all this.

And I'm like, you're not your great grandma. And then your great grandma gave stuff to your grandma and she gave stuff to your mom.

And then they gave that to you.

So it's all been handed down.

So you're not in as good a position.

Holy crap.

And then that's, that's where we're at right now.

And so we're undoing this stuff.

Like as an example, we had a mom who'd had her fourth child recently all three kids were jaundiced before when they were born which means i mean 80 percent of kids are being born jaundiced what are you serious yeah this means they are their livers are not good from the get-go oh my gosh i didn't know it was that hot yeah they're starting with their livers behind and then so she just had her fourth child while she after she had been work doing my work not jaundice damn like so we're just we're fixing the liver problems that you know all those kids inherited a lot of people a lot of people notice a pattern that the first child in a family is like the healthiest one and then as you have more kids they start to kind of get sicker or they have more problems the mom's accumulating toxicity that whole time and so each kid is grabbing on to a bigger chunk that makes sense and we just we're here to resolve that and fix it yeah yeah i i plan on having kids soon and we're like super aware of the health of the the woman now yeah i mean it's still the dad, the child marinates in the mom basically for like nine months, right? So what the mom has in her is going to make the biggest impact. But of course the dad's, the dad's contribution still has a huge impact.
Right. So we both, we wanted to be both men and women being healthy.
Yeah. Dang.
I didn't realize how much it got passed down though. is super interesting because that age-old nature versus nurture debate right yeah well people want to think that we're all clean slates right it's just then they don't have to take as much responsibility but the problem is is there is a huge amount of responsibility that we're passing down and it impacts the kids and this is why we have so many problems today that we didn't before is just these problems.
ADHD, the autism. It's all just toxicity.
And I mean, well, it's not all just toxicity. There's deficiencies too.
There's, so we work on nutrient deficiencies and toxicity. Yeah.
Vitamin D is a big deficiency these days, right? Well, no. Vitamin D.
Well, here's the funny thing. I won't hit on, I don't know if we're going to hit on vitamin d too much today but it's considered in the research that vitamin d and vitamin a are antagonistic so what that means is if vitamin a goes up like toxicity goes up your vitamin d goes down huh so if if we're sitting here discussing and i'm saying there's a vitamin a toxicity epidemic if when vitamin a goes up vitamin d goes down do you see what i'm getting at so is it a vitamin d deficiency epidemic or is it a vitamin A toxicity epidemic.
If when vitamin A goes up, vitamin D goes down. Do you see what I'm getting at? So is it a vitamin D deficiency epidemic or is it a vitamin A toxicity epidemic that's then causing that? And then other things that cause your vitamin D to get lower, zinc deficiency, which we work on a ton.
Yeah, I had that actually. Magnesium deficiency, we work on that a ton.
And then if people just don't eat enough protein, that's in the research too. And then we just, then there's the whole light thing getting outside.
Yeah. So if people fix those, they fix their vitamin A toxicity, their zinc deficiency, their magnesium deficiency, protein deficiency, and they get light, the vitamin D deficiency problem goes away.
So what do you think of the calorie deficit approach that Brian Johnson's on? He's eating our weight. He's burning more calories than he's eating, right? Yeah.
By 200 a day. That's a huge topic.
I tend to think that one of the reasons people tend to gain weight. So we were talking about fat soluble toxins, right? So where does your body store fat soluble toxins? In the fat.
So if you had too many coming in, what is your body going to make more of just well okay let me back up one second if you take in your body cannot get rid of toxins fast enough oftentimes so but your body has to get it out of the blood if the toxins stay in your blood they change how you feel they affect your brain they affect your heart affect everything. So what the body will do if it can't detox stuff fast enough is it will store it.
It has to get it out of the blood. It can't get rid of it fast enough.
It's like a lot of people with their house and they have too much stuff in their house, right? So they got to get it out of their house so that their house can function. Well, so they put it in a storage unit, right? Well, your body can make storage units like body fat.
It can store it in the liver itself, which is fatty liver. So fat-soluble toxins, your body will make more storage.
