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My notes and thoughts from Michael Palmer‘s Presentation on Brood Factories

In beekeeping, efficient resource management is key to thriving hives. Michael Palmer introduces the concept of brood factories—a game-changer for any apiary. This strategy can transform how you support and expand your bee colonies. Here’s a deep dive into the essentials of brood factories and how they can elevate your beekeeping practice.

What is a Brood Factory?

A brood factory is a hive specifically managed to produce surplus brood and other resources. Think of it as the powerhouse of your apiary, consistently supplying brood to boost other colonies or start new ones. This approach ensures your bees are always ready to tackle the challenges of the season. Michael’s focus is on having a large number of laying queens in the apiary.

Flexibility in Hive Types

Any beehive style can be used as a brood factory, as long as you stick to the same frame size across your apiary. This compatibility is crucial for easy transfer of brood, honey and pollen frames to other hives.

Strategic Uses of a Brood Factory

Brood factories are versatile and can be deployed in various ways to strengthen your apiary:

1. Boosting Weak Colonies: Transfer frames of hatching brood to weaker hives to boost them.
2. Boosting Honey Production: Supplement honey-producing hives with additional brood at the right moment to maximize their workforce and yield. This is a highly effective way to produce honey during a flow.
3. Boosting Cell Builders: Provide emerging brood to cell builders, ensuring strong cell builders that build healthy and productive queens.
4. Starting Nucleus Colonies: Use the extra brood to create new nucleus colonies to expand your apiary or for more sustainability.

The Power of Bee Bombs

One of Palmer’s standout techniques is the “Bee Bomb.” He places a box of capped or emerging brood at the bottom of a slow or weak hive, triggering rapid population growth. This sudden boost can revitalize a struggling colony. Note that he says not to do this to a hive that need to be requeened or has a legitimate problem, but rather to boost hives that struggling to get going.

The Mechanics of Brood Management

To manage a brood factory effectively, follow these key practices:

• Frame Harvesting: Every 10-14 days take a couple frames of brood from each resource hive. Remove enough brood to prevent swarming but not so much that it slows down the hive’s overall growth.
• Empy Frame Placement: Place empty frames of comb or foundation in the center of the brood nest, surrounded by existing brood. This encourages the queen to lay more eggs, expanding the brood nest.
• Queen Spotting: Always make sure you don’t accidentally remove the queen when taking brood frames.
• Honey Management: Take some honey frames from the brood factory if needed to provide space for nectar. This prevents the hive from shrinking the brood nest when it backfills with honey.

Creating Nucleus Colonies

When setting up nucleus colonies (nucs), it’s crucial to balance the mix of resources:

• Include a frame each of honey, mixed brood, capped brood, and empty comb.
• Avoid using all capped brood; mixed brood (with both capped and open cells) is better for holding bees, ensuring they stay and nurture the new colony.

Seasonal Adjustments

As the season ends, it’s important to prepare the brood factories for winter:

• In the fall scale back each brood factory to 3 or 4 frames of brood to focus on building up for winter.
• Maintain a smaller hive size going into winter for easier management.

Managing Varroa Mites

Varroa mites are a persistent threat, but brood factories offer a strategic advantage:

• Since you frequently remove sealed brood from brood factories, you can delay mite treatments slightly.
• However, prioritize treating the hives that received brood from the factory, as these are more likely to have increased mite loads.

Preparing for Winter Feeding

Winter preparation is crucial for hive survival:

• Assess and mark each hive based on its food stores.
• Start feeding as soon as the fall nectar flow ends, typically when you no longer smell goldenrod curing in the hives.
• Early feeding ensures the bees have ample stores to make it through the winter.

Michael’s Seasonal Playbook

Palmer’s approach to brood factory management throughout the year is straightforward:

• Spring: Focus on building up the colonies’ strength.
• Summer: Harvest brood for cell building and gradually reduce colony size to prevent swarming.
• Fall: Create nucleus colonies and prepare the brood factories for winter.
• Winter: Maintain the brood factories as smaller, manageable units ready to ramp up in the next season.

