Vitamin A
Quentin said:
The good news is I have my bg well under control. One unanswered question for me is how long one needs to have the blood glucose under control to have the liver function returning to normal.
Marty responds:
The constant push of glucose into the liver drives VLDL formation and as a result of this metabolic push, the liver is not able to convert come of the beta-carotene to retinol.
Alcohol will do the same thing. Among Americans, 30% will have a confirmed vitamin A deficiency at the time of death when a liver biopsy is done to check vitamin A stores in the liver.
This high incidence of vitamin A deficiency is believed to be caused by diabetes and/or alcohol use. Most of the vitamin A in the diet is from the carotenoids, not from the animal preformed retinol so if your liver conversion is not working very well, you can develop a vitamin A deficiency even if your diet is high in carotenoids.
In undeveloped countries, vitamin A deficiency is estimated to affect about 50% of the population but there the problem is intestinal parasities which block the gut conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A.
There is no good blood test for vitamin A status though Spectra Cell says their assay will provide information on the vitamin A status in white blood cells. The first symptom of a vitamin A deficiency is night blindness which occurs when the liver storage pool drops below 50,000 IU.
A normal liver storage pool should be around 500,000 IU. If the pool gets up to the 3-5 million IU range, liver damage can start to occur.
Carotenoids will never give this kind of storage pool (cause liver damage) because once the liver has a normal storage pool, it stops converting any beta-carotene to retinol.
Liver is the only animal tissue with good amounts of retinol. The eyes (if you were to eat them) have the aldehyde form (retinal). This has to be reduced to the alcohol (retinol) before it can be absorbed in our gut.
Most tissues in the human body use the retinoic acid form of vitamin A and this can not be absorbed and it can not be converted back to the alcohol (retinol).
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