RawPetMedics Tuesday Live: Vitamin A

I love that poster.

Look at that nice poster on vitamin A.

What species of dog? What species of dog? What breed of dog would that be, guys? Maybe it's not a dog.

Breed?

What breed? Yeah, what breed of dog you say? Are you looking— are you thinking of— it looks like a working lab. Is that a bad guess? I'm very bad at my breeds. What would you say?

It's got a bit of ginger. I could see a bit of ginger in there.

I'm thinking a sight hound of some sort, maybe.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, actually, yes, I am. I'm going to go— look at that beautiful eye. Beautiful. How very topical. And it's even brown in color. It's even kind of that carrot color. Yeah, orange. It's perfect. Perfect.

Nothing wrong with that, boys.

Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I get a bit of orange in my beard. Bren, do you get any red in your beard at all?

You're on that now. Have you not guessed?

Yeah, sage, salt and pepper. Salt and pepper, Bren. I don't know why, but I feel like it's going to be a busy night. I don't know why that is. And I love these vitamin and mineral conversations. It's because it forces you down a little hole that, um, you know, you just kind of say, you know what, I want to learn more about this. And so, um, these sort of topics, uh, you got— get me reading anyway, certainly get the juices flowing. So I'm looking forward to tonight. We Are Raw Pet Medics, you will find us on Facebook, of course, of course, that's where you listen to us now. YouTube, anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on podcasts, do give us a rating, we appreciate that a lot. Uh, we are also on patreon.com/RAWPetMedics where we do a bit on the side at the end of every show for 15-20 minutes. And, uh, we really appreciate that. Price of a cup of tea or coffee gets you entry to that, um, each month. And if you can afford it, absolutely great. If you can't, no problem, we're going to be here anyway because we love doing this. Um, so guys, anything dramatic happen during the week that you need to get to before we start talking about the topic at hand?

Oh, there's a couple of things happened. Oh, how is Ireland today? Bless Sinead.

Did you say— oh yeah, yeah, we were actually— I was actually outside her house yesterday and there was a lot of flowers appearing. But you should have seen the turn up at the funeral today, it was huge. Have you seen the documentary on her, Nothing Compares?

No, no, I haven't.

Well worth the watch. It came out, they had it ready to go, and unfortunately she died, but they got it out a few days after her death. Uh, it's well worth the watch, and then you totally understand, uh, where she's coming from and right on most of the points she was making and the struggle that she had and the childhood, brutal. But anyway, nothing compares, great documentary. Poor old Sinead, but what a legend, great life. So what about you, Bren? What are your two interesting things? Do share.

Oh, two interesting things. No, no, I can't share anything about me because there's the interesting things that are happening out in the world. There's the sudden decrease in plant-based products sales over in the States. Did you see the Beyond Meat 30% decrease? I was like, yeah, that was on the news tonight. And I was just thinking, they're all saying it's down to economics and people don't want to pay a premium for it anymore. And, you know, but they did actually quote in that this whole thing about that 30% of people have shifted from their belief that plant-based products were going to be the most ecologically sound foods to eat. So there's a 30% shift across to they, you know, actually there's other things that need to be brought in. So that's really interesting just because I'm writing that talk for the Nordic Pet Food Conference on sustainability of meat-based products. So that's going to be my little spiel for them. That's the 2 weeks after Helsinki, I think.

Busy.

So it's a busy month of September.

Yeah.

So that's it.

Can I just point out that I didn't mention anything about plant-based food?

It wasn't me.

Yeah, but there's a banner behind you.

It was him. So there you go. We went to the Wilderness Festival, and so we had a whale of a time. The kids really enjoyed it. We saw Joe Wiley, we saw Fatboy Slim, and we danced a lot and had a right old time. So it was, it was really, really fun, actually. Really, really fun. Good to be back though. Yeah, just to have running water and electricity and a phone signal. Yeah, it's nice.

That's a treat.

Really, really nice.

Did you sleep in a tent?

We did, we did. We had to lug it about 15 minutes in a trolley, so 3, 4 trolleys worth on the way out. We had to over mud and humps and this, and I was absolutely at the end of it. You're pretty knackered at the end of a festival, but I was on my last legs because Muggins had to do all the lugging of the trolley.

I The way you said, uh, 4 trolley loads on the way out, I'd say 2 of those trolleys were probably crates. I'll take those 2 trolleys going back. Oh yeah, I like— that's all part of it though, that bit of work and setting it up while they go off and do something and then crack open a beer after the tent. Feel like a manly effort. That sounds good, guys. Who wants to start it off tonight? Who wants to, uh, tell us a little bit about Vitamin A? What's the— what's the intro?

What about a little bit of history? I've just read a tiny bit of history.

Go for it.