My Thoughts (Josiah)

The success of brood factories lies in maintaining the right hive size. Colonies thrive when they’re not too small or too large. Regularly removing frames of brood and honey keeps the hive in that sweet spot, allowing for continuous growth and quick recovery from resource extraction.

For my apiary, using 8-frame medium hives, I plan to scale back to one box in the fall as this size of hive has overwintered very well for me in the past. I envision setting up hive stands where production hives are at the corners and brood factories are positioned between them. This setup should streamline management and ensure easy access to resources when needed.

Final Thoughts

Brood factories are a powerful strategy in beekeeping, providing a flexible and efficient way to manage hive populations and resources. By adopting Michael Palmer’s methods and tailoring them to your apiary, you can enhance the health and productivity of your bee colonies, ensuring a healthy and thriving beekeeping operation.

Introduction

The carnivore diet has gained popularity in recent years, with proponents claiming various health benefits. However, some individuals on the Carnivore Diet may experience anxiety and other negative symptoms such as feeling of being wired and tired, or even severe insomnia. In this blog post, I’ll share my personal experience with anxiety on the carnivore diet and a theory on why this happens to some people. I’ll also provide some ideas for successfully navigating the carnivore diet in a way that minimizes negative symptoms like anxiety and insomnia.

While I’m not a medical professional, I hope this information sparks a discussion and helps shed light on the potential role of glutamate in causing anxiety. Please comment with any ideas, corrections or insights that you have.

My Personal Experience with The Carnivore Diet and Anxiety

Curiosity led me to test the carnivore diet during the initial Covid-19 lock-downs. Social gatherings were limited, sparing me the awkward conversations about my unique dietary experiment of consuming only animal foods.

However, soon after starting the diet, I encountered unexpected negative effects. Anxiety, and a constant state of being wired replaced the calm I had hoped for. Sleep became elusive, leaving me tired and wired upon waking, reminiscent of the over stimulation caused by excessive caffeine intake. As weeks went by, the situation worsened, leading me to halt the experiment after three weeks.

Because my diet primarily consisted of grass-fed beef, tallow, eggs, and some dairy—a fairly standard carnivore diet—I decided to search for explanations for these symptoms. I eventually developed the following glutamate theory, and I discovered that many others had similar experiences of anxiety on the carnivore diet.

The Glutamate/GABA Balance – Anxiety and calm

The theory I am considering revolves around the balance of glutamate and GABA, important neurotransmitters in the brain. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, while GABA is a calming neurotransmitter.

In the past I had done getnetic testing. After reexamining my genetic SNPs, I discovered significant polymorphisms in the GAD1 genes, responsible for converting glutamate to GABA. I suspect individuals with these polymorphisms may struggle more with the carnivore diet due to the higher glutamate levels in many of the foods which are commonly consumed.

An imbalance with high glutamate and low GABA has been associated with various problems, including sleep disturbances, increased blood glucose levels due to elevated cortisol, psychiatric disorders like anxiety and OCD, migraines, diabetes, and neurological conditions.

If you want to know if you have any GAD1 SNPs, consider checking using tools like the Nutrahacker complete mutation report.

Examining Glutamate Content In Foods

To further investigate, I took some time to compile a list of common carnivore and non-carnivore foods and their glutamic acid (glutamate) content per 100 calories. Not surprisingly, many of the foods I was consuming on the carnivore diet were high in glutamic acid. Interestingly, many of the carnivore foods recommended by the carnivore community to alleviate the anxiety, wired/tired problem, such as fat, eggs, butter, and cream, had lower glutamic acid content. Incorporating more of these foods moderately improved my symptoms. Meats like fish, turkey, shrimp, beef, and poultry tend to be higher in glutamic acid.

I find it interesting to consider the staple diets of various cultures before the advent of Western processed foods. It appears to me that even cultures whose diets were closest to the modern carnivore diet consumed foods that could offset the intake of high-glutamate foods. Take, for instance, the Inuit; although their diet predominantly consisted of animal foods, they consumed a significant amount of animal fats, which are much lower in glutamate compared to muscle meat. This may have helped balanced their consumption of high glutamate foods. Another example to consider is the Maasai. While their diet was predominantly meat-based, it also included a substantial amount of milk, which has significantly lower glutamate levels.

