 Man, for not having slept in three days, I look pretty good. As many of you know, I haven't been sleeping well. And to give some background, I took a drug called Accutane like eight years ago and that damages your liquor. It's essentially concentrated vitamin A. The sleeping issue specifically started 2018, around March, after I got back from shooting season nine of the TV show MasterChef. When I was out there, and I didn't really think about this, I took Tylenol and Advil like clockwork for about a week and a half straight. And I stuck to the recommended dosages. I never exceeded the dosages on the medication, but that probably exacerbated and compromised my liver health, especially considering I was on Accutane in the past. And this drug Accutane is actually the reason I started the carnivore diet in the first place. Before I stopped producing the enzymes, I needed to break down carbohydrates. I used to eat sweet potatoes, rice, fruit as a bodybuilder, and my body just wasn't digesting it anymore. So there's definitely some long-term damage that has compromised my digestive system from this drug. And I decided to finally get some blood work and figure out what was going on, why I can't sleep. I'm always mindful of vitamin synergy. The importance of balancing fat-soluble vitamins A, D3, and K2. Problem is, it's not always that simple. These nutrients have complex interactions and other precursors. Despite all of this speculation, how my body was responding to taking vitamin D, vitamin A, like eating liver, or taking your vitamin D3 supplement, it's very hard to gauge which one you are deficient in. For those of you that don't know, the laws in the New York tri-state area are very strict regarding doctors and blood work. A doctor has to write the script regardless of what it is. You can't order it online, you can't pay out of pocket for itself, and you're considering my health insurance and I don't really have a doctor I can trust. Had a very hard time getting this blood work done. That's why it took so long. So starting with vitamin B12, my levels were 1483 on a scale of 232 to 1245. This is what vegans usually brag about having a high B12 level. It doesn't really matter because vitamin B12 is water soluble. So if you fasted for a few days, then this number would go down drastically. And not really what I was looking for, but I got it tested anyway. Vitamin A retinol was 50.6 on a scale of 18.9 to 57.3. Towards the high end of normal, nothing crazy. And this is what we were concerned about because Accutane is vitamin A. It's supposed to damage the liver by causing it to store large amounts of vitamin A. I thought this number was going to be a lot higher. So this doesn't seem like an issue on paper. But vitamin A and vitamin D3 are antagonistic. And my vitamin D3 is 37.2 on a scale of 32100. Ideally, in the context of my high vitamin A level, this should be at least 65 to 70, possibly even higher to be in line with slightly elevated serum retinol. Keep in mind, I have been avoiding any high vitamin A food for the past few months. I haven't eaten any liver. I've also been tanning every single day this summer. So I'm sure several months back, the discrepancy between my vitamin A and vitamin D was even more severe. If I have to guess, my serum retinol was definitely above the safe reference range and my vitamin D might have been as low as 15, 20 or 25. So far what I've been doing over the past few months has been correcting this to some degree. But I definitely have to start supplementing the vitamin D3 again and continue to avoid any super high vitamin A foods. So another speculation I had was that my zinc to copper levels were imbalanced. My serum copper was 118 on a scale of 75 to 166. And my zinc was 663 on a scale of 440 to 860. So both are in the safe reference range. But just like vitamins A and D3, zinc and copper are antagonistic. The ratio is supposed to be at least 8 parts zinc to 1 part copper. Problem is that this serum mineral level in your blood isn't always an indicator of tissue levels so I don't know whether to trust this or not. But if we were going by this, my copper is a bit high and my zinc is a bit low. And the high liver consumption that I was eating before giving it a break explained this. I actually remember when I was still bartending in 2017, I bought two cases of foie gras which for those of you who don't know, it's fatty duck liver to delicacy. I literally ate like a pound and a half of liver a day for like three months straight which is absolutely insane and crazy. And that would actually explain why my copper and my vitamin A were potentially so out of whack. I followed the carnivore diet for six years and everything was fine but then I went crazy with a non-natural amount of liver. Moving on to iron, levels were normal, 315 in the reference range of 250 to 450 but that is blood levels of iron. Ferritin cellular iron was high, 470 on a scale of 30 to 400 and some of you might be familiar with hemochromatosis which is iron overload in the cells. This serum ferritin level is indicative of that but it's not that simple. Serum ferritin can be elevated in people with liver damage or just inflammation in the body. This is not necessarily an indicator that I am consuming too much iron and if you look up the symptoms for hemochromatosis, heart palpitations and insomnia, this is hitting the nail on the head to some degree. So what I can do is get some blood drawn and that should lower my serum ferritin to some degree. The thing is if this is being caused by vitamin A driven liver damage, this wouldn't address the root cause, this can just alleviate the symptoms in the meantime. So I'm going to try to make some sense of all of this. We need to address the vitamin A to vitamin D3 ratio, the copper to zinc balance and certainly the high ferritin levels. How this started gives a hypothetical solution. What triggered my insomnia at that point in February and March was consuming dairy. Yes, when I came back from MasterChef I wasn't sleeping well but I tried some raw