So came along, it was discovered as a factor in 1912, 1913 by a clever guy called Hopkins, and he got the Nobel Prize for it in 1929, which is great, that recognition. And it was the first one that was the first vitamin that was found, hence A going down, B, C, D, E, F, G, and not even G. But, you know, I mean, vitamin F, they talk about fiber as vitamin F, but that's a, that's a whole other kettle of fish, methinks. So there's this historical precedent, and that's great that they found these things because they were able to then say these foods are high in them and they prevent, you know, deficiency disease in humans, what have you. But the downside of that is that it began that scientification, if that's a word. Is that a word? It became the sign— it became the scientific. Food was no longer food, it was nutrition. And it was, it was, oh, it does— that food contain vitamin A and, and what have you. So there is some, some very good things because we understood more about what makes us tick. But at the same time, it meant that food became sciency. And unless you had a a PhD or something like this, you didn't really know much about nutrition, you see. Whereas if you ask your granny, she'd say, yeah, you've got to eat a bit of liver and you've got to eat your greens and you've got to, you know, and what have you. Because you can say your granny, you know, I'm talking back in the 1850s, she knew a lot about what foods would make you healthy. So, you know, step forward and step back there, but all very interesting. And then they had a big, big rush and And then penicillin came along in the, in the '30s. That's an antibiotic, not a vitamin, but you know what I'm saying. It was a big scientific push to move forward with this stuff. So there's a little bit of background. Has anybody found anything definitive and definite in the whole vitamin A space? Because most of what I read is that the safe upper limit— that we don't know what the safe upper limit is. We don't know what a minimum dose is, although if you have below about 3,000 international units, you're probably not going to do very well. Did you find anything very definite in this space, Brent?

I found a couple of bits about, you know, for you're trying to supplement or you're trying to achieve in the total diet. And this is the issue because it's not just about the supplement you're going to give, it's about what's already included in the food. So a couple of things about 110 International units per kilo of body weight is the sort of ideal sort of total quantity that you want to be consuming.

According to who?

For humans?

That was—

no, is that for humans? That's for dogs.

No, that's for dogs. That was taken from a veterinary text. The other parts were that there is this thing about chronic exposure versus acute, and there's a total difference. So you can cope with massive amounts in the very short term, relatively speaking, like up to 200— sorry, up to 50 times or per pound, wasn't it? That was so between 50 and 100 times that standard dose can be consumed without toxic effects as long as it's a one-off. However, if you're going to take it over the long term, that could be days, weeks, months, years, then, you know, the smaller and smaller dose can become more and more toxic because it's a fat-soluble vitamin that's stored up in the liver and other tissues around the body.

What I found, which was really, really interesting, is that dogs are much more tolerant of much higher levels, and they can excrete vitamin A in the urine, which I guess helps them if they're eating like piles and piles of liver. But then you think a cat is an obligate carnivore, not a facultative carnivore, as is a dog. And so how do you, how do you interpret that one, guys? That cats have got a lesser upper and lower limit than dogs, even though we're not quite sure what they are. We just know that cats are more sensitive to vitamin A liver, for example. How do you square that one?

Does this come down to that toxicity on the kidneys of, you know, the antifreeze stuff and what happens with that? And it actually— there is a form of vitamin A because you've got the retinol alcohol form and the aldehyde form of retinol. That's there. I don't know, could be that. I'm not sure. I'm just so interested when it's a fat-soluble vitamin, you'd think the detox thing to do is to try and get you to excrete as much in your bile and through your feces as much as possible if you're trying to detox them.

Maybe cats aren't, well, they aren't the whole prey eaters that dogs would be. Maybe that's the case. I mean, cats seem to be quite selective when they're eating prey. They seem to take the best bits. They seem to leave bits behind. Dogs don't leave much behind when they're eating a rat or a rabbit. They will take everything they can. Perhaps they eat more organ meat, perhaps it's symptomatic of what they eat, you know, they'll eat the liver, they'll eat the head, and they'll eat the eyes, you know, so you have that vitamin A sinks. And so maybe it's just the way they eat, you know, maybe the cats just go for slightly different pieces.

And there's also tolerance, isn't there? Because you talk about some of the other meat-eating predators out there. So the seals, the walruses, the polar bears, you know, they're renowned for being able to tolerate and store in their liver the excess vitamin A.

Yeah, so that is one, that is one very, very definite thing that I found. Please don't feed your dogs on polar bear liver.