And then what we can do to bring down that body fat is as we get the fat-soluble toxins out, then the body goes, I don't need to keep this anymore. So this is a lot of times I did a whole live stream on this where when people were losing weight quickly, they were dumping tons of fat soluble toxins in their bloodstream and they measured this.
And I believe that this is actually why a lot of people, when let's say they have a lot of weight to lose and they do, and they they're losing it and then they kind of stall. Yeah.
What's happening is the amount of toxins that are going in their blood is now affecting their thyroid and their ability to burn more fat. Their body's saying, we can't do this anymore.
And then the body would actually put a lot of those toxins back in the fat. So the fat is, they have less fat now, right? Some of the toxins are going back in that they're actually more concentrated in toxins.
Jeez. And this is why a lot of people, when they, they try to do the same diet again, it only works like half as much.
Wow. And then they try it again and it only works like two pounds.
And they're like, I don't understand. I'm doing the same diet I did, but I'm not losing any more weight.
Cause as soon as they start dropping body fat or burning body fat, they dump so much toxicity in their bloodstream, but it just shuts it down. So the whole calories in calories out is kind of like, does it have an impact? Of course.
However, the body will resist losing weight. If, if the toxicity coming out was going to be too dangerous, or if it shuts down things too fast, you just won't, you just won't lose it.
Yeah. So that is super interesting.
Cause when you see these bodybuilders that are super lean, they're not the healthiest after they retire. Oh no, they're, they're, they're not living very long.
Yeah. And I never even thought it was a toxin thing.
Well, yeah. When you think of how low their body fat is and what they must be storing.
Three to 5%. But if, so if they lose all their body fat, what's the last place left to store fat soluble toxins? It's their liver.
liver king fatty oh the liver king yeah well that that's kind of an example of i have people look at this which is health influencers who are red when you see a person who is red like they're tan but they're red yeah their liver is not happy geez yeah that's a that's a bad sign of a liver and that's in chinese medicine like, like traditional Chinese medicine, like being red in the face, like you see a lot of alcoholics. That's just a sign of a messed up liver.
Really? Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. He was eating organ meat, which is high in vitamin A, right? Yeah.
He would do a challenge where he'd eat a pound of liver in a sitting. Jeez.
And yeah, he's kind of, you know, I don't know how, how there he is these days. Some people say that he's experimented with a lot of things and may not be doing so hot.
I mean, that whole industry is, is sketchy when they're pushing their own products. You know, I feel like there's going to be a biased.
Yeah. Well, when, when you find out that he was, you know, what he was doing in the background saying he was all natural and doing things that were not so natural, put it that way.
Yeah. Dishonesty is rampant.
I mean, that one was obvious. How would you think he's natural? People want to believe it.
I mean, in, in these days of influencers, like they see something that they, they like and they want to believe that that person is honest and everybody else is just just going yeah that just doesn't happen you've seen a ton of fads come and go being in a space for a while what do you think of this methylene blue thing going on or no methylene blue i mean the first thing is it's a it's it's a it's a dye it's an azo dye azo dyes i was just going over this the other day uh red 40 really and yellow five are known to be like toxic food colorings yeah those are azo dyes so methylene blue is the blue version of an azo dye it's it's got i mean i was going over the poison control website where they were talking about methylene blue the other day um meth it's stored in the nerves it's stored in the fat tissues. Methylene blue is a fat soluble toxins.
And I showed research on my Twitter thread and on my video about how it accumulates inside the cells. Like they actually said, insoluble solids of methylene blue were forming inside the cells.
It's used as a fish tank cleaner, as a biocide. So bio life side to kill, right? So it's a bio side.
It's a port-a-potty, you know, the blue stuff in the port-a-potty. That's methane blue? Sometimes it is.
Yes, absolutely. Holy crap.
Because I mean, if you think about it, for the fish tank cleaner, right? What would be better to use in a port-a-potty to keep it, you know, so they can clean it out easy when they're done. Right.
So the big thing is, I mean, people will say they feel better on it and I go, okay, it is an MAOI antidepressant. So it's, it's a pharmaceutical.
I mean, so it is a pharmaceutical. It's sold as a pharmaceutical.
