Quote from Dr. Garrett Smith on November 13, 2018, 7:36 pm

If you have seen me refer to the "Bosnia anecdote" here on this site and elsewhere like FaceBook, here it is.

Very astute observations here.  Yes, I had previously given her Vitamin A supplements, before I was aware of their innate toxicity.  We all make mistakes...now that I know better, I'm going to do better.

Hi Dr. Garrett,

I wanted to tell you since I have discontinued Vitamin A supplements, my calcification on my left wrist that was a size of a marble ball and very hard and painful at times dissolved completely within first two weeks. My wrist now looks normal and I have no discomfort or pain that it is coming back.  I was not even doing low Vitamin A diet since that was very soon in your research and I did not have foods to avoid, but just stopping the supplements dissolved the wrist issue. The wrist ball calcification started when I started taking Vitamin A supplements at the beginning of your program. I never had it before. But I also think that my diet in general was low in Vitamin A since we mostly eat our traditional food which is rich in potatoes, meat and white flour. We eat mostly fruits than vegetables so I was lucky there not to eat so much of red/orange/green colored vegetables. 

Also I think I told you this once, but farmers market here is full of Slavic people, mostly us and Russians. We never buy red, orange or green peppers. They are considered very hard on your stomach. If we ever buy peppers, we only buy Hungarian Gypsy peppers. They are very light yellow in color. Our staple vegetables are potatoes, cabbage, leeks, white onions, lots of garlic. I don’t remember eating much more vegetables than that. Also, we never ate potatoes once baked and cooled. They were considered a poison once cooled for few hours after baking. Potatoes are only eaten immediately after cooking them and thrown away after cooled. My grandma would throw them away at night after we had some left from dinner. She used to say that they convert to poison once cooled. She used to do the same with our tea. Poison after cooled for few hours. I was listening your last podcast and now I am listening the one from today. It is crazy how much connection I am making being raised back home and how much truth there is to everything you are saying.

I was thinking about how strong my father, his father and my aunts are back home. You mentioned how strong people were before. When we were back home few years ago, we were trying to get the couch up the stair to the 2nd floor and my aunt from my grandma’s side pushed us aside and pulled the couch upstairs all by herself. She was 87 at that time and is still alive.  This was a full wood built quality couch as heavy as horse. She also got the fridge up all by herself. Older women back home are like Rambos and they can usually have anywhere between 5-10 kids. I have a video of my uncle flipping a bull upside down on his own. He had his own shop in the village where he would work with metal and make horse shoes and do something with horse and bulls legs, but that required him to tie the bull and flip him so he could work on his shoes. Here, I feel like no guy could do that. Guys are more like girls here. 

I have been wondering this for many years now. How did we get so strong and tall back home if we never are this many vegetables and as much as Americans do or eat in general as much as Americans do? My brother is 6’7 and like a mountain, my husband is 6’5 and like a tank, I am 5’9, my father is the strongest man I have ever seen at 6’4 but like I told you before, he wakes up around 5am and makes his own bread. He eats the entire bread for breakfast with meat, and does same for lunch and dinner. His job was very physical but he would easily work 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week. He is unbelievable strong. 

There is a lot of things now that I am connecting that you are saying. It just keeps spinning in my head. Like we never ate pumpkins. You said they are poison. My grandpa would only grow few so we can take the pumpkin seeds out and roast them with some salt. I never tried the pumpkin until we we came here. The only thing now that I am wondering about it that they never drank their coffee black. The reason for that would be that all old people used to say that black coffee would “bite” your stomach like a black snake. A splash of cream was always added so it does not bite their stomach. Probably to counter off the acid of the coffee. There are so many things that are coming up to my mind. Looks like they knew more than we do know now. 

I also wanted to ask. On your last post about postpartum depression and Vitamin A, I read that Zn is stored in ovaries and sperm and highly needed and used to develop a baby while in mother. Could it be that Zn has something in raising Vitamin A if Zn gets depleted during pregnancy, and mother is left depleted which accumulates all that Vitamin A and rises Copper and gives her postpartum depression. I feel like Zn keeps Vitamin A in check. Does it work that way? Zn is also called an anti-depressant in one of the articles I read. I personally know that one starting the high doses of Zn, I am a completely different person than before. I wake up early on my own not exhausted, I can work like a horse now, my mental health is 1000x better, my motivation is back, my emotions are back to normal again and I am no longer feel despair and hopelessness.