Yeah, rocket fuel, it's like a battery. And so vitamin A is, it's fat soluble. Okay, so it's stored in the fat. Okay, so that means we can store vitamin A and the liver can store vitamin A. It's why liver is a great source of vitamin A and why raw-fed dogs are never going to suffer a vitamin A deficiency unless it's linked to some sort of disease that I don't quite understand. So it's a fat-soluble vitamin, which means you don't run out of it too easy. And so this, you know, you store some vitamins and your body learns to store the vitamins. It really needs. And so that's the way I look at it. And so this comes into the question, people measure bloods to get the, their kind of vitamin levels and they measure the blood, but your vitamin A and D and copper and selenium, they're stashed all around the body, bones and liver and manganese, etc. So the blood is kind of, as another vet was explaining to me recently, I'm passing off her information as my own here to try to look smart, but they said that the bloods are like a, it's just a right on point what's happening at your body at the moment, but your body is keeping that in a kind of relative within two kind of highs and lows. It's keeping it at a, what's the word, just at an average when actually by the time you start detecting the vitamin A deficiency in your blood, you're in big trouble then because it's like your body isn't drawing any more from the vitamin A reserves. And is that not a bigger issue? How do you measure, how would you recommend, sorry for putting you on the spot, but how would you recommend you measure these fat-soluble vitamins A and D? Is blood a good measurement, or is there other ways of measuring these things in dogs?

From my reading, you can in the lab, if you've got an enormous lab and good funding, you can actually measure some of the retinols and the retinols and other esters within the blood, but If you— if I've looked, I've looked on veterinary laboratories and things like that. I can't see that it's a very readily available test. But, Brian, have you ever tested D3?

Yes, definitely. I do test D3 levels. But vitamin A? No, it's not.

Never.

Because we did have a question. Somebody said, I've just done a test for vitamin A. I think it was vitamin A. And she said it was 3 times over the standard level. And she was very, very concerned that we should express that people should be careful with giving liver and milk and what have you. And I'm thinking I'd really like to see those results because if it was 3 times the minimum, it's probably well within that kind of 10 times the levels. I've got a quote from the NRC here saying In 1987, the NRC proposed a presumed maximal safe level for the number of species, including dogs, of 10 times the requirement.

I can do better than that, Nick. Here's the AFCO 2006, okay? Per kilogram of dry food, vitamin A minimum 5,000 international units, whatever that is in milligrams. 5,000 international units of vitamin A per kilogram of dry food. The maximum quarter of a million international units per kilogram of dry food. That's 50 times higher than the RDA. So now the AAFCO has a history of using pigs and stuff for iron and copper and all sorts of things, so you can't trust a thing out of this. And the maximum studies are done on one or two tiny little studies of some poor dogs fed terrible doses of synthetic vitamin A, because vitamin A is a complicated thing. It's got As with vitamin E, it's got, as you said, retinol, retinal, retinal esters. The stuff that people know about in food is carotenoids. People hear about carotenoids in fruit and veg and oils, and dogs can convert the carotenoids to vitamin A. They're pretty good at it. A bit.

A bit.

Cats can't do it at all.

I'm posting a paper actually on that. There was a great paper written. I think I shared it with you guys. Because there is some debate as to the levels of different species being able to convert those carotenoids into vitamin A. So definitely very low in cats. Actually, many people have assumed that dogs would be okay because they've classed them as omnivores.

Of course.

And then, but the paper was a very interesting— so have a little look at that. That's going to be posted and shared with you guys at the end of today, so you all can have a little read and see what you think.

So is that in a nutshell? If you're a carnivore, you can't convert it very well. If you're a facultative carnivore, you can convert it a bit. But if you're an omnivore like a human, then you can convert it quite well. And what about cattle and horses? I imagine they can convert it like whippity snip.

Yeah. Like whippity snip. You took the words right out of my mouth, Nick. We just don't use that word enough. Whippity snip. And it's interesting that the preformed vitamin A, this retinol and retinol esters—

Before you know it, Conor, sorry, Conor, before you know it, you're going to start saying jeepers.

Jeepers creepers.

That's a great word. Teach the kids.

They're starting to learn my language and it's not working out for Grandma. She was appalled. So Holly just said bloody hell when something went wrong. She's 5 and grandma was like, she can't say that. I'm like, bloody hell, what's wrong with that? Anyway, so yeah, like, so the carnivores have it easy because the preformed vitamin A is sitting in your meat and your liver and it's ready to go. In fact, you know, it does call into something I've been thinking about recently, how little blood cats and dogs get. If you think about what an elixir blood is, it has everything just ready to go for the animal and it's killed And you've got the Maasai Mara, the healthiest people on the planet, drinking huge amounts of blood. I mean, it's a brilliant food. And yet the animals are bled by the time they're fed to you. So the meat looks bloody. It's more red than it is bloody because there's obviously huge amounts of blood in an animal. So I often think that anyway.

So a lot of that's myoglobin. That's okay.

Yeah.

In the fluids, it's not blood.

Yeah. Yeah. Still, though, I mean, all your everything you need is poured into it. I want to start drinking blood. I think it's going to be good for me.

