#131 - Dr Garrett Smith - Uncovering Vitamin A Toxicity: The Hidden Dangers and Path to Detox

Discover the hidden dangers of vitamin A toxicity in this eye-opening episode with the "Nutrition Detective" himself, Dr. Smith. From his early days as a bodybuilding enthusiast to his transformation into a nutrition expert, Dr. Smith reveals how his personal experiences with artificial sweeteners and milk sparked his deep dive into nutrition science. Learn about the complexities of vitamin A in its various forms—retinol and retinaldehyde— and understand its far-reaching implications for mental health and overall well-being.

Uncover the severe risks of excessive vitamin A intake, particularly its devastating effects during pregnancy and on fertility. Dr. Smith highlights alarming research, including historical liver biopsy studies, and discusses the potent dangers of Accutane. We also explore how glyphosate (Roundup) exacerbates vitamin A toxicity by hindering the liver's ability to detoxify harmful retinoic acids. We'll examine common dietary sources of vitamin A that could be putting you at risk, like brightly colored fruits and vegetables, egg yolks, dairy, and organ meats.

Finally, gain practical insights into detoxing your body naturally. Learn how to reduce your toxic load by eliminating high-vitamin A foods and optimizing your body's detox processes. Dr. Smith shares actionable steps, including the importance of soluble fiber for gut health and the risks of vitamin D supplements. Discover safer, holistic approaches to maintain your health, such as the Love Your Liver program. This episode is packed with valuable knowledge that could transform your approach to nutrition and wellness.

Transcript

Dr Garrett Smith: 0:00

So there is, by definition and I have other liver biopsy studies I have studies from Africa in the 1950s showing 50% of the people there had vitamin A toxicity in their liver 50%. So this is a real problem and people aren't. They don't know about it and then they're even doing things like for their health, they think, where they're eating more of these foods and they're building it up even faster.

Asekho Toto: 0:29

So this is Mental Metals, hosted by Asako Toto. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of mental meters. I'm your host, a second daughter, and before we dive into today's incredible conversation, I have a small favor to ask If you enjoy what you hear today, please take a moment to rate and review our podcast on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen. Your feedback not only helps us improve, but also helps others discover the available insights we share every week, and if you find today's episode particular, inspiring or insightful, don't forget to share it with your friends, family or anyone you think could benefit from it. Thank you for your support. It truly means the world to us.

Asekho Toto: 1:38

Now let's back. Let's get back into our conversation also. I just want to say thank you so much for explaining my message of sport, marriage and being able to have this conversation with me, and something that I realized is the fact that at first, I didn't realize how much it is important when it comes to nutrition and how it actually impacts your mental well-being and mental health in general. So to our conversation. It's something that I feel like, in a way, I'm quite fascinated in terms of your title the nutrition detective. It's something that actually grabbed my attention in a way, and probably through our conversation, we'll be able to have a conversation that will not only benefit me alone, but also the audience that will be listening to this particular episode.

Asekho Toto: 2:30

So, dr Smith, I would like to welcome you to my internet and thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Reading through your story and I saw had you were quite interested in nutrition at the age of 11, and that's quite fascinating in terms of that, in being that young and being able to being able to be to be interested in nutrition. Can you take us through that? What actually piqued your interest in terms of being so interested in nutrition?

Dr Garrett Smith: 3:06

Well, at first it started with exercise. It was actually I started. I started working out with some dumbbells at 11 and my dad got me a bodybuilding book and so I was really interested in the bodybuilding stuff and all that. And once you get into weight training and all that, then nutrition comes around and then we start working on other things. And I actually had as a kid I got into supplements early and I was trying to figure.

Dr Garrett Smith: 3:32

I had these really bad migraine. They were very short, very intense, like migraine-ish type headaches and I couldn't figure out what they were. And I went to this. My family, we took a trip to Canada and I was. There was a supplement store there and they sold a magazine, a free, a free magazine out front and I looked in it and they talked about NutraSweet or Aspartame and the title of it was toxic sweetener and I read the article and I I it's talked in there about headaches from it and I went wait, I'm using equal like NutraSweet on my cereal. I'm making little fake. I made like fake sodas out of it with like soda water and some equal and some lemon juice. I was making like homemade sodas and stuff. I thought I was being all healthy and they talked about headaches. And I took it out of my diet after that and immediately the headaches just went away. So that was there, was that.

