Vitamin A and “The Little Deuce Coupe Syndrome”
By: Richard Sarnat, M.D., Thomas M. Newmark and Paul Schulick

“Oh it’s my little deuce coupe, you don’t know what I got!”
—The Beach Boys

>Many of you reading this are Baby Boomers, and if you’re at all like the authors you perhaps still reminisce about your teenage years and the crazy things you used to believe (and sometimes do!) Do any of you remember that wonderful Beach Boys’ song, “My Little Deuce Coupe,” a simple ditty of youthful exuberance (ignorance?). Dreaming of high velocity and high performance, the Beach Boys sang the glory of, what else?, fast sports cars. The song, we think, was a teenage metaphor: Life challenged us, demanding to know: How fast is your car? And the song boasted, with throbbing hormones, “Oh, you don’t know what I got!”

At least that’s what we think the song was all about – horsepower, megapotency, invincibility through technology. And maybe that was an acceptable answer for us lo, those many years ago, but we were naïve, and hadn’t learned that faster was not always better, or that high-tech didn’t always mean healthy and natural. After all, we were still eating Twinkies^® and Ding Dongs^® and staying up all night, and we didn’t understand that real food could have a life-force, a soul. Goodness knows, we had hardly begun our life’s journey.

We have a few more years on us now, and we wonder: Is the “Little Deuce Coupe” still an acceptable answer? When it comes to human nutrition and health, is faster and stronger better? Is our dietary path to be an asphalt highway, or should it be somewhere in the mystery, the complexity, of whole food? Put another way, is supplementing our diets with high-octane, mega-horsepower vitamins a wise choice, or is there a more sensible and natural solution to life’s dietary challenges? These are the issues we have explored in our recent book The Life Bridge (Herbal Free Press 2002), and we return to them again with a special focus on Vitamin A. So, as another song of our youth proposed, “Let’s start at the very beginning”….

The Things We Know For Sure

First, what we know, with a fair degree of confidence, about Vitamin A:

1. If a person doesn’t have enough Vitamin A, a chronic deficiency can lead to eye inflammation, deterioration, and blindness. Vitamin A deficiencies can manifest, in their most benign forms, as simply dry hair and dry or broken nails. Vitamin A promotes protein synthesis and cell differentiation, helps to regulate our immune systems, helps to maintain the surface linings of the intestinal, urinary, and reproductive tracts, and it plays an important role in promoting the integrity of skin and mucus membranes. It is important to note that Vitamin A deficiencies are extremely rare in the United States and the developed world, for the vitamin is richly present in dairy, beef or chicken liver, and a host of fortified foods;
2. We also strangely know, for sure, that there is an inconsistency in the public scientific record on the RDA for Vitamin A. The FDA has an RDA labeling standard of 5,000 IU (1515 micrograms or mcg, on a conversion ratio of one microgram of retinol or its equivalent equaling approximately 3.3 IU of Vitamin A) and the National Academy of Sciences recommends 700 mcg (2,330 IU) per day for women, 800 mcg (2.640 IU) per day for pregnant women, and 900 mcg (3,000 IU) for men, with a “tolerable upper limit” of 3,000 mcg/day for both men and women (approximately 10,000 IU).
3. Finally, we know with strong conviction that too much Vitamin A (from either foods like beef and chicken liver or supplemental Vitamin A palmitate/retinol sources can, on a chronic basis, be highly toxic and lead to:
   1. Birth Defects, for one study has indicated that even modestly excessive chronic intake of Vitamin A from retinol (10,000 IU daily) has potentially teratogenic (fetal deformity) effects if consumed in sensitive periods of pregnancy, especially prior to the seventh week. In 2000, a comprehensive article entitled “Retinoids in Embryonal Development” authored by scientists from the FDA, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and Harvard Medical School reported that a prospective study on 22,000 pregnant women found “an association between the consumption of >10,000 IU vitamin A/day from supplements and an increased risk of birth defects of all types.”;
   2. Hypervitaminosis A in animals during a growth stage can lead to bone fractures and skeletal abnormalities; and
   3. In adult humans, chronic hypervitaminosis A has been associated with progressive calcification of ligaments, increased bone resorption, osteoporosis, migratory arthritis, hepatosplenomegaly, and increased intracranial pressure with secondary papilledema and/or diplopia. On an “acute” basis, toxic levels of Vitamin A can lead to nausea, vomiting, dizziness, blurred vision, and muscular uncoordination.