You can actually buy it on Amazon. If you look, you can buy liquid blood on Amazon. I had an iron deficient patient and so I was looking for blood products like, you know, like dog— no, no, black pudding for dogs. You've got to be careful how you say that, as opposed to black pudding made from dog's blood, which I don't think would sell very well. Yeah, but you can actually buy— I don't know, it's probably porcine blood. So that's maybe something to think about if you're wanting to increase nutrients and iron and magnesium and all those kind of things.

Yeah, I hate to do a bit of self-promotion here, but I do have a product coming out soon in about maybe 2 or 3 weeks, and it's going to have blood in it, guys, the first time. So look, I found some interesting bits here. We just mentioned retinol and retinal. It's quite obvious this retinal, where that word came from. And so it's really, really important for the eyes and for vision. And so retinal, you can get the retina, and it's good for the cornea and all sorts of functions.

Oh, it's called retinal because it's an aldehyde. And it's— so is that not what is the ret—

is the ret-a-bit not the eye bit?

No, you've got retinoids, you know, that whole—

I thought it was because it works on the retinal, so it made sense.

I don't think so. No, because I saw something the other day, they said retinal and retina sounds very similar, don't get them confused. Oh, retinal is because it's an aldehyde retinoid without getting too—

I think they named the retinal bit of the eye first and then they found out about this bit, they found it in an eye and then they went with And they call it retinoids.

Yeah, there could be something in that.

Yeah, surely. That's just two words identical. Anyway, this was a lead-in to something. So, um, we know that vitamin A is very good for the eyes and macular degeneration, and studies show that the higher— the more the stuff you get into you, the, the significantly less you suffer these sorts of issues later on in life, and it can actually help with them when you're suffering them. So vitamin A is really, really important. But did you know why, uh, they started saying, um— actually, I'm just going to tell you because I can't get the question right. Hang on.

I can tell you, I can tell you. You're going to talk about radar in the story.

Yes, I am. Don't say radar. Don't say that. Any other word you could have said, and you just said the punchline. So yeah. So what was it going to be about? Tell the story.

Tell the story.

Go tell the story.

I can't tell this. I can't get started with this. Now all I can say is the end of it. I think, okay, so when the British were working on radar and they nearly had it, They were so terrified that the Germans were going to find out that they had it because they were shooting down so many of the planes for a little while that they thought they'd give the game away. This is when Churchill had to let them bomb— was it Birmingham that he had to decide? It was Coventry. And so imagine that for a decision. Jesus. Anyway, so they sold loads of silly stories and nonsense stories and built fake armies and fake tanks and all sorts of cool stuff to lead them astray. But one of the stories they started saying was that the RAF lads were eating huge amounts of carrots, and carrots contain vitamin A, it's very good for their eyesight. And that's the secret to the RAF's success in shooting down so many German planes for a while. And so it became a kind of a thing that, you know, if you ever see a rabbit with glasses, and carrots are just the best source of vitamin A ever. Obviously it's not the best sort of vitamin A, I mean liver and dairy and all that, but I just thought that was such a— is there more to the story than that, Nick? I feel like you have more, but that's all I have.

I think that's it. And forevermore, when I was a kid, they used to say, eat your carrots, they're good for your eyes. And that's the derivation of it because of this. It was misinformation. Yeah, during the Second World War.

Yeah, yeah.

The first casualty of war is truth.

Oh yeah, what a movie.

I've got to apologize to one of our German viewers who's just said, I'm German, should I be closing my ears?

No, it was us.

Sorry, Martina.

It was us who was being naughty with the truth.

Yeah, actually naughty. Yeah, fake information or whatever, fake news. So yeah, have you got any more, guys? I just, I have a little bit here that I'm kind of holding back and I'm going to let it go in a minute.

But I mean, there was one little thing about zinc and the increased uptake with vitamin A. If you get the zinc right. And actually also making sure there's too many foods which are adding zinc sulfate to fortify the zinc levels instead of using some of the gluconates and indeed any of the other amino acid combinations with zinc as a salt. So it's actually, you know, really if you go out there and you're looking at zinc supplements, or indeed manganese or magnesium, you know, all of those. If you actually start to look at some of the organic salts of those, indeed even some of the amino acid salts, you can also get some of those minerals in better uptake and that will actually improve your vitamin uptake alongside them.

Interesting.

Or you can, or you can eat food like liver, which is high in iron and zinc and A and D. And it's super cheap. Yeah, it's super good for you.

I like this tip here by Karen Reed in the feed. Karen Reed in the feed talking about carrot seed. Hey, so Karen, who is big into ZooPharma because it works so well on her boy Newton, and she says wild carrot seed oil is so often self-selected by dogs with eye issues. It was self-selected by Newton when he started to lose his sight. Later on in life, it repairs at a cellular level and is great for eyes. No doubt about that. Isn't that interesting? I'm a big believer in that. And he definitely went bananas for that carrot seed oil. So that's interesting.