Dr Garrett Smith: 4:23

And there was the time when I was so. That was there, was that. And then there was the time when I was a kid, when I was, I was about halfway drinking through drinking a glass of milk and I realized that it was giving me a ton of phlegm. And I was about halfway through the glass of milk and I'd be, I'd feel the phlegm starting in my in my throat and in my sinuses and I went this is weird, this is this is not cool, because I, I, you know, allergies are a big, we're a big thing in my family. We, a lot of us, had seasonal allergies and all that stuff and I went this is not a good sign. I could, I could reduce this, so I think I kind of got off milk several years after that and so it was just. It was noticing that things I put in my body changed how I felt. That was the big thing.

Asekho Toto: 5:07

Actually, you know, it laid a path to what you are today in terms of being a nutrition detective, and it's quite, it's quite a fascinating thing. And also, and to the conversation that we're about to embark on and to the conversation that we are about to embark on Also, I would like to mention that I would like to actually dive more into also vitamin A toxicity and toxification and also the toxic bio theory. So I'm interested in that and, for someone that isn't aware of this conversation, and also as much as I try to actually research on it, as much as the information online can get you so far, but from yourself, a professional on this field, what is a vitamin A toxicity?

Dr Garrett Smith: 6:02

Well, what is it? Okay, so vitamin, what we call vitamin A, it was how we start. We can kind of start with this funny little joke about it. Well, when is the time when we're learning something, or when we're figuring something out? When do we make the biggest mistakes? When we first start learning about it. Right, when we're first figuring it out. That's when we make the biggest mistakes. And that vitamin a was named a because it was the very first vitamin. So it, uh, it's.

Dr Garrett Smith: 6:35

Vitamin a is an alcohol. Retinol is an alcohol. Um, it breaks down into an aldehyde and it breaks down into an acid. There's retinol, there's retinaldehyde and there's retinoic acid. Nobody tends to think of alcohols and aldehydes as being good for us. And the acid form, the retinoic acid, is said to be the part that we need as the active form of vitamin A. That's what we supposedly need. That's what the essential thing is. It's not retinol, it's the retinoic acid that is made from it.

Dr Garrett Smith: 7:05

Well, since we're here talking, you know, talking about mental health and these other topics, I mean there's black box warnings, as in the strongest warning a pharmaceutical company can give about isotretinoin, which is accutane and suicide risk. So if we have a compound, and so the thing that's important for people to understand is they'll be like oh no, well, that's a pharmaceutical. No, accutane, also known as 13-cis-retinoic acid, is the exact same compound, 13-cis-retinoic acid, that your body turns some of the vitamin A you eat into. So if you're eating vitamin A, you are essentially making Accutane in your body, a drug that carries a suicide risk warning. So we start to get into there. Then lots of people have talked about depression and anxiety and all these things with Accutane. Those are like the beginnings of where it could lead. Right, there's always warning signs. There's these things, don't? You don't just have suicide. You know behaviors or suicide thoughts just come out of nowhere. There's usually depression that starts and anxiety and all these things that that lead up to it. So vitamin A toxicity is here's the hard thing for a lot of people to understand. Lot of people to understand.

Dr Garrett Smith: 8:30

You, we, you me, everybody we were handed down the toxicities and deficiencies from generations beforehand. We do not. The idea of any of us starting with a clean slate of any sort is absolute nonsense. We we inherited toxicities from our mother and whatever DNA damage potentially came from our father and his sperm. So we inherit these things and then they can build up. And then the same thing with deficiencies. If your parents didn't have enough of a certain nutrient, especially your mother during the time she carried you, she can't give you that, you're not starting with it. And then the very same diet that your family eats that might've caused them to become toxic or deficient. You learned how to eat like that. So not only are you inheriting these problems from generations before, but the things that we learned from our parents compound them and continue them going. So it's kind of like nature and nurture, it's both.