I will include the charts of glutamic acid in foods at the end of this post. However, it’s important to note that some publicly available databases may have slight disagreements, making the information not entirely precise. Nevertheless, the charts should provide a good idea of the types of foods that have the highest glutamic acid content. This will allow you to experiment with lower glutamate carnivore foods to see if it helps to reduce your anxiety and insomnia.

The Impact of Free Glutamate

It’s important to understand the concept of “free glutamate.” Glutamic acid converts into free glutamate, which is easily absorbed and can act as an excitatory neurotransmitter. Cooking and aging increase free glutamate levels. Slow cooking, in particular, seems to be problematic, but even aged, uncooked meat can have high levels of free glutamate. Aging beef enhances flavor and tenderness but unfortunately increases free glutamate. Additionally, if you thaw meat in the fridge before cooking, it further elevates free glutamate levels. Fatter cuts of meat have lower glutamate levels, as fat has very little glutamate. This might explain why some people report feeling better on higher-fat cuts of conventional, grain-fed meat.

Considering Glycine

Glycine is often recommended to balance the consumption of muscle meats which are high in Methionine. However, from my research and personal experience, glycine may exacerbate the effects of a high glutamate/GABA imbalance. If your glutamate/GABA ratio is already high, glycine might intensify the excitatory effects of glutamate. Some argue that this excitotoxicity also leads to brain cell death. Foods high in glycine include muscle meats, while fat, butter, cream, and dairy tend to be lower in glycine content. In general the patter is that foods high in glutamate are also hig in glycine.

Ideas for Balancing Glutamate Levels

1. Mind Your Diet: Consume more low glutamic acid foods and less high glutamic acid foods. For more information, refer to the charts provided at the bottom of this post. The foods toward to bottom of the list are important to focus on eating if you are dealing with anxiety.
2. Cooking and Aging: Reduce your intake of slow-cooked and aged meats. Opt for rare-cooked meats since cooking and aging can raise free glutamate levels. Inquire with your butcher about the duration of meat aging before butchering and their aging methods.
3. Exercise: Engaging in regular physical activity may help reduce glutamate levels in the brain.
4. Eat More Fat: Incorporate healthy saturated animal fats into your diet, as they have lower glutamic acid levels.
5. Front-load Glutamate Consumption: Consume glutamate-rich foods earlier in the day rather than towards evening. This may help you avoid the overstimulating effects of glutamate when it’s time to sleep.
6. Prompt Meat Cooking: Minimize the time meat spends in the fridge before cooking to avoid increasing free glutamate levels.
7. Moderate Bone Broth Consumption: Avoid long-simmered bone broth, which may contain higher glutamate and glycine levels.
8. Exercise Caution with Supplements: If you are prone to high glutamate levels, avoid those containing glycine, such as Magnesium Glycinate, TMG (Tri-Methylglycine), Betaine, Collagen, or any supplements bound to glycine (Check for glycinate, bisglycinate, trimethylglycine, etc., on the bottle).

Conclusion

I found my experiment with the carnivore diet to be very interesting and insightful since it helped me to learn a lot about myself and glutamate. While I don’t plan to adopt the carnivore diet, I firmly believe that animal protein is a cornerstone of a healthy diet, offering nutrient density, excellent bioavailability, low toxin content, and easy digestibility.

While I don’t claim to have all the answers, I hope sharing my experiences as a grass-fed beef farmer and nutrition enthusiast sparks a discussion. The potential impact of glutamate causing anxiety and other problems on individuals following the carnivore diet is an important topic to consider. Remember, I’m not a medical expert, so it’s crucial to consult with a healthcare professional before making any significant dietary changes. If you’ve had similar experiences or have insights to share, I welcome your feedback. Let’s engage in this discussion to promote better health and well-being for all.

Carnivore Foods – Glutamic Acid High to Low (grams per 100 calories)*

Non-Carnivore Foods – Glutamic Acid High to Low (grams per 100 calories)*

*These charts should be taken with a few grains of salt. I used the data I could find in publicly available databases and not all databases agreed. However, I think a clear picture is presented of the types of foods which are higher in glutamic acid.

