Z3R0Gravitas Yea I have light sensitivity/photophobia from when I messed up my neck back in 2021 and honestly speculate my screen issues may simply be due to that. Because the screens I can use and tolerate (my dell TN monitor) and my CRT TV, all emit very low levels of light.
I scoped your self treatment protocol and want to say, tread carefully. I think the author sounds brilliant but he is only half right. Some minerals like manganese or copper should be not supplemented or focused on in diet. If you eat a food with it, fine. But don't purposely try to get a lot of it as high doses of them in the body can mess you up. Iodine is super tricky and you can induce hypothyroid and worsen chronic fatigue if you mess that. You can also go in the other direction and induce hyperthyroid. Just too risky with that.
I also completely disagree with his view on a "active vitamin A deficiency". No one in a developed country has a vitamin A deficiency and I would even go as far to say there is a silent epidemic of hypervitaminosis A because of how ubiquitous it is in foods, government mandated supplementation of it in foods (very famously in dairy), and cultural propaganda from things like "eat the rainbow" and influencers pushing to take liver pills/ eat liver, eggs, sweet potatoes, and other high vitamin A sources which slowly build up in the body and burden the liver.
Your guy writes about how retinol (vitamin A) turns into retinaldehyde, an aldehyde which builds up and burdens the liver and ADH/ALD enzymes. This is correct. Where I think he gets it wrong is he is conflating a low level of All-trans-retinoic acid (active form of vitamin A) to be the reason people are experiencing symptoms when I think a lower All-trains-retinoic acid is actually signaling a larger problem - excess vitamin A in the liver.
Like he said, aldehyde overload can burden the ALDH enzyme, which doesn't allow retinaldehyde to convert to all-trans-retinoic acid to then leave the body. So the solution isn't to supplement retinoic acid, but to instead fix the bottleneck. And the bottleneck is the excess vitamin A coming in, regardless of form (carotenoids or retinol), which then get stored as retinal esters in the liver, which then turns into retinaldehyde, which again is building up in excess, burdening the ALDH enzyme, so then the body cannot convert it into retinoic acid.
Do not for one second think retinoic acid is good for the body. To give you the easiest example to visualize how bad it is for the bad, think of those yellow chemical peels people put on their skin. It is literally burning off their skin cells. If this can burn the cells of the skin, imagine what it can do to the cells inside of your body, especially epithelial cells.
I would urge you to look at all these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AccutaneRecovery/
Accutane is the active form of vitamin A. So if you want direct anecdotes of how bad it is to supplement that and how much it can destroy your body, read this subreddit.
https://ggenereux.blog/my-ebooks/
Read Grant Genereux's free ebooks on how he reversed his eczema, and chronic kidney disease (which he was going to die from) by eating a low vitamin A diet. His doctor told him to basically get his affairs in order because there was nothing he could do for him and he refused to accept that. He reverse engineered common triggers of eczema (since that bothered him more than his kidney disease due to the pain of eczema) and found out that 9 of the top 10 eczema trigger foods were high vitamin A foods. He basically tried to cut down to as little vitamin A as he can get in his diet, literally going down to just eating beans, rice, and red meat (beef or bison), and reversed his eczema in 1.5 years and his kidneys are fully healed. He's been on the diet for 10+ years now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHtvZdfqo78&t=2103s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMF56gzc-UI
See these videos from Dr. Garrett Smith He refutes any argument doing apologetics for vitamin A, goes over how the early studies on it were wrong and that everything vitamin A was purported to do, zinc and taurine were actually doing, and argues that vitamin A is likely a plant defense chemical that builds up in the body and is a big variable in the cause of chronic disease.
Look into the works of researchers Anthony Mawson and Stephanie Seneff. Anthony does studies on how vitamin A causes chronic diseases, Stephanie does studies on glyphosate and how it inhibits the later conversion steps of vitamin A in the body (this circles back to what your guy was talking about earlier and goes hand in hand with the ALDH bottleneck issue).
I've been eating low vitamin A for close to a year now (started 1/1/2025) and it straight up brought me back to life. Prior to this, I was dealing with much worse screen intolerance, terrible sleep-maintenance insomnia, debilitating muscle tension, digestive problems, and when the histamine/MCAS stuff started happening, I knew it was time to make a change and that's when I started the diet.
I feel more hopeful about the future than I have in years, honestly probably half a decade even. I just feel incredibly good these days. Well rested, calm, and strong. I don't think my diet of bananas, apples, peeled green kiwis, oats, beans, white rice, whole wheat pastry flour used to make homemade bread, steak - all low vitamin A foods, I don't find this diet restrictive at all. It's not some weird cultish, internet diet thing where I'm restricting a whole macronutrient, or swearing off plants or swearing off meat entirely. I'm just picking foods that are low in vitamin A and there's plenty to choose from, even beyond what I personally eat. Meals make feel great and I look forward to every meal.
If you want to learn more, message me. I don't want to get all preachy about this and I wrote enough info here to get someone started who is interested.