Dr Garrett Smith: 9:30

And so then we see these problems like vitamin A toxicity, as vitamin A has become kind of more of a health foodie type thing and it's always been known that fat soluble vitamins. So the fat soluble vitamins are vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E and vitamin K or a deck as I remember them, as anyway these are the ones that can accumulate and cause problems. This is what everybody knows. They're the easiest ones to accumulate. Other other B vitamins can accumulate B6 toxicity. Go look that one up. B6 can accumulate in your nerves and cause neuropathy. It's also an alcohol and an aldehyde. So these things that can get stored can then over time so somebody might think I'm not doing a lot of it every day. The problem is is if you're doing more than you can get rid of, if you're taking in more than you're clearing out, you're accumulating it, you're building it up and if you build up enough of it you'll have problems.

Dr Garrett Smith: 10:28

There was a paper done I think it was 20, I don't remember, maybe 2020, where they did biopsies or they did necropsies of livers. So they looked at the liver tissue after people had died. So they looked at the liver tissue after people had died. They analyzed it and of the 27 people they looked at US people, nine of them had diagnosable vitamin A toxicity. So that's a third. That's 33% of the cadavers, the dead people that they looked at in their liver. A full third of them had diagnosable vitamin A toxicity. That's an epidemic level, but the WHO said that an epidemic level of something is 20% or higher. So there is, by definition and I have other liver biopsy studies I have studies from Africa in the 1950s showing 50% of the people there had vitamin A toxicity in their liver 50%. So this is a real problem and people aren't. They don't know about it and then they're even doing things like for their health, they think where they're eating more of these foods and they're building it up even faster. So it's it's.

Dr Garrett Smith: 11:45

It can happen from supplements. People try to say it only happens from supplements. It can absolutely happen from food. I've got that documented everywhere. We've got a bunch of people.

Dr Garrett Smith: 11:52

Really, where we're at with this is I decided to go into this after reading the work of Grant Jenner and Anthony Mawson and I incorporated this into my practice and as I've avoided or I should say the words I use are reduced, minimized, avoided Like sometimes you can't avoid something, you can just minimize it or reduce it, because vitamin A is in many foods. It's a plant defense toxin. It's not a vitamin. It's not good for us, it's for the plants to defend themselves. So as we just we try to reduce our intake, we try to minimize our intake and if we can avoid it like avoiding taking supplements with vitamin A in it then we avoid it and what we see in myself and others is people are healing what they thought were incurable conditions. So I even tell people.

Dr Garrett Smith: 12:46

People say, well, how do you know how toxic I am? Because the blood test for vitamin A does not necessarily show what's in the liver. You can have somebody with. I've got there's case studies of this. People had very low vitamin A, they had deficiency of vitamin A technically in their blood and their liver was absolutely overflowing with vitamin a absolutely overflowing so so the blood test doesn't tell us. The blood test could look exactly wrong. So what we do is we just assume people have this problem living in the modern world and if they reduce their toxin intake, their their body does detox it and then they slowly get better over time. And this is what we see. Of course, people out there doing it on their own, people can make mistakes, doing all sorts of things, people can screw up all sorts of things.

Asekho Toto: 13:39

But yeah, the general gist of it that we do is a very simple diet and we like to see people get better from it, and that's what we're seeing actually, you just came up with the information that I didn't know before, in a way, because I'm thinking in terms of how people are not aware of vitamin A, toxicity and something. Also. I have said that I don't know it because I believe that there is a rise of vitamins when it comes to supplements. People are how can I put this? People are so obsessed about vitamins and at some point that one can come across vitamin a, vitamin a to city and not realize that it's bad for the, for their health and what, in terms of just just to be, in terms of just one final, that we are still on the same page.

Asekho Toto: 14:43

Where does vitamin E come from? I understand that you mentioned that it can come from generation, to your past, your parents, your grandparents, your ancestors. So, in terms of, let's say, my grandparents were actually healthy, so I don't come up with from, I don't hear it from them. So where do I? How do I get it?

Dr Garrett Smith: 15:10

Where do you get it? Okay, so let me go over the signs for people who you know. If they're wondering how could they have known, or why did they not know, or why were they not told? Okay, some of the biggest things. So of the supplements.