There are many different ways of eating that lead to good health results. Weston Price did research on the traditional diets of healthy indigenous and non-industrialized groups of people and he found a wide variety of diets. For example the fat content in some healthy diets was more than double of other healthy diets.

Even though there are many ways to eat healthy, there are 2 keys to healthy eating I want to highlight. I believe every healthy diet should be low in toxins and high in nutrients. This may seem obvious, but it can be difficult to achieve in the modern world.

Eat a Low Toxin Diet

Eating a low toxicity diet is a fairly common concept. It’s the principle behind the push to buy organic foods. It is important to avoid toxins in our diets when we can. However, man-made toxins aren’t the only toxins to avoid. Toxins that occur naturally in plant foods are also something we need to be careful to avoid.

Many cultures ate plants as a part of a healthy diet. These traditional healthy cultures were aware of the dangers of plant toxins and had special ways of preparing plant foods to remove and reduce naturally occurring toxins.

For example, traditional sourdough bread likely resulted in much less toxins from grain. Katherine Czapp explains in this article. “The traditional sourdough process reliably neutralizes the anti-nutrients in the cereal grains as the flour is kept moist and acidic for many hours (or days). Ongoing research in cereal microbiology is investigating some preliminary evidence that the traditional sourdough method may also sever the bonds of the “toxic” peptides in wheat gluten responsible for the celiac reaction and neutralize them as well.”

Eat Nutrient Dense Foods

The second key to healthy eating that is as important or more important than the first, is to eat nutrient dense foods. In addition to avoiding harmful compounds, We should eat foods that contain plenty of compounds our bodies need for health. Nutrient density was one of the commonalities of healthy traditional diets that Weston Price found in his work.

None of us lives a toxin free life, so our bodies must be equipped to deal with and remove toxins. One of the big benefits of a diet rich in nutrition, is that it helps our body access the raw materials to deal with the toxins in our food and environment.

Eating a nutrient dense diet is something that our culture has largely forgotten. We’ve focused on organic and other fancy food labels like cage-free or antibiotic-free. It’s great to avoid the bad, but let’s make sure we also eat food that contains plenty of good nutrition.

It can be difficult to find nutrient dense food. Often the organic versions of foods we find in the grocery store are similar in nutrient content to the non-organic ones. Despite the reduction in chemicals, the production of most organic food is nearly identical to that of non-organic foods and results in food that lacks nutrient density.

How to Improve Your Diet

The basis of your healthy diet, should be prioritizing nutrient dense food.

If you can find food that contains a high level of nutrition, your body will have what it needs to do all the amazing things it does! Your body will also be able to more easily eliminate toxins from your environment and the food you eat. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to find nutrient dense food in the supermarket.

It’s important to find a local farmer you trust so you can learn how they raise nutrient dense food. I would recommend going to Local Harvest or Eat Wild and looking for farmers near you. Feel free to ask these farmer’s questions about how they are producing nutrient dense food, till you find one you trust.

Secondly, know about the toxins in your food and work to reduce and eliminate them.

Learn which plant foods have naturally occurring toxins and avoid them or learn how to prepare them to reduce the toxins.  Learn to make sourdough bread or how to Lacto-Ferment vegetables.

Talk to your farmer again and ask them how they reduce the toxins in the food they produce. Ask them if they feed their animals with organic or chemical-free feed. Ask about what chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers they use (if any) in their production practices.

I would recommend prioritizing the purchasing of chemical-free or certified organic food in the following way. First meats and animal products, then grains, then vegetables and fruits. We often think of vegetables and fruits when we consider buying organic. However, it is more important to focus on meat and animal products because toxins bioaccumulate higher up the food chain making animal products an important place to start when purchasing chemical-free. Secondly, grains are important to consider purchase organic as the conventional model of producing grains is highly dependent on the use of many toxins. After all, many of our modern grains, like corn and soy, are designed specifically so herbicides can be sprayed on them without killing them. The reasons I would focus on vegetables and fruits last is because many vegetables and fruits and grown without the use of herbicides and pesticides and they also do not bioaccumulate toxins like animals do. It’s best to learn which vegetables and fruits are most problematic and prioritize those when purchasing chemical-free or organic. Checkout the dirty dozen list here.