It has a black box warning when they use it in IVs in hospitals and they use it as a, as an oral, it has a black box warning, which is the highest warning that the FDA gives. So, and then people put a small concentration of it into a dropper bottle and they think it's fine.
Well, it's an antidepressant. It is literally antidepressant.
It's an antipsychotic compound and it's a stimulant. So imagine if people were taking something that's an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, and a stimulant, they might feel good, right? But it's accumulating in their system.
This is the thing that people don't understand. They'll say, well, it's not toxic short-term, but we go, but it's accumulating over time.
Right. You know, I can joke that like somebody might, you shoot, you shoot somebody with a 22 bullet, right? It doesn't kill them.
But if you you start accumulating 22 shots in you at some point you're going to go down right so it's just accumulating damage it's accumulating toxicity and this is where people they just don't get it because pharmaceutical industry does short-term studies they don't do long-term studies and there is no long-term data on taking this this this methylene blue low dose. Wow.
And there's another guy actually posted a thread on Twitter, um, by Tuluminati, 888. And he was showing, he, he has been in this industry for a long time.
They investigated methylene blue like 10 years ago as a nootropic, as a brain nutrient, right? They ditched it because there was too many side effects. They saw it come on slowly.
So you have all these people saying, I don't have problems yet. And I'm going, that's that key word yet.
It's like the COVID vaccine. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's so you just don't, I mean, the whole thing is, is a lot of people who are taking it are into the natural, you know, they're into the RFK is taking it, which is weird.
Yeah. the whole idea of natural health and then all of a sudden they glom onto a pharmaceutical drug and the guy who created it or the guy who really started to work on it he invented chemotherapy which we all know is so healthy wow and the thing he was working on before methylene blue was an arsenic compound oh my gosh so it's like birds of a feather kind of flock together.
I don't want to be part of that. Nah.
So I just think it's going to end really badly. And if people are wondering right now, they go, well, what do I, I'm already on it.
I don't want to take it anymore. Now that I heard this, what do I do? Well, it's really just stop it.
Is there any addiction to it or? Well, I mean, stimulants are very addictive. Yeah.
Right. So, so they might have a little, yeah little yeah actually um in that thread to luminati did talk about a withdrawal process it could it could be very simple it could be rough he said it was totally different dude when i was on xanax that was the worst withdrawal ever uh holy crap yeah that wasn't fun at all these i mean they they are the drugs are just what what they're doing actually as i in my thread, methylene blue slows down more detox processes than anything I've ever seen.
Damn. The weird thing is, I mean, that's what pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical industry, they give you kind of a toxin that has an effect.
A lot of times it's slowing down your detox. Now, I don't know that we have time to go over this all today, but by slowing down your detox short-term, you can feel better.
That's what they do. They cover, they suppress symptoms.
Well, what if the mechanism suppressing symptoms is actually just slowing detox? And then when, so you're slowing detox that whole time. Does that mean you're not exposed to toxins? You're still being exposed to toxins.
So you're accumulating them even more. So think about this.
When you stop that med, when you stop the methylene blue, your detox systems come back online and now you have extra stored toxicity in you. And then you start, that starts leaking out into your system and then you feel bad and it takes a while for your system to kind of catch up.
So this, it's a different, it's a different paradigm of, you know, getting people better. And why do, why do we feel better when we take short-term these toxic things? And why do we want to get rid of them long-term so we can function well without them? Yeah.
Yeah. Farmer's sneaky with it, man.
They've even infiltrated the supplement industry too. Yeah.
They own a lot of those companies. Well, most of the meds these days, I mean, you wonder how much money they put into herbal research.
There's tons of herbal research. You go and you look, well, who's funding that? The pharmaceutical industry, because they get like 70% of their compounds are plant compounds that they just tweak.
Really? So then you start going, wait, if a pharmaceutical medicine is just a herbal compound tweaked. Are those herbal compounds not good for us either?