Dr Garrett Smith: 15:26

When the media decides to talk badly about supplements, they always use three specific examples Beta carotene, vitamin A as retinol or retinyl esters typically retinol, retinyl palmitate and vitamin E. Beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E. Those are the three major supplements that have shown bad results, like people got sicker or died earlier in a lot of big trials with those. Well, beta carotene is plant vitamin A. This is where nearly all of the vitamin A that what we call animal vitamin A that's in us comes from. Either cows eat beta carotene and they turn it into retinol for us, or we eat beta carotene and we turn it into retinol, and people like to say that we can't do that. Oh, that's just, they're just, they just don't know what they're talking about. We can absolutely do it. So, though, two of. And then vitamin E, as I mentioned earlier, is anothersoluble vitamin that gets stored in the fat tissues and can build up and become toxic over time. So the three supplements that they talk about that are bad are either fat-soluble vitamins they're all fat-soluble, two of them are vitamin A and one of them is vitamin E. So it was taught a very long time ago that the fat-soluble vitamins are the ones you have to watch out for, because we store them in a bad way, like they can build up and become toxic. So there's that Now.

Dr Garrett Smith: 16:56

The other thing that a lot of people don't know is that, of all the things women are supposed to not overdo during pregnancy, the biggest one is vitamin A, because too much vitamin A in a woman's pregnancy will cause birth defects. This is well known. It will cause spontaneous abortions, you know miscarriages. It will cause all sorts of nasty things. If something's bad for a fetus, it's bad for a normal person too. This is just something we should understand. We like to think, oh, oh, no, it's just the babies that have problems with it. Like alcohol. Like when they say, oh, pregnant women shouldn't drink alcohol. Well, retinol is an alcohol, ethanol is an alcohol. We know. Too much alcohol drinking during pregnancy will cause birth defects. We know too much vitamin a during pregnancy will cause birth defects.

Dr Garrett Smith: 17:45

There's these patterns that we see and and then when we get into, um, accutane, accutane destroys people. Accutane is the active one of the active forms of vitamin A and if people go and look at the side effects of Accutane they'll understand that it's, it's super toxic, like it's, it's destroying the fertility of young people that are put on it, absolutely destroying it. So then the mistake that people make is they will say well, it's destroying the fertility of young people that are put on it, absolutely destroying it. So then the mistake that people make is they will say well, that's, you're talking about supplements and synthetic stuff. The research there is no research to show that synthetic vitamin A causes different effects than natural vitamin. Actually, I have research showing that when the same forms of natural vitamin A and synthetic vitamin A are given, they cause exactly the same toxicity side effects. So we have all of these and we know that. And then people were taught you know, maybe I don't know if you remember in school, but they would say well, polar bear liver has so much vitamin A in it, if you eat it it could kill you. Well, that's natural vitamin A. So then the people who say that natural vitamin A is fine and synthetic is the bad stuff. Well, that was just proven wrong. So there's all these signs that were around, but what happened was the biggest change.

Dr Garrett Smith: 19:01

I think that happened in vitamin A toxicity was the introduction of glyphosate, or Roundup, in the 1970s, late 1970s. What glyphosate does? The herbicide you know they spray on crops. What this does is it slows down a particular pathway in your liver that turned. There are tons of different forms of retinoic acid with things bound to it and different. You know configurations and stuff like that. What glyphosate does is it. It's it makes your body less able to convert more damaging forms of retinoic acids to less damaging forms. So you keep the more damaging forms around in your system longer and they cause you bigger problems. So that's where glyphosate came in and that's that's where actually I have research in in the early eighties where doctors were saying like a kid was taking a vitamin A supplement and it caused them all sorts of problems, and the doctor, the, the, the doctors in that case study said this dose of vitamin A should not have caused problems.

Dr Garrett Smith: 20:08

But it did. And this this is several years after glyphosate. I would bet that that kid was out there spraying weeds in his yard with with roundup and he got poisoned with it. I've had people come to me poisoned with glyphosate before and they do better on a low vitamin A diet. That is the glyphosate's bad enough, but the vitamin A that it, the problem that it causes, is bigger. So now that we covered, like there is evidence, there is reason to believe that we knew about these things and there was warnings from scientists back in like the 70s and 80s saying a vitamin A epidemic, a vitamin A toxicity epidemic, is coming. They actually warned of that.