I hope this article was helpful as you make decisions about purchasing the healthiest food for you and your family. Remember to prioritize nutrient dense food by learning to know your farmer’s practices. Don’t forget about avoiding plant toxins in addition to chemical toxins. These two principles should serve you well. Stay Healthy!

Occasionally I’m asked by friends “How can I find grass fed beef near me?” Often, we receive requests to ship beef, but there may be better options if you can locate a local farmer you trust.  Here is one way to find a local farmer where you can buy grass fed beef.

One option is to skip the local farmer and buy grass fed beef in your grocery store.  As the health benefits of grass fed beef have become more well known, many grocery stores have started stocking grass fed beef.  This can often be your most convenient option.  However, there are some things to watch out for if purchasing grass fed beef in a grocery store.  First, there is sometimes less than truthful marketing.  For example, a lot of beef that is finished on grain is marketed as grass fed.  This is often conventional beef with a “grass-fed” label added to it and is probably not what you are looking for.  In fact, the conventional way to produce beef is to raise it on grass and pasture and then finish the animals on grain.  These animals do technically eat grass at some point in their lives, but unfortunately the nutritional profile of beef changes rapidly if finished on grain.  Finishing animals for even a few days on grain before butcher can dramatically change the nutrient profile of the meat. If you are want true grass fed beef, you should look for 100% grass fed beef.  If you want to know the details of how the animals were raised, grocery store beef is likely not your best option.  Finding a local farmer near you is a great way to learn exactly how your grass fed beef was raised.

How do you find a local 100% grass fed beef farmer?  If you don’t have any friends or family raising 100% grass fed beef the I recommend two online directories: Local Harvest or Eat Wild.  These directories allow you to quickly find the closest farmers and what they are selling.

To use Local Harvest type “grass fed beef” in the search bar at the top as well as your zip code.  This will give you a list of farmers near you that sell grass fed beef.  To learn more about the farm, click on the listing.  Listings will often have contact information so you can reach out to the farmer to get more information.

To find grass fed beef on Eat Wild click on “Shop for Local Grassfed Meat, Eggs & Dairy” on the left hand side of the site.  From there, you can click on the state where you live.  Then click on the map twice to see where each farm is located in your state.  Zoom into the area of your state closest to you and look for red pushpins which signify farms.  Click on the pushpins nearest you to learn about the farm, the products they offer and how to contact them.  Eat Wild also has some great information on their site.  You can learn about the basics of grass fed, health benefits of grass fed, and grass fed environmental benefits.

I hope this article helps you find local, high quality, grass fed beef.  Finding a local farmer you can trust is a great way to source the highest quality, nutritious food, support your local farmer, and benefit the environment.  Good luck on your search!

Every day with few exceptions I move my herd of cattle to new pasture.  This mean that each day I setup a new fence, move the cattle water bowl (and clean it out if necessary), move the mineral feeder and move my herd into this new pasture area.

Many people wonder why I go to the trouble of moving my cattle daily. It’s a lot of work to move cattle each day rather than leave them in one larger area, but there are important reasons to take the time to move your herd each day.

Daily moves improve the quality of the pasture over time.

Good pasture requires grazing in order to be healthy, but if the animals are given constant access to the full pasture they will overgraze plants.  This means that they will choose the most valuable plants and graze them repeatedly without letting the plants recover.  Eventually these valuable plants die out and the pasture quality diminishes over time.

Moving cattle daily also improves the pasture quality by distributing the animal impact more evenly.  Many people think that animal impact is negative.  However, properly managed herds of animals are critical to improve pasture health.  By moving animals daily manure is distributed more evenly providing a natural fertilizer to the pasture.  Daily moves also help animals to trample uneaten, less desirable plants.  This trampling of plant material into the soil helps to feed soil life improving overall soil and pasture health.  Without daily moves cattle tend to favor certain spots which become overgrazed and over fertilized to the detriment of that area as well as the other areas of the pasture.