Or are they just weaker?

So they're weaker with less side effects.

Pharma just takes them and then they turn them into stronger with more side effects.

Yeah.

So, I mean, nobody has an herb deficiency.

I talk about this all the time.

A lot of herbs are just suppressing symptoms too.

Because how do you know they're suppressing symptoms?

You stop taking it and the problem comes back.

That means you didn't fix it. Yeah.
You get to the root cause with what you do. That is what we're trying to do.
Yeah. Yeah.
A lot of people don't. No.
Well, they don't know what the root cause is. It's really just a, it's a philosophical foundation kind of thing.
It's like, I wanted to, when I started doing all of this, I believed that there was some common thread to chronic disease. A lot of people want it to be one thing like, you know, there's like the candida thing or there's the heavy metals thing or there's the parasites thing.
And everybody wants it to be one thing. Now, can it be all of these things together? But what makes one person grow candida better than another? Why do only some people really have parasites and other people don't, even in the same household? What is going on? Why does one person grow things better than another? Well, how would you grow things better in a garden? Well, you've got to make the soil and everything suitable.

So one person's soil is more suitable to grow these nasty things which tends to mean they're more toxic so when we start to figure out like concepts that i'm working on like cancer is toxicity storage tissue cancer is not our body like going rogue and these cells are just going rogue and you know making more of themselves it's that our ability to store this stuff has run out and the body is actually like you know how i was saying the storage unit you buy a storage unit to put your stuff in the body is creating storage units for toxicity and we have to get rid of the toxicity to fix it. an example you know i was talking about aldh as a detox enzyme okay cancer tissue has tons of aldh really yeah and what does modern medicine want to do they want to shut that down that's actually one of their anti-cancer like oncology approaches they want to to shut down the detox of cancer because they say that helps.
We all know what direction like oncology medicine tends to make things go. It goes bad.
They kill the good cells too. Well, they're already, these people are already toxic.
And then if you can't just slow down the ALDH in the cancer cells, it's going to slow it down all over the body. And it's a long story short.
You can make things look better for a while. Like when people say, oh, I did chemotherapy and my cancers went away or it shrunk.
Well, how much longer do you have until they all show up again? That's what always happens too. And it's worse, right? And then they got to give you a stronger chemo.
So they got to shut down your detox stronger and they just keep doing it until all of a sudden the toxin overwhelms the person. Yeah that's but that's what we're talking about here a lot of people are doing that with supplements or other things they're just doing it on a daily basis methylene blue they just shut down their detox they feel better for a while and then eventually the problem is going to pop its head through because it just it's like a a damn breaking you just can't store the toxicity yeah, that's concerning, man.
Cause a lot of people rely on supplements and they don't even know what they're taking. Oh yeah.
I mean, we do, we do some supplements. I mean, I, I've, I have a supplement line, but we're, we're trying to do stuff like simple things like zinc, like you need zinc.
The food doesn't have the zinc and it's supposed to have anymore. Like, so we're just working on like minerals and the most basic things that, you know, we're trying to do a lot of times they're single ingredients because we want people to know, like you're, you're an experiment of one.
I'm an experiment of one. We might try the same zinc pill and it might not be enough for me, but you might not feel good on a certain dose.
So you take less. Yeah.
That's just, that's just individuality. Like when I see people on the internet, they're like, everybody needs to take this many milligrams of this every day.
And I'm like, that's not how this works at all. So we're respecting each person so they can figure things out.
The more toxic people are at the start of doing this kind of work, the slower they got to go. Oftentimes, or some people can go faster and maybe get through it sooner.
But the whole idea is we're trying to improve people's health while we're not, you know, a lot of people, when they try to detox, they know they're going to suffer. Yeah.
Or we're trying not to ruin their quality of life as much as possible. We're trying to help them get better while they're enjoying life, or at least it's getting better along the way.
They're not making themselves suffer. I remember when I got blood work last year, my vitamin D was low.
I think I sent you my blood work too. And the guy was like, take 10,000 IU of vitamin D3.
I thought I was going to die. I'm not even kidding.
Tell me more. So I literally took, it was five pills, each one at 2000, took it.
I got chest tightness and I had to lay down for like hours. It was so uncomfortable.
Yep. Well, did I, did I tell you about, did you see about how vitamin D3 is sold as rat poison? No, I didn't see.
Okay. So yeah.
If you go and you look up the products called Terra D3, T-E-R-A-D number three and D-Con, D-Con, which is a pretty crazy name, right? That's rat poison. Mice poison, rat poison.
It's vitamin D3. You look at the active ingredient.
It is vitamin D3. It kills rodents by hypercalcemia, too much calcium in their blood, which then affects their coagulation and they bleed out internally.
Jeez. So what it does in humans, we were just bigger, right? So when we take a poison that would kill some people, again, people will say, well, dude, that's a dose that kills a mouse.
That's not going to kill a human. I'm like, well, no, that's not how they're, that's not how this is working.
This is accumulation. Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, right? So it accumulates.
now what it does and what you were probably experiencing is two things that vitamin d does