Dr Garrett Smith: 20:48

So then we get into where does the vitamin A come from? How would people get toxic? Okay, so I can go into the highest vitamin A foods that cause the biggest problems Normally. So there's like plant vitamin A, which is carotenoids. This is where all quote unquote vitamin A starts from Animal plant. Whatever the colors of high vitamin A, plant foods are generally yellow, the part that you eat, okay, yellow, orange, red, dark green. So what are people encouraged to eat a lot of these days? Right, eat your brightly colored fruits and vegetables, so like. But an example of like a food that could be okay would be like, let's say, a banana. It's the peel is yellow, but you don't eat that. You throw that out. Right, you keep, you eat the inside, which is white to off-white. So the plant food colors that are good white, off-white, green or light green, light green those are the best ones. So we have those colors of the plant foods.

Dr Garrett Smith: 21:49

Um, then we get into animal foods and we have a lot of people trying to eat lots of these foods these days, thinking they're healthy. We get into, um, egg yolks they're yellow, right, egg yolks are yellow because of all the vitamin A in them. We have pork. Pork actually has forms of vitamin A in it that they don't. They don't read on the uh. When they read, when they give the nutrition information, they're measuring retinol and not retinaldehyde and retinoic acid, anyway. So we've got egg yolks, pork, dairy we fortify dairy with vitamin A and also cows get a lot of it from grass and things of that nature. And then there is what is the last one, organ meats like liver or kidneys. So those are the four main animal foods that contain a lot of vitamin A.

Dr Garrett Smith: 22:33

And then there's people using supplements, whether it's fish oil or cod liver oil or just vitamin A supplements like retinol, palmitate. There's beta carotene supplements, there's lutein, zeaxananthin, astaxanthin, like there's people those self-tanning pills. I don't know if you've ever seen those pills that people can take to tan themselves? Those are carotenoids, that's plant vitamin a that gets stuck in your skin and gives you that little tan color until your body can detox it. So there's that. Um, then there's women especially, but some men too using face, you know, like skin, like skin products, retinol, retin-a I mean, women should know this. About retin-A and tretinoin Same compound.

Dr Garrett Smith: 23:16

There was a study done with a ton of US military veterans. They gave them retin-A cream to put on their face. They thought they were going to prevent skin cancer. That was the whole goal. They wanted to prevent skin cancer and they were just going to try this on tons of military veterans. Well, they had to stop the study too early because too many of them were dying and they even took out they had. They looked at the you know people's health risks before they were put into this study and they removed the people they thought were going to die early. So they still had too many people dying even after they didn't let the people into the study who they thought were going to die early.

Dr Garrett Smith: 24:00

And we have people, you know, you see ads on Instagram for tretinoin and retin-A. Everywhere they're giving it out like candy. People are just poisoning themselves. And there's retinol creams and you can buy other retinoic acid products and it's been shown that you can get vitamin A toxicity through your skin. You absorb it through your skin. That's why you're using it. Right, it's to absorb it. So it can happen all sorts of ways and the more well. First of all, kind of like running. If somebody was a slower runner, it's going to take them longer to cover the same distance. So if somebody's detox system is slow for whatever reason from their parents, from the medications they took, from toxic exposures they had, from their crappy diet, whatever If they're slower at detox, they're going to build up toxicity faster. If they do things that slow detox, it's going to build up toxicity faster. Some people are faster at getting rid of it. That doesn't mean that if they're not as toxic as other people, it doesn't mean it's not happening to other people. Is what I'm saying.

Asekho Toto: 25:11

So I think I got to your questions there and again, something actually interesting that you mentioned in terms of vitamin E, where, as you said, it builds up and becomes toxic, in terms of and becomes toxic in a way of how to prevent it, in a way of becoming toxic with vitamin E, vitamin E.

Dr Garrett Smith: 25:44

Well, the biggest thing is vitamin E comes in things with fat in it. A lot of people know about it from nuts and seeds that's. That's where people usually get that. As long as people generally, as long as people with vitamin E, as long as they're not supplementing it and they're not like purposely trying to eat tons and tons of nuts and seeds, or if they're not trying to, how do we? I have a way of explaining this. I say we don't trying to. How do we? I have a way of explaining this. I say we don't try to avoid it, but we don't try to consume it, so we just kind of let it happen.