One of the other things I read, boys, was that if you get a vitamin A deficiency, somebody was asking, please tell us about the vitamin A deficiency. What are the signs of it? So one is you get a mucoid, your cornea gets a bit mucoidy and you kind of wake up like this. The other eye thing is night, your night vision can reduce, so you can't cope with bright, you know, if you're driving along the road, you get a bright shining light. If you've got plenty of vitamin A, you will, you'll be able to look back at the road and you'll be able to see and accommodate to that really, really quickly. If you're a bit low in A, then you'll be dazzled for longer, and therefore that will be a risk. So make sure you get your vitamin A.

Other little thing is you can get on the side of the sclera, so the sort of normal white part of the eye, you can get these gray nodular appearances, a little bit like lymphoid tissue that start to build up in deficiencies. I've seen it once in my career. Didn't know what the— it was. Okay. But yeah, it's one of those deficiency symptoms. It comes up with, you know, those. So yeah, some really interesting bits and bobs out there that you just don't realize. And for all of the vets and nurses listening who, you know, are sort of being told by their clients, look, you should be watching some stuff on nutrition because— and hopefully they'll watch this, but I'm sure they'll watch other stuff. I find it really interesting that they're missing out on this form of medicine of just recognizing that actually maybe the dry stuff that they're feeding is deficient in the real parts of these things. They've been giving artificial vitamins, artificial minerals that just aren't being utilized by the body appropriately. And actually, they don't need to be using drugs. They could just be using some real food with the appropriate amounts of vitamins and minerals in, and they could resolve so much of their problems that they see for their patients. They should be seeing it as medicine. Totally seeing it as medicine.

Totally, totally. Let food be thy medicine.

So Conor's got some interesting stuff about vitamin A and measles and things like that. I'm going to segue into that by saying that if you are— if you, when I say you, your dog, same thing— if you're vitamin A deficient, your mucous membranes get a bit dry and they don't work as well. You can get dry skin, you can get hyperkeratosis, you can get kind of lots flaking and things like this, because the vitamin A as a fat-soluble vitamin can actually penetrate into the cells and change the expression of those germinal cells in the skin. So it's very, very clever stuff. And if you have dry mucous membrane, these kind of things, it means that viruses can penetrate you into you much more easily. And this is, this is a phenomenon that we see in certain parts of the world. Conor?

Yes. Oh, to you, I saw Nicholas. So vitamin A deficiency is not very common in the West. And so by the West, you say in the kind of slightly richer countries, we eat more dairy and meat. And we have that, that's quite a luxury item in some more developing countries. And so vitamin A deficiency is quite common and it's a top killer of humans, very top killer. So I'm gonna talk about that in a second. But just to take one step back, we were talking about vision a lot for vitamin A, but vitamin A is really important for so many different things, as is every vitamin and every mineral if you Google enough. But you know, it's really important for vision, skin health, reproductive health, plays a role in sperm and egg development. Critical for placental health, fetal tissue development and maintenance, fetal growth. And so it's just really important that you get enough vitamin A. So vitamin A deficiency, it's a big thing. Now, just give me 5 minutes, guys, and I'll get through this. And I'll be very careful if anybody is offended by me mentioning COVID and at one point vaccinations. You're on your own. Okay, I don't want to see dancing off.

I'm going to get a cup of tea.

I'm reading this. Have a nap like you did during my last talk, Nick.

I always do, mate. Just as soon as you open your mouth, I'm tired.