in the system one is it raises calcium calcium tends to be contractions tight chest right okay so you start feeling things are tighter it depletes potassium vitamin d depletes potassium well you start depleting potassium too much you're going to have just heart rhythm problems and all sorts of stuff yeah my heart was going wild so that's it that's it. That's exactly, you're just having an acute response and you stop taking it because, well, first of all, you listen to your body, right? You're like this.
I don't feel it. I only did it one day.
It was, no, that was enough for me. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I used to take a, one of my funny stories was I used to think I was being real smart.
Cause I was big on the vitamin D thing. Like I tend to be an early adopter.
Like I was, I was doing vitamin D for people 2013. Yeah.
I was even, I was, I was so into it. I was doing finger prick vitamin D tests in my office.
Like I wanted people to do it and get on it. I was taking, you know, 5,000 was kind of the dose back then.
Yeah. I was like, well, I'll do, I'll do one better.
I'll take 50,000 units one day a week. So I was doing on average 7,000 a day.
I was normally a very regular, I had normal bowel movements like two, three, four a day. I would not go for two whole days after I took it.
And then I remember a book I read, he said, if you take too much vitamin D, you can get constipated. I went, oh, there it is.
It took me like two weeks to figure it out. But I do a lot of hair analysis.
And one of the things on hair analysis, when you look at it is vitamin D will raise calcium and lower potassium. That's what it does.
You're going to see it. Okay.
High calcium with low potassium on a hair test is basically a hypothyroid pattern. What's a big symptom of hypothyroid? Constipation.
So we start seeing that all this stuff is matching up and we just don't have people take it. And then we do, people don't have a deficiency of vitamin D pills.
We talked about those things earlier. They have too much vitamin A, they have not enough zinc, they have not enough magnesium, they have not possibly not enough protein.
And then definitely they're not probably getting enough sunlight or UVB. Like I actually like for people who can't get sun, I like tanning beds or spurdy bulbs.
I mean, if you will, if you, if you need light, you need light. Okay.
Just because this is a very important thing. Just because we can live places where there's not light doesn't mean it's good for us so we need light that's why that's why we're not covered in hair yeah i just remember hearing all the fear-mongering about tanning beds causing cancer growing up well think about this if tanning beds were actually not bad for people or if they were good for people people could go in the winter time and get through their tanning bed.
They'd be in a better mood. They'd be healthier.
They enjoy life more. Is that going to do good things for the antidepressant industry? No, no.
So what are they? I mean, you have to realize they will pay for studies. That's interesting.
And also if people could get a tan without having to go outside, right? What's that going to do? The sunscreen industry, if you, if you could just go and do five minutes every so often and get a nice tan and you don't have to buy sunscreen because you don't know how long you're going to be outside and you don't want to burn, then, you know, both the antidepressant industry and the sunscreen industry,

those are pretty big industries, right?

So you start to see that,

well, the other thing is too,

you start to see that it all makes sense.

The more toxic somebody is with vitamin A,

the more their eyes will be sensitive to light.

So if people out there have sensitivity

to like blue light from computer screens

and all that stuff,

or they go outside

and they have to wear sunglasses,

or if they very quickly burn

when they go outside,

Thank you. have sensitivity to like blue light from computer screens and all that stuff, or, or they go outside and they have to wear sunglasses or if they very quickly burn when they go outside, those are vitamin A toxicity signs.
They're not the only ones, but those are very big signs. And as we get people better, they're able to go out in the sun so much longer.
And I have, I have IT guys who tell me they're like, I don't have problems with blue screen with the screens anymore. Wow.

So we see that these things, I have research showing that blue light will not cause damage to the body, the skin or the eyes if vitamin A is not present.

Wow.

That's a process.

So if we take the vitamin A out, the eyes stop getting hurt, the skin stops getting burned. And we have people getting better and enjoying life and going, I should be able to go out in the sun and now I can.
So it's pretty cool. What percentage of the percentage high in vitamin a this is a huge question because blood tests for vitamin a don't necessarily show how much is in the tissues an analogy i've used to is like, if somebody tried to estimate how many cars were in garages by how many cars are on the road.
So if they count, if all they could see was the cars on the road and they're going to say, well, there's probably X number of cars in the garages. They could be completely wrong because they're just trying to guesstimate.
We store vitamin A in the liver and in the body fat. Once it's out of the bloodstream, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going back and forth.
So blood tests over and over in the research, basically what I'm saying is over and over in the research, they say blood vitamin A is not an indicator of how much is in the tissues. Got it.
So I've had two people where they had deficient vitamin A on a blood test. They were deficient.
And we start doing the things to, they're on a low vitamin A diet and we start doing the things we do to detox them. And they both went actually high on vitamin A as they did it.
And they're not eating it. So where did it come from? The tissues.
The tissues. Wow.
So how how do you find out is that a hair test or urine there is actually no so if somebody comes to me and they have like high vitamin in the blood they're they're very toxic guaranteed okay if somebody comes to me and they have normal vitamin in the blood or low vitamin in the blood we just we don't know so we just treat it like it's there and then then people generally start getting better. Interesting.
Yeah, there is no, I mean, the only, the gold standard test for vitamin A toxicity in the body is a liver biopsy. They got to take a chunk of your liver out, right? Nobody wants to do that.
I mean, you could, you can get infections, you could get sepsis. You don't, you don't want to do that.
So we don't really have a great way of doing it. It's kind of just people trust a lot of people, like you mentioned, you had experience with Accutane.
Yeah. Seven months.
Yeah. Or we have a lot of people like myself where I took vitamin A supplements.
I did cod liver oil. I did, did the liver thing.
I did dairy. I did supplements.
It was, it was, I was all over the place and my blood vitamin A came back in the normal range. And when I started doing this, I just started slowly getting better.
And I mean, I fixed my, I had terrible chronic insomnia. I was developing, my dad died of prostate cancer.
Well, he really died of the chemo. Yeah.
But he, I was getting prostate issues mid twenties. Damn, that's young.
And I had this back pain that started around the time I took ketoconazole, which is a med that slows detox. And in men, it's actually been shown to reduce testosterone.
That's not good. Yeah.
So I did that as a teenager. That's the worst time to do it.
Right. And I fixed all those issues as I, oh, and my psoriasis, I fixed psoriasis.
So I just watched these things slowly go away. And then I was like, this, what we're doing.
Like, I'm going to become the expert in this. But yeah, Accutane is a form.
This is very important for people to know. Accutane, 13-cis-retinoic acid is the technical term.
It is found in normal people who just eat vitamin A. It's found in your blood.
So if people who are eating vitamin A,