Daily moves improve the health of the animals.

Daily moves mimic the natural behavior of large grazing herds in the wild.  One reason this leads to better health outcomes, is that the animals have a large diversity of plants to choose from when grazing as discussed above.  Daily moves lead to increased species diversity in the pasture allowing animals to easily meet their nutrition needs.

Also important for the health of the animals, is the daily moving away from fly and parasite pressure.  Because the herd is constantly moving away from it’s own manure, they end up moving away from flies that will hatch over the coming days.  Parasite pressure is also dramatically reduced by moving the herd daily, as an animal will not return to an area that was previously grazed for quite some time.  This breaks the parasitic cycle that  happens when animals are able to continuously graze and manure one area.  Nature has its own way of sanitizing and sterilizing a pasture through sunlight, rain and biological life if given enough time before re-grazing.

Because I move my cattle daily, it is easy to check in on my animals each day and make sure there are no health problems developing.  This makes it more likely that animals will stay healthy than if the cattle are seen infrequently.

Daily moves keep animals calm.

Daily moves do require quite a bit of extra work each day.  However, the additional work results in calm animals that are easier to work with.

An animal that sees the farmer each day becomes familiar and comfortable with being handled and moved each day.  This familiar routine results in much calmer animals than those who are not used to daily moves.  This makes loading animals for butcher easier, which in turn leads to more tender, tastier meat.  It also make the farmer’s life much easier when cattle escape a fence as they are more cooperative when being moved back into the pasture.

Daily moves improve weight gains in the long run.

If there is one thing that will very quickly negatively impact the bottom line of a cattle operation, it is poor weight gains.  Getting consistent and sustained weight gains results in more profitability, better meat quality and healthy animals.

Moving cattle daily leads to improved weight gain over the long run.  It would be easy to obtain high short term weight gains by turning cattle out onto a large piece of land and not moving them.  Cattle could select the plants that they most preferred leading to good initial weight gains. However, as pasture quality declines due to not moving cattle, weight gains will start to become poor.  Parasite and pest pressure can quickly rise without daily moves causing a significant negative impact on weight gains.

Many of these problems with weight gains can be avoided by properly managing your herd and moving them frequently.

Daily moves improve the environment and wildlife habitat.

One of the biggest myths is that cattle are always damaging to the environment.  When cattle are fed their natural diet of pasture and managed properly with daily moves, they are one of the most important tools for healing land, building soil, and restoring habitat for wildlife.

When cattle are allowed to roam over one entire area wildlife have no place to hide.  In contrast, when cattle are moved daily there is always some area of the pasture with taller grass and other areas with shorter grass.  This allows a wide variety of habitat for wildlife.

Mimicking Nature

Moving cattle daily is a great way to mimic nature and provides many benefits to the environment, the animals, the farmer and the consumer of the finished product.  These are some of the reasons why I take the extra time to move my animals each day.  In the long run, it’s worth taking time to move your cattle daily!

A couple years ago, after doing some genetic testing, I found out my body has a Vitamin A problem.  Or I should say had a problem.  But before I get into that, let me tell you a story.

As a kid I was very healthy.  My parents helped provide balanced meals and I got lots of exercise.  In middle school I started running cross-country.  I loved the sport and spent lots of time and energy trying to figure out how to get faster.  I decided that I should eat less fat and more carbohydrates.  I recently pulled out an old journal from health class in middle school and I had written “I am not going to eat butter on my bread because it is not healthy.”  I can remember that I followed this principle quite a bit.  In addition, because I had heard of the principle of ‘carb loading’ I began to eat a lot of carbohydrates so I could run faster.  I tried to eat mostly carbohydrates and avoid fat.  This meant I was consciously eating more grains and less animal foods that contained fat, protein and other important nutrients.  At home, meals were generally what would be considered well balanced. If I went to a church potluck or somewhere else where I had the opportunity, I ate A LOT of carbs.  It seems there is always plenty of pasta, bread, desserts and other high