Obviously, I don't know if the folks are, but whatever the last thing we were at, I can't remember what it was. Just before I got up on stage to talk for an hour, Nick goes, mate, I'm just going to nip off for a sleep and I'll come back. It's like you didn't do that when Bren was going up. And you tell me before I get up on stage. Anyway, don't go for tea. If the camera goes back on, that chair is empty, Nick. I'm going to be angry. Okay, I got this. This is a little, little segment, little, little rant. It's been a while. Okay, and this is a quote. So a lot of these are quotes from studies. I'll let you know when they are to get me out of trouble. This is a quote from a study: Vitamin A supplementation reduces child mortality worldwide between 100 and 140 million children between the ages of 6 and 59 months have vitamin A deficiency, which contributes both to blindness and to poor immune function, which in turn increases the severity of diarrhea and measles, some of the top killers. Every year, 1.2 to 3 million children die from the effects of vitamin A deficiency. Okay, so that's UNICEF. 1.2 to 3 million children die a year from a lack of vitamin A. And you think, bloody hell, this day and age they need a bit of vitamin A. 1 to 3 million children die in a year. So at a minimum, 100 million children suffer vitamin A deficiency, and between 1 to 3% them, we'll dive it. To address vitamin A deficiency, the best approach is a mega dose of vitamin A capsules. It's 200,000 international units in each capsule. Big whack. It's administered twice yearly to preschool children. You don't have to do it that often because your body stores it, which tells you how long you can go. The cost to produce a capsule ranges from 2 cents to 4 cents per capsule, but this is only about 5% of the cost because to get it into their mouth you need a whole lot of logistics and stuff that I poorly understand. But to cut a long story short, 2 or 3 studies reveal that it costs up to about maybe 60 cents in today's money. It was about 45 cents in 2004. It's about 60 cents in today's money to do this. Okay, so a more recent study of 7 wealthier countries studies it was $1. So it's $1 to do this per year per child. So 100 million children at $1, it would cost $100 million to improve the health of 100 million kids and save the lives of 1 to 3 million children a year. $100 million. That's what it would cost to save 1 to 3 million children in developing countries. Okay, $100 million. So you can see where I'm going with this. Dose their moms too during pregnancy because of the importance of vitamin A deficiency in fetal growth, and again during lactation to improve fetal development maintenance. Now you're looking at $200 million to greatly benefit these people and reduce, you know, the amount of child death. Huge. Okay, to give that figure some context, I'm getting a bit tricky here. Here we go, here we go. Okay, see you later, Patreon. Strap in. Nothing too, nothing too, uh, the West is after spending $16 trillion on COVID in 3 $16 trillion has been spent, and largely by the West. Let's face it, mostly developing countries weren't kind of spending too much money on it. $16 trillion. Just to give you an idea what a trillion is, guys, you know what a million is? One and six noughts. And a billion is a thousand millions. And a trillion is a thousand billions. So it's a hundred thousand million. 17 of them. Okay, that's how much we just spent on COVID. Now let's just talk about how many— let's just get— break down the figures here. If you believe the COVID death figures, around 7 million people, whatever figure you want to pick, which of course includes people that died with COVID and you know, the fact that they denied a lot of treatment to folk, they didn't do anything, even vitamin D or anti-inflammatories or antivirals, that was foreboding for some reason, and the disastrous effects of remdesivir and disastrous move of moving the COVID sick into nursing homes initially when we were panicking, and all these other things affected lockdowns and inappropriate use of ventilators, you know, the midazolam scandal, and not to mention very staged spikes in excess deaths since the vaccine campaign. But 7,000— 7 million people, if you were to look at that figure and divide it by 2 realistically, a lady from the CDC said it's probably about 30% of the figures that are being quoted. But anyway, um, all these are references available later if you need them. So being cautious, if we divide the stated number of deaths and we divide it by 2 even, okay, and don't forget the vast majority of these deaths were more than 80 years of age with more than 4 comorbidities, okay? So these are very old, quite sick people, okay? The vast majority of these poor people that died with COVID 3.5, that's 3.5 million older, very sick Westerners. Okay, largely spent $16 trillion on that effort. To save the lives of 1 to 3 million poor kids, $100 million. Putting those kids 160,000 times less valuable than the effort we just made for code. Quite a, quite a statement. I know that was probably Brent. Sorry, Brent, you're not gonna like that.

That was me.

That was you. So yeah, there's the difference in spend. Okay. And there's no getting away from that. That's what we spend to protect the other end of We're talking about children here, which is the opposite end of the spectrum. Women and kids first. Kids first. Okay, just to finish up, UNICEF— not quite finished, almost there. UNICEF: the impact of vitamin A supplementation on reducing child mortality is comparable to, if not greater than— I favor the latter— than any single immunization against a childhood disease. Long known as a cause of blindness, vitamin A deficiency has increasingly been recognized over the past decade as significantly heightening children's risk of dying from the most common diseases of measles and diarrhoea. A review of the randomised controlled trials investigating the use of vitamin A to prevent measles death found there was a 64% reduction in the risk of mortality in children who were given 2 megadoses of vitamin A, as they were doing above, compared to placebo. And that figure jumps to 81% if you use the new water-based vitamin A supplements twice a year, as they were doing above. For a dollar. 81% reduction in measles deaths. Do we do it? No. Instead, the focus is purely on vaccination. So just one more cost-benefit analysis of that, and then we're done. Sorry, lads.

Uh, so, uh, oh, sorry, can you still hear me?