consuming vitamin A,

which you can't avoid completely,

but you're going to find

some of the accutane molecule in your blood,

you're going to find some of the retin-A molecule

in your blood.

The easiest way for me to explain

how vitamin A is a toxin is

retin-A is called all transretinoic acid.

It is also the same thing as tretinoin or the big thing here is a yellow it's called a yellow peel or a chemical peel so chemical peels right they're going to put something on somebody's face it's going to dissolve the upper layers of cells like does literally dissolve the upper layers of cells and then new skin comes up underneath it okay imagine if you have those compounds floating through your bloodstream or going through your gut. You've heard of leaky gut, right? You think chemically peeling your gut could cause leaky gut, right? So once you start to understand it's a chemical peel, and in a paper, a dermatologist called it, it induces controlled wounds to the skin.
That's what they're trying to do with a chemical peel. Okay, so what about uncontrolled inside your body? And then we wonder why everybody's inflamed.
And we have all these things where we're talking about leaky cells and leaky gut. When I was on Accutane, I had to get a monthly blood test to make sure I wasn't dying.
And it was the worst I've ever felt. Like constipated emotion yeah it was destroying me i would never do it again never recommend it and now what i know now all the acne was diet related i wouldn't what was it it was uh well i have the motherfucker gene break i was eating a lot of dairy and bread and stuff so i think it was the carbs well so it's probably not carb what dairy right okay so the big things that we do to help acne i have a whole live stream on acne but vitamin a dairy's full of vitamin a they add well they add vitamin a and vitamin d to regular dairy and then a zinc deficiency is a big part of it and then gluten well the issue with modern gluten is a lot of it's the glyphosate that's in it.
And what if I were to tell you that glyphosate, the weed killer actually slows your vitamin A detox. So you take out the dairy, you're taking out a lot of vitamin A and vitamin D and excessive calcium.
And then you take out the gluten, you're taking out glyphosate, which slows your vitamin A detox. And then you see, so that can be enough for you like back when you were younger that could be enough and you know obviously you didn't get along with the accutane no so so this is what we do like um chocolate is actually legit like a thing that can aggravate acne in people really like the things where we see the the urban legends of things that worsen acne like i could tell you each one of those things, how they slow detox and why they would make acne worse.
So we usually, we see very good results with acne pretty quick and nobody has to take Accutane and ruin their life. No doctor or dermatologist I went to talked about diet.
That was the crazy part. It was all like a pill.
I've had people, the thing where people start to really question modern medicine is when i have people they go to gastroenterologists right gut doctors and the gut doctors will legitimately tell them that what you eat has nothing to do with your gut problem what yeah and i always tell them i'm like if you if you go to a dermatologist right and you have a rash on your skin your skin, first thing they're going to ask you is, what are you washing your clothes with? What are you putting on your skin? What are you doing? Sorry. What are you doing to cause this? What are you applying to your skin? Why are gastroenterologists not asking people, what are you applying to your gut? Because that's probably causing it.
Yeah. I had a gastroenterologist send his wife to me.
No way. gut problems that was that was a funny that's ironic yeah yeah so and it was diet related it was it was it well it was back then i wasn't doing this back then okay but we did we did help her what the one of the cool things we have now is we actually have multiple people who have told us that they have resolved their celiac disease right right? So that's an auto immune condition to gluten.
I had never heard anybody say that people could get better from that until people I was working with were saying it's getting better. And then they started saying it's gone.
Damn. So I was, you know, there, one of the things, well, one of the things we talk about it a, I talk about toxic bile paradigm, which is my approach to health, but there's a difference in the people who have celiac disease actually dump more bile, which is part of their, part of the root cause of the problem.
They dump more bile when they eat gluten than normal people. And so we start to find mechanisms of this.

That was kind of a taster of toxic bile paradigm.

I don't think we have time to go over that today, but that's what we're working on.

We're working on toxic bile. We're working on toxicities.
We're working on deficiencies.