Dr Garrett Smith: 26:14

One of the things in a study where they added vitamin E to the mouse diets and they saw. They saw what happened. Then they measured the vitamin A in the liver. One of the things that the vitamin E did was it stored up to 20 times more vitamin A in the liver. So it was like retaining vitamin A in the liver. So vitamin E and vitamin A are kind of synergistically working together to cause problems. Some people there. Yeah, I won't get into the studies where vitamin E, vitamin A.

Dr Garrett Smith: 26:41

So that's vitamin E is not vitamin E. Toxicity is not that big of a problem that I'm not worried about, but vitamin A is definitely.

Asekho Toto: 26:52

Yeah, that big of a problem that I'm not worried about, but vitamin a is definitely yeah, since there's this lot of information in terms that entails about between you also, why why do people keep on in a way of of selling these vitamin A supplements and splat vitamin A in the way of preventing them from being out there if they are so toxic?

Dr Garrett Smith: 27:17

Right. Well, so it's. One of the reasons it's so sneaky is because it's an accumulation of toxins, like if you wanted to get vitamin A toxic all at once. I mean there are papers out there If you wanted to get vitamin A toxic all at once. There are papers out there. I have papers on people being sent to the hospital sick with eating four bites of fish liver. It can happen. These things can be very, very toxic.

Dr Garrett Smith: 27:44

There's a reason why we don't eat predator liver. It's because predator liversvers, like polar bears and and bears and other things of this nature, lions. They collect tons of vitamin a from all the bioaccumulation up the food chain. That's why we don't eat them. And there's papers about this, saying that even the cavemen had to learn to not eat predator liver because they would get. They can see in their bones that they had vitamin a toxicity, so like why are these things still for sale? Well, the FDA doesn't regulate supplements. I'm not I'm not advocating for the FDA to regulate supplements, but the FDA doesn't regulate supplements. The FDA screws up everything it touches. It's a government organization. I mean that's what they do. So but the problem with vitamin A is it takes a long time to cause problems for most people, which is why it's so sneaky, because then you have people saying but I've been eating this my entire life, why is it bad for me now? That's why it's so sneaky. So we have that. Then there is okay.

Dr Garrett Smith: 28:47

There's a thing I call the duration paradox, which is very common with pharmaceutical medications and toxins. It's where something feels good or shows symptom improvement in the beginning and then it turns bad over the long term. Think of an example I use for this is caffeine. A person drinks caffeine for the first time. They feel like all sorts of energy, they feel great, my brain's working a million miles a second and all this stuff. But if they keep drinking it day after day, the benefits start to shrink and then all of a sudden they're left feeling more tired, they have worse sleep, they have worse energy, they're just, and if they don't have their caffeine, then they're not normal, which is an addiction.

Dr Garrett Smith: 29:35

So so that's kind of a big example, like it's even been shown in, like erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra and Cialis, like guys who take those too often, their effectiveness starts to fade until all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore at all and then they got to move to a stronger drug. All of a sudden it doesn't work anymore at all. And then they got to move to a stronger drug, and then eventually that doesn't work. And then they got to inject themselves, and then that works for a while, and then eventually that doesn't work, and then they got to go do more surgical stuff. And it's just so. It works in the beginning, but then it doesn't, and tons of toxins look like this.

Dr Garrett Smith: 30:07

So people putting, let's say, retinol on their face or retin-A on their face, and their face improves Okay, that's the drug effect. This is what the whole pharmaceutical industry is based on, is drug effects, which are short-term things that are not fixing the actual problem. And then, underneath it all, the actual problem is slowly getting worse. So then people get addicted to the thing that they're using, because if they stop using it, the original problem has only gotten worse in the meantime. And then they, then they. They don't know what to do. They've painted themselves into a corner by using a drug and the only way out is really like to just get off of it and and weather the storm of the toxicity then coming out of them.

Asekho Toto: 30:49

So yeah, Actually that makes sense.

Asekho Toto: 30:57

Back then, I think three or four years ago, I actually was quite addicted to caffeine, because at that point I was actually writing and I wanted to be awake.