No, I can't really improve on that. But anyway, look, to cut a long story short, about 20 years ago the figure was about $3 per child to vaccinate, and now it's $4 to $5 to vaccinate for measles. You know, $1 for vitamin A, that covers an awful lot of diseases and blindness and reduces diarrhea, which is the top killer of kids. And, you know, the measles, 81% reduction, all that kind of stuff for a dollar. $4 to $5 for the measles vaccine. Okay. In 2011, the World Health Organization, annual budget of $6 billion for marketing, let's face it, African region, they adopted a target of eliminating measles by 2020. The WHO, good old WHO, eliminate measles by 2020. You know, you know, 2 weeks in lockdown, we'll be rid of COVID and just take these there, 17 boosters need to be sorted. So good old WHO, who denied the vaccine patents to developing countries, remember. Nigeria received the most amount of doses. The target was to vaccinate 95% of the population. They did exactly that. They got in the main state studied 95.9% vaccine coverage, 95.1% in another state. So they did very well in Nigeria. How well do they do on the measles front? Despite significant progress, this is UNICEF, in reducing measles burden and mortality, the disease is still common in many parts of the region. In 2020, only 13 out of 47 countries had measles under control, incidence of less than 1 case per million. So despite this, Nigeria has experienced repeated outbreaks of measles. 35 of the 36 states and the federal capital experienced at least one measles outbreak last year. Let's assume all those measles vaccinations were safe and effective. There you go, little rant finished. I just thought I'd get that out. How amazing vitamin A would be if we spent $200 million protecting 100 million kids.

Yeah, I think it's a really good example of if there's money in it, then the big pharmaceutical companies are all over it. If there's no money in it, They don't care. I think, and I'm really cynical about this and I apologize, but I think they don't care about health. I think they care about giving their dividends to their shareholders. That is the prime thing, is to have a successful business. Been doing a lot of reading and, and podcasts about this recently. Um, But I think we're all on that, on that, on that page, uh, more or less, uh, between, between the three of us. Yes, yes, yes. Um, okay, so let's just go to, for the real basics, going from the esoteric and, and, and frighteningly horrible and cynical to the, the, the, the more simple. So people are saying, how much vitamin A does my dog need? Can we just go over that? As far as I'm concerned, if you're feeding a good raw diet and you're feeding some liver on a regular basis— what does that mean? At least twice a week, 3 times a week, 4 times a week— you're going to be absolutely great to go, because you really, really need to go to town on liver in dogs, feeding liver in dogs, in order to get an excess of vitamin A. Yeah, because remember, they can pee it out up to about 65%. So vitamin A is probably not a problem unless you go insane and you feed nothing but polar bear liver for 2 years. Okay. Or, you know, really high vitamin A liver for years and years and years and years and years. However, if you are kind of subclinical or you're not feeding enough liver because I don't know, you like, don't like the feel of it in your fingers or the dog doesn't like it or something like that. If you're a bit low on vitamin A, then you you can get all these problems— problems with viruses, problem with the immune system, problems with cancer. It is correlated with reducing cancer through the genetic effects and through improving immunity. And, uh, it's a great antioxidant.

It's a great antioxidant, and it's a massive antioxidant. And the thing to remember, there are other concurrent diseases. So anything that increases fibrosis especially of things like the pancreas, which reduces the normal digestive processes, can interrupt with that fat uptake and therefore also the vitamin A uptake. So there are a couple of concurrent diseases to be aware of that could mean you need to supplement. But other than that, I absolutely agree with you, Nick. You know, the majority of raw foods that, you know, all of you guys are going to be feeding out there should be more than adequate in vitamin A levels. But if you are getting certain symptoms, I think we should just reel off the various diseases that we would think of being associated with vitamin A deficiency, because we did say we've only mentioned a couple, and I think we should really just go back over those just so that everybody's clear. You know, we've talked about dry eyes, we've talked about issues with degeneration of the retina, so loss of night vision, so night blindness. We've talked about the scleral sort of cream cheese materials, plaques that can occur. They can even get submandibular swellings around the lymph nodes as well. Looks like mumps in humans, can occur in animals. A couple of other things, bone weakness, So, you know, it's just, you know, just fractures that occur for no apparent reason. If that's occurring, you know, it's certainly something to be considering, especially if they— if you look at the diet and there's other issues going on there. Hyperkeratosis. So this is one of the things that we use vitamin A for and zinc. And E alongside that sometimes. But it's if you're getting hyperkeratosis of the skin, so that's folliculitis and increased scurf and skin scales coming up through the coat. You know, think about that could be improved with improved levels of vitamin A. Anything else, guys? Come on, I've gone through a lot. I'm just wondering whether there's anything else.

Cancer. Cancer. Remember cancer? You know, if your dog gets a diagnosis is cancer, it's unlikely that it's because it's like your dog is low in it. But I think it's worth thinking, am I feeding enough high A foods? Either cod liver oil— be careful about that, and it's got to be sustainable and it's got to be low mercury and what have you. Am I feeding enough liver? Am I feeding enough organ? Am I feeding enough fish oils? Am I feeding enough greens and what have you? I think that these, these are just signs. The way to make dogs healthy and to prevent as much as one can is to feed a variety of real whole foods, as well grown as you possibly, uh, can get a hold of.