Yeah. Yeah.
Because you hear a lot of people with like a gluten sensitivity or dairy sensitivity and it sounds like it ties to this.

Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, the thing about gluten is what we want is, I mean, people, we get people so they can eat it again.

Of course, we want them to get organic stuff. We want them to get quality stuff.
But in the meantime, kind of like, you know, if somebody breaks their leg, right, they need to be in a cast and they need to not do stuff on. So they're healing their leg.
Okay, so if we're healing an autoimmune condition, they may need time where they have to be away from things. But then eventually we can it back in so it'd be it's kind of a phase thing we had one woman she could not eat out at restaurants because if there was any gluten on like the fork that wasn't washed off she'd be wrecked for three days holy crap she wouldn't eat from convenience stores she wouldn't eat from restaurants she just she was you know kind of in a way a shut in.
But now she's, she's actually to the point now where she wants, she was going to try it. Like actually try eating some gluten instead of just like dust on a fork.
That's nuts. So it's, it's really cool.
Yeah. Where are you out on the seed oil debate? Cause I know that's a hot one.
Seed oils. Oh, well this, this kind of gets into all the stuff about detox that we do now.
what color are most seed oils? Yellow. What color is vitamin A? Is it yellow? Yeah.
So we start going, okay, so seed oils do have a lot of vitamin A. We absorb fat-soluble toxins via fat.
So seed oil, right? Vitamin A in oil, that's the best way to absorb it. Then we get into the PUFA thing, right? The polyunsaturated fatty acids.
One of the big things, we talked about aldehyde dehydrogenase, right? Aldehyde dehydrogenase is a very important detox enzyme that detoxes aldehydes. Aldehydes are toxic.
One of the forms of vitamin A is retinaldehyde. Nobody talks about it, but we know that aldehydes are toxic and then people are going to try to say that an aldehyde is a vitamin.
Start going, that doesn't make any sense. So aldehydes, one of the things that PUFAs turn into that people don't tend to talk about much is it turns into malondialdehyde and 4-hydroxynonanaldehyde.
These are both really toxic and they often use, they measure much, you know, inflammation of the things are going on in the body for in a short way. So when you're putting in PUFAs, well, when you're putting in seed oils, you're putting in vitamin A, you're putting in PUFAs, the PUFAs turn to aldehydes and then actually malandaldehyde slows down ALDH.
So the very toxin that's coming in is slowing down detox. One of the crazy things I tell people is that when the more toxic you become, the slower your detox goes, right? People understand that if you drive a car a long time, you don't clean it and maintain it and stuff like that.
It's going to be less efficient. Well, same thing with your body.
The more toxic your body becomes, the slower the detox runs.

Yeah.

And then people are often taking things to slow their detox.

They don't realize it,

but that's what they're doing to get,

to feel a little better.

And they're slowing it all down.

And then there are cumulatory more toxin.

And they wonder why,

when I can't get off this anymore,

or they get like basically the equivalent of withdrawals,

the symptoms come back.

Yeah.

And I'm like,

well,

I'm stuck on it.

But then oftentimes people who get really far along, they get to the point where they get symptoms when they take it and symptoms when they don't jeez and then they don't know what to do that's scary yeah it's it's rough we we help people get out of that but sometimes it just it just sucks for a while yeah it sounds awful yeah there's nothing you do helps at that point no no we oh i mean we can we can do things like give them the nutrients that they need and then we also have with their diet we have them not put in things that are making it worse and then we can we we help people get off thyroid hormone like a lot of people get on thyroid hormone and they're told you're going to be on this for the rest of your life jeez and we get people's health to the point where they often they're just like i don't don't think I need this anymore. Or they start getting, they're on thyroid hormone and they start getting hyperthyroid symptoms too much, right? Or they go to their doctor and their doctor's like, your thyroid tests are too high.
And then I talk to them and we talk about how they might lower their dose. And then we oftentimes over, as they work with me long enough,

they often get off the thyroid hormone,

which is kind of unheard of.

Yeah.

And a lot of hormone issues right now,

right?

With testosterone, especially.

They get you on it.

They expect you to be on it forever.

Yeah.

Right.

Because most of conventional medicine

and even a lot of alternative medicine

is like once you're broken,

you're broken.

There's no way to fix you.

We can just kind of

make your symptoms better.