Asekho Toto: 31:09

And as more years went, the more it was ineffective, or actually I was quite surprised of why isn't it working? And I didn't see it in that, in that perspective, and actually we have been speaking about vitamin A for such a long time as I'm seeing the time, we are almost out of time, as much as I wanted to talk about the toxic, the specific bio theory, but I guess, if you don't have a problem, we can do it in terms of another day, in terms of part two of this episode, because I'm quite, really interested in terms of the bio theory and it's quite big in terms of how do you approach it and how people can learn it from. And just a quick in terms of, I would say, summary in terms of detoxification when it comes to vitamin A, because I think we are around that before, but next, in terms of when it comes to we spoke about vitamin A, toxicity, and but I want to now, I want to dive deeply into the detoxification of it oh, the detoxification of it.

Dr Garrett Smith: 32:24

Okay, so well, the biggest thing that we do is really so. Our bodies detox every day. This is normal. We have to detox to live like. Kind of like to drive a car. It's going to push out toxic exhaust. Well, we're going to make toxins in our system every day. That's just a byproduct of living. So, being that we do that, our body has a certain detox load that it has to do on a daily basis. The biggest thing that we can do to not add to the body's load, the most important thing is to not put more toxins in, because then that just gives it more work taking supplements or, you know, doing this other stuff.

Dr Garrett Smith: 33:08

I always say the the. We always want to stop in toxin before we try to start detoxing. So the like it'd be like if somebody was, you know, messed up from alcohol. The very first thing that they should do is generally quit drinking. It makes sense, right? Stop putting the poison in. So that's that's what we do first. Like so we just work on. Like a lot of those vitamin A foods I mentioned. Well, I mean, the first thing that people can do is stop any vitamin A supplements that you're taking, whether it's cod liver oil or fish oil, or retinol palmitate or organ meat supplements, or, you know, retin-a on your face, retinol creams, anything like that, carotenoid supplements, anything like multivitamins all have it in there. So you stop putting the poison in with pills, which are the most you know, some of the most concentrated. And then, if you want to start working on the foods you know that food list that I gave you so the parts of plants that are yellow, orange, red, dark green, yeah, but but if you can peel off the, you know, if you like, as an example would be a cucumber, right, you can peel off the dark green and then on the inside it's, it's white or off white, that's fine. So if you're not eating those colors, then that's okay. Then then those plant foods I'm sorry, the animal foods I talked about. We wouldn't be eating egg yolks, dairy pork and organ meats like liver and kidney, and that's a really, really good start.

Dr Garrett Smith: 34:40

A lot of people build their diet, after they take those things out, on muscle meats like red meat or poultry and some sort of grains, the ones we tend to find the best. It's a short list, it's rice, oats or barley, and then a lot of people also include beans. You know this can be any kind of like the normal beans that you think of, like black beans or pinto beans or Navy beans or any of the normal like cooked beans that you think of. So not green beans, not peanuts, not peas, but like normal beans. So a lot of people base their entire diet around those three things and then they often with fruits, big fruits that we like to use, bananas and apples, and maybe some green grapes, vegetables that it's not a big list, but those, those parts of the vegetables, or the vegetables that are white, off white or light green, and that's that is the most important thing to do. To start, make sure you get enough protein. Um, we like to get soluble fiber from the things like the beans and the oats and the barley and the apples, because soluble fiber helps bind to bile. Bile is we didn't get into toxic bile theory but bile is the most toxic fluid in your entire body and you want to poop it out and the bile helps to grab on to. I'm sorry. The soluble fiber helps to grab onto the bile so that then you can poop it out, which is really important, and it also feeds your gut bacteria. Soluble fiber is food for your gut bacteria. So those are the big things in terms of and I mean we didn't get into it today.

Dr Garrett Smith: 36:21

But I'm also a big advocate against. Let me make sure that's heard right. I'm a big advocate against taking vitamin D, as in dog supplements. We never use vitamin D supplements. They just calcify you into a statue. We have other ways of fixing people's internal vitamin D levels, but we never use vitamin D3. It is sold as rat poison. It will kill your dogs. It's been shown to kill babies when fortified milk had too much added. It's dangerous stuff. You don't want to be using that. So we do a lot more other things in the program, like my Love your Liver program. We do a lot of other things. It's not just vitamin A. We are way beyond just a one-trick pony shop kind of thing. So yeah, but that's kind of the basics. The first thing to do is to stop putting the poison in. That's always the first thing in getting back your health is figure out what's poisoning you, stop putting it in and then your body can start to catch up.