Hard to advocate WAP for some alternative groups

[Guest guest]

I belong to a local Attachment Parenting group, which is

convenient for finding out about events in the community. Every so

often a thread comes up where I feel I can post some WAP articles and

the like. For instance, some people were talking about how their young

toddlers eat butter straight out of a container. I posted

Byrnes' articles " WHY BUTTER IS BETTER " and " Vitamin A, a Vital

Nutrient " to the group. But the resident vegetarian/vegan advocate

whom

I always seem to get entangled with (she's a major anti-dairy

advocate) immediately got her guns up and started shooting. I just

don't know how to respond, and am wondering if I should just not ever

write anything relating to WAP again. I'm feeling very discouraged,

and it doesn't help that it's a billion degrees (okay, " just "

84Ëš) and I don't have air conditioning. <sigh>

I've been thinking about becoming a co-Chapter leader in my town, but

if this is the kind of opposition you guys face, I just don't know if

I'm up for it. Even though I feel passionate about these issues, I

don't feel knowledgeable enough, and I'm pretty busy being a stay at

home mother to a toddler.

The e-mails are below.

****************************

[sB's article on butter]

From below: “Ounce for ounce, butter has more selenium per gram

than either whole wheat or garlic.â€

[Response]

Hmmm, according to USDA, ounce for ounce, garlic has 14 times the

selenium as butter and whole wheat has _71 times_ as much!!! The

author

of the below has a math problem. This sort of stuff keeps me from

spending much time on Weston Price †" I can’t believe

anything I see and

don’t have the time to check it all out.

Most butter I see on the shelf has A & D added, doesn’t it?

Anyway, USDA

doesn’t say which they’re giving values for, but

carrots have 5.5 times

the vitamin A and _40.5_ times the beta carotene and butter has no

alpha

carotene while carrots have 3767 mcg.

Both alpha and beta carotene, found in fruits and veggies, are

valuable

and no level of these is found to be toxic. This link:

http://www.bodybuilding-supplement-guide.com/vitamin-a-overdose.html

shows the suggested risks of consuming excess vitamin A (retinol) from

animal/milk sources, liver damage is the most common. It’s

linked to

causing osteoporosis as well, but then every component of milk has

been

linked to osteoporosis --- (the simple truth is that milk causes

osteoporosis and it’s likely due to several qualities of milk,

not just

one). While I’ve seen that _children should never have more

than 1,000IU

of vitamin A daily --- that’s *3 Tablespoons* of butter, if

you don’t

have any other milk, meat fat, or dairy,_ to avoid risk of vitamin A

toxicity (can be fatal, I’m not talking osteoporosis here),

this webpage

suggests 2,000 as the upper limit †" maybe they mean for one

day. Vitamin

A toxicity also causes birth defects.

To get the powerful health effects of omega-3 fatty acids, you need to

be having good ratios of these harder-to-find f.a.’s versus

those in

lard (butter and meat fat) and others in vegetable oils. Using the

high-omega-3 fatty acid spreads now available with zero trans fatty

acids is a much wiser choice health-wise. While a little butter is OK

or

good if you arent’ eating any other animal fat (like cheese,

meat,

cream), you’d need to take a lot of fish-oil tablets to

balance out a

regular lard diet (please don’t make me do the math).

********************

[sB's article " Vitamin A " ]

From your article at bottom: “Consumers are often warned that

vitamin

A can be toxic if taken to excess. Such warnings are

overblown.â€

[response]

The abstract I pasted below the references below shows that women

taking prenatal vitamins with 10,000IU had nearly 5 times as many

birth-defect-babies as those taking less than 5,000IU. (The

“safeâ€

upper limit for babies is commonly suggested to be 1,000 IU while

it’s

10,000 for adults --- in case you thought I had my zeros wrong--- the

amount considered toxic is supposedly much higher than the

“safeâ€

upper limit.)

Extremely high doses of vitamin A are given experimentally to people

who are dying anyway of cancer. If it doesn’t kill them, like

all the

other cancer meds can as well, it might help cure them, then their

livers can recover later.

One reference I pasted below demonstrates the toxicity in experimental

usage in cancer †" many more do as well. Most toxicity studies

are done

on animals and are non-debatable, but I used only human studies below.