You know, if your testosterone is low, we just give you testosterone. It's not coming back.
Well, we can get it back. Yeah.
Yeah. That's what we're doing.
That's scary to be on TRT the rest of your life. It is.
And the liver doesn't really like TRT. Oh, really? Well, I mean, your liver has to process everything that comes in.
in so think about this my whole basis to health is that the liver rules all your health because that's your detox that's your detox so anything that your liver is not detoxing it's affecting everything else negatively so as the liver slows down we like people don't people think they have to have uh like live their liver enzymes have to look bad on a test or any of that stuff. It just, you don't have to have obvious liver problems.
Like, if somebody has, like, Grant had kidney problems. And he had jaundice, which is a liver problem.
And he had skin problems. He took out the vitamin A and he had some, he had enough protein.
He had enough soluble fiber that helps you detox. And he had enough, he had enough calories and his body fixed his liver.
It fixed his kidneys and it fixed his skin. And I'm saying all, where do we store vitamin A? The liver.
So as his liver cleaned out the vitamin A, it fixed the other problems. So when we're, the liver just rules everything.
So when we're fixing that that then we get to the point where your body can fix the problems that's that's the thread the thread that i was looking for was the liver and the bile that the liver makes which if it's leaking into your system so this is an important thing i'll give you the quick rundown of toxic bile paradigm your liver, right? Your liver takes the toxins that come to it and it concentrates them into bile. Therefore, how does your liver get rid of toxins into the bile? Okay.
The bile is the most toxic fluid by definition in your body. You don't want that hanging around, right? Well, you remember the chemical peel thing? Yeah.
So your body gets rid of vitamin a and retinoic acid into the bile so then the bile becomes a chemical peel the bile can then eat holes in the liver cells that make it it can eat holes in the tiny little bile ducts in the liver it can eat holes in the big bile ducts it can eat holes in the gut the leaky gut if it goes back up into your stomach what do you think stomach ulcers are it's eating holes in your stomach it's not the stomach acid that does that it's the bile up into your stomach, what do you think stomach ulcers are? It's eating holes in your stomach. It's not the stomach acid that does that.
It's the bile. So, and your stomach can actually absorb bile directly.
And all those other leaks means that that toxic bile, the most toxic fluid in your entire body is leaking into your bloodstream. You're self-poisoning.
And so how do, why are we having such good results with all these different conditions? We use the same concepts and principles just tweaked for the person for pretty much everything. Because it's all related to the liver and the toxic bile.
So as we get the bile less toxic, it eats fewer holes, the body can fix the leaks, and then the bile, more of it is going out through your poop, which is what we want and that's that's it like that's that's the thread it's really three things we we um reduce the reduce or minimize or eliminate toxins coming in we facilitate the removal of toxins that are already stored and then we give the body the nutrients that it needs to protect itself into detox that's it that's the whole thing because the body when it's to heal itself, right? Yes. That's the whole difference with pharma and you.
That's the part we have to believe in. We have to believe a couple of things.
One, that the body can heal itself, and it does, if it's given the right environment. Two, is that the body is wise and that at any given moment, it is doing the best it can with oftentimes the junk that's being thrown at it and so we have to assume that we're not trying to shut down the body's responses we're listening to the body that is saying here's a signal that something's wrong and we're just going to try to reduce the load on it it's like a lot of people at work if you got too much work you're all stressed out you gotta feel good if all of a sudden if you can catch up on your work well Let's say you talk to your boss and you say, stop giving me so much work.
I're all stressed out. You're going to feel good.
If all of a sudden, if you can catch up on your work, well, let's say, let's say you talk to your boss and you say, stop giving me so much work. I got to catch up.
Let's say you're, so this is like less toxins in, right? Stop putting toxins in. You catch up on the work that you have and then you can clean up your office space.
You can, you can do more stuff. You're happier at home.
Like your whole life gets better because you're not not overloaded so the most important thing of all of this is less toxins in because a toxin that you don't take into your body you don't have to detox it doesn't hurt you so a lot of it is just avoiding it at the start and then you're giving your body space to clean up yeah yeah love that dr darrett where can people find you anything else you want to close off with no i mean i'm i'm i'm on the internet if people are looking for me like looking for nutrition detective is a great way to find me nutrition detective.com is where if people wanted to work with me or my other health care facilitators we do we do hair testing and blood testing and consults and we we actually give people six months of included follow-up in a package because this is this is not an easy route to follow. And so that's I insist on giving people help.
It's not just like, here's your consult. See you later.
And then I'm on Twitter at Nutri Detect. That's where I do a lot of posting.
And YouTube is probably one of my one of my big haunts. I do a weekly live stream.

And yeah, people really like that.

I go deep into topics.

It's usually two or three hours.

So yeah, I talk a lot.

You go hard.

I love it.

Yeah, but those are the main places to find me.

Thanks for condensing for this episode.

Absolutely.

Check them out, guys.

I'll see you next time.