dairy and it just blew everything out of control. I couldn't sleep for weeks, it was insane. I'm assuming the vitamin A content of the dairy threw my vitamin A to vitamin D ratio off even further because the amount of vitamin A in dairy is substantially higher than what I would normally consume in just meat. Also, calcium inhibits zinc absorption, making the copper toxicity worse. So I'm assuming, oh I might not have been having too many problems related to vitamin A at that time over a year ago, although I probably did. I think the copper toxicity was a lot worse. The real problem here is that I never detoxed my liver from Accutane. I know I joke a lot about detoxing but this is actually legitimate. We've said several times that Accutane is concentrated retinal, concentrated vitamin A, a synthetic form, it accumulates in the liver and it has been said that some people become unable to detox vitamin A as a result of taking this drug, being permanently damaged. I don't believe that, but whether that's true or not, I guess I'm going to find out. So to detox vitamin A, I have to obviously avoid foods like liver, which leaves me with lean muscle meat, which would be fine, but now I have this high ferritin issue, so I should be avoiding red meat and the iron content, even though red meat isn't too high in iron, especially compared to shellfish and organ meats. Consuming anything like dairy or fish is much lower in iron, but can't do dairy because of the vitamin A content. We also have vitamin D3, which is antagonistic to vitamin A. So if I start supplementing vitamin D3 again, that will lower my vitamin A. I could also go to the tanning salon, that will help that a little bit. And of course, what I think caused all of these issues in the first place was the lack of magnesium and vitamin K2 in my diet that is needed for vitamin D3 absorption. So I guess I had a lack of vitamin D3 throughout the past year or so, but I was tanning and I was using a vitamin D3 supplement on occasion. I just think my body wasn't utilizing the vitamin D3 because I was deficient, definitely in vitamin K2, possibly in magnesium. Our modern lack of soil quality, how we're raising our foods has depleted a lot of the nutrients, especially magnesium and vitamin K2. So despite me consuming some of the highest quality animal foods I have access to, I've still been unable to balance my nutrients properly. It's impossible to go overboard on vitamin K2 and I definitely wasn't consuming enough fermented foods. The amount of vitamin K2 in liver is definitely not enough and considering I'm ingesting large amounts of vitamin A, large amounts of vitamin D3, you need the vitamin K synergy to utilize those nutrients. So I want you guys to know that just because you're following a nutrient-dense animal-based diet, you still need to get a lot of sun, you still need to take a vitamin D3 supplement, you still need to be very conscious of your K2 intake and even if you're eating a lot of egg yolks that do have vitamin K2, egg yolks do have vitamin A which does counteract the vitamin K2. So the presence of fermented foods like raw high-quality cheeses, any type of fermented meat, fermented animal product needs to be present in the diet in fairly large amounts. But how does this apply to you? I can't say it does. Out of the hundreds of clients I've had, I have never seen one person with an issue like mine and that's probably because I haven't consulted anyone that has taken Accutane and had Accutane-induced liver damage. If you guys are questioning how much of these nutrients you should be taking in, I've done three videos that are very important. One is titled You Should Tan Naked, where I discuss vitamin D3 and taken dosage. Another is liver is a superfood, discussing nutrients in liver and the recommended amount, as well as why you need vitamin K2 and Mk4. This is part of the reason I despise doctors as well as the medical establishment in general. They have ruined the lives of everyone in my family to some degree just so they can buy their daughter a new Mercedes or have a yacht. Any person that has an MD after their name, in my experience, does not have good intentions. That's why they became a doctor in the first place. And, you know, everyone in my family has been damaged besides my brother. I'll probably have my mother tell her story sometime this week. As you guys know, my sister is mentally disabled and my father was prescribed medications that essentially ruined his mental state. I had my liver destroyed because no one around me was able to educate me on a diet that could fix my acne. But I'd probably do it all again. Because without me taking that poisonous drug, I would have never created my YouTube channel, started the Carnivore diet, and improved the lives of tens of thousands of people. So with the bad comes the good. Hopefully things get a little bit better. So thank you guys for joining me today. You can please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon, share the video if you can. Listen, I've had people come directly to me and say, hey, should I take Accutane? I'm taking Accutane. And I tell them I literally will scream at them. I will curse at them. I'll tell them, do not take that drug. Do not take the drug. And no one listens to me. They still take it. And I'm sitting here eight years later wondering if I'm going to need a liver transplant. It's completely crazy. So if you guys do want to support me further, check out Frankie's free range meat. Looks like I'm going to be eating a lot of salmon roe in the future because it's low in iron. But again, that doesn't really apply to most people. You can also check out Frankie's Naturals, Minimal Ingredients, Minimally Processed, Hygiene and Cosmetic Products. Is that why I still glow after three days of not sleeping? Or was I just chiseled out of marble? Well, I guess at this point in time, I am forged out of iron with the levels of ferritin in my blood, right? I guess make a new statue for that one. Thanks again for joining me, guys. Enjoy the rest of your day.