Vanaquafacts

With the increasing popularity of the carnivore diet or other low plant diets, I’ve come across more and more claims suggesting that plant sources of vitamin ...A are inadequate. As usual, let’s take a look at the validity of these claims. While animal foods contain preformed vitamin A, plants contain provitamin A carotenoids that we convert into vitamin A upon consumption. The common claim is that the conversion is not adequate to maintain healthy levels of vitamin A. This is simply not true. We have data on men in Bangladesh, a population that is at risk for deficiency, in which consumption of spinach or sweet potatoes raised levels after 2 months of regular consumption. In fact, high carotenoid plant foods may contain so much provitamin A, that even poor converters wouldn’t have a problem making enough vitamin A. A great 2011 publication calculated how much orange sweet potato would be needed to reach vitamin A requirements in various age and sex groups, using a very conservative conversion rate, and they found that only 0.27 to 1.49 cups would be needed by a lactating woman, who has greater needs than the general population. For a 3 year old child, only 0.02 to 0.13 cups would be needed. It is clearly very easy to hit vitamin A requirements with plant foods. I must mention that there is one case report involving an individual with a very rare genetic mutation that results in incredibly low conversion rates. In this case, medically supervised preformed vitamin A supplementation may be a good idea, but certainly does not apply to the vast majority of the population, nor does it necessitate animal food consumption. In fact, excessive preformed vitamin A consumption, which can occur with supplements or animal foods such as liver, can lead to toxicity and liver damage. This is just another reason to focus on plant sources. References in the comments : @natashanagra See more

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