One of these, um, just going back to the basics, one of the, one of the deficiencies of vitamin A, the reason it can come about even if your dog is raw fed Actually, in liver, the vitamin A content of liver, give or take, who said, who knows, okay, in 100 grams of it, of liver, you're talking 16,800 international units of vitamin A, 17,000 international units per 100 grams of liver. So in a kilo of raw dog food, and there's always liver in complete raw dog food, they never forget that one, okay, sometimes they can't get the kidney in or the whatever, but they always get liver in, it's quite cheap per kilo, so it's always in there. And people, raw feeders, wouldn't like to see a complete raw food without liver in it, so you're always getting about 5% 10% liver in her raw dog food, give or take. So 50 grams of liver is 8,000 international units of vitamin A. Okay, your dog needs 5,000 in that kilogram of dry food, but it's good, it's raw, so it's going to change that a little bit. But in other words, if you've got liver in there, your dog can't be deficient. But some things can lead to deficiency, and things that upset the gut and absorption can be an issue. And I was just having a look at what else can cause a vitamin A deficiency in a dog. And pancreatic insufficiency can cause it. But then they said Giardia. Giardia was second from the top of the list, so I had to do a quick Google and I went to Scholar, and they said, yeah, chronic intestinal infection with Giardia, which is so common in, certainly in your gut sick dogs, can lead to malabsorption featuring a selective deficiency in vitamin A.

This is back to that fibrosis and building up. I mean, humans, they talk about cystic fibrosis being one of the issues that can cause vitamin A deficiencies as well. So you watch out for those in cystic fibrosis cases. So anything that could cause chronic inflammation and therefore fibrosis and poor uptake would be responsible there for any of the vitamin supplement deficiencies. Yeah, but I think we, we've, we're running low on time. We've got to think about, just for these guys, a little bit about excesses, what to watch out for at the other end of the scale, because I desperately want to talk about the people that have been using cod liver oil for arthritis cases for years. So are we okay to move on?

Can we move on to 1946? Should we do it in Patreon? Let's do it in Patreon.

Yeah, there's two questions that are hanging over us there. So is there enough in 80/10/10s? Claire, yes, if it contains liver, 5% liver, you cannot be deficient in vitamin A even stall-fed cattle are going to have vitamin A. So it's absolutely, it's fine. Another question there was, so can they get anything from carrots? Probably not a lot. Cats almost, I would not, probably not. Dogs maybe a little, although we're a little bit unsure, and Bren's got a bit of evidence to show us later on.

Yeah, and that's been posted on Facebook as we speak.

So how efficient? And last question here, guys, I have a Dalmatian and we don't feed liver, it's too high in purines. So what do we do instead? Eggs. Eggs is one. Yeah. Dairy. Is dairy possible for Dalmatians? I don't know the purine content of that, to be honest, offhand.

Oils. So, you know, there are obviously oils that are out there which will take out some of the purines. You'll just be living, you know, so some of the fish oils and things like that will have it in.

Yeah.

But just be really aware, guys, that just because you've got Dalmatian doesn't mean you can't feed purines. Okay, there are some, some Dallies who can do fine on purines. Okay, so make sure that you go the extra mile there and don't say it's white with black spots, therefore it can't have any organ.

That's not the case. Okay, some of the tests for uric acid, so look at the tests and monitor that. You know, that can be done at home.

You can do genetic testing on that one, I think, as well. Anyway, guys, right, we need to jump over to Patreon because I need, I need to shoot Okay, all right, thanks very much everyone.

I love that, I love these vitamin ones and minerals.

The vitamin ones are great. What are we— okay, so what are we doing next week?

I don't know, we'll just look at the list and pick the most interesting one during the week as we normally do.

Yeah, it just rushes up on us so fast. We have a diary somewhere that says all of the subjects that we should be talking about.

Yeah, did we not have the next 3, 4 months?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do we not have a guest next week?

I know, sorry. No, because we had Ellie last year—

last week, didn't That was our August guest.

Anyway, we'll see. We'll get to it.

We just like to give the impression that we're doing this on the hoof.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We have a whole team of people behind us here. Gotta spend the money somewhere.

The 2 and the 4-year-old don't count.

Did you hear her screaming on the bed there? Oh, she's improved. She's 2 and a half now. She's just kicking off. Gosh, he just— Daddy, you're yucky. It'll stand to her later in life, but at the moment, oh, jingle, hard to manage. Anyway, okay guys, that was great. We'll see you over on Patreon.

Don't forget, if you want to sign up for our talks in December, December 2nd, please look at the Eventbrite. Thanks, Karen and Fiona, for pushing us and organizing us. A little bit better. We'll be putting that to the top. So if anybody wants tickets, please be sure to book through that site. That'd be great. And for everyone else, if you want to join us over on Patreon in about an hour, we'll give you the what to look out for for excesses, how long it takes to get things back to normal and right, and when we should be looking at that. So see you over on the other side shortly. So bit on the side.

Patreon.

Bit on the side. Good night, everybody.

Good