Retinoic acid may increase the risk of bone marrow transplant

nephropathy. Pediatr Nephrol. 2005 Apr;20(4):534-8. Epub 2005 Feb 18.

Nutr Rev. 2004 Feb;62(2):65-7. Vitamin A supplementation and risk of

skeletal fracture.

Phase I study of concurrent radiotherapy with TS-1 and vitamin A (TAR

Therapy) for head and neck cancer

Hypercalcemia caused by iatrogenic hypervitaminosis A. J Am Diet

Assoc. 2005 Jan;105(1):119-21

1. Biesalski HK. Comparative assessment of the toxicology of

vitamin A and retinoids in man. Toxicology 1989;57

:117†" 61.[Medline]

2. Hathcock JN, Hattan DG, MY, Mc JT, Sundaresan PR,

Wilkening VL. Evaluation of vitamin A toxicity. Am J Clin Nutr

1990;52:183†" 202.[Abstract]

3. Olson JA. Vitamin A. In: Rucker RB, Suttie JW, McCormick DB,

Machlin LJ, eds. Handbook of vitamins. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc,

2001:1†" 50.

4. Rothman KJ, LL, Singer MR, Nguyen US, Mannino S, Milunsky

A. Teratogenicity of high vitamin A intake. N Engl J Med

1995;333:1369†" 73.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

5. Feskanich D, Singh V, Willett WC, Colditz GA. Vitamin A intake

and hip fractures among postmenopausal women. JAMA

2002;287:47†" 54.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

6. Melhus H, sson K, Kindmark A, et al. Excessive dietary

intake of vitamin A is associated with reduced bone mineral density

and increased risk for hip fracture. Ann Intern Med

1998;129:770†" 8.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

7. Korner WF, Vollm J. New aspects of the tolerance of retinol in

humans. Int J Vitam Nutr Res 1975;45:363†" 72.[Medline]

Teratogenicity [birth defects]of High Vitamin A Intake

J. Rothman, Dr.P.H., Lynn L. , D.Sc., Martha R. Singer,

M.P.H., R.D., Uyen-Sa D.T. Nguyen, M.P.H., Salvatore Mannino, M.D.,

M.P.H., and Aubrey Milunsky, M.B., B.Ch., D.Sc.

ABSTRACT

Background Studies in animals indicate that natural forms of vitamin A

are teratogenic. Synthetic retinoids chemically similar to vitamin A

cause birth defects in humans; as in animals, the defects appear to

affect tissues derived from the cranial neural crest.

Methods Between October 1984 and June 1987, we identified 22,748

pregnant women when they underwent screening either by measurement of

maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein or by amniocentesis. Nurse

interviewers obtained information on the women's diet, medications,

and illnesses during the first trimester of pregnancy, as well as

information on their family and medical history and exposure to

environmental agents. We obtained information on the outcomes of

pregnancy from the obstetricians who delivered the babies or from the

women themselves. Of the 22,748 women, 339 had babies with birth

defects; 121 of these babies had defects occurring in sites that

originated in the cranial neural crest.

Results For defects associated with cranial-neural-crest tissue, the

ratio of the prevalence among the babies born to women who consumed

more than 15,000 IU of preformed vitamin A per day from food and

supplements to the prevalence among the babies whose mothers consumed

5000 IU or less per day was 3.5 (95 percent confidence interval, 1.7

to 7.3). For vitamin A from supplements alone, the ratio of the

prevalence among the babies born to women who consumed more than

10,000 IU per day to that among the babies whose mothers consumed 5000

IU or less per day was 4.8 (95 percent confidence interval, 2.2 to

10.5). Using a smoothed regression curve, we found an apparent

threshold near 10,000 IU per day of supplemental vitamin A. The

increased frequency of defects was concentrated among the babies born

to women who had consumed high levels of vitamin A before the seventh

week of gestation.

Conclusions High dietary intake of preformed vitamin A appears to be

teratogenic. Among the babies born to women who took more than 10,000

IU of preformed vitamin A per day in the form of supplements, we

estimate that about 1 infant in 57 had a malformation attributable to

the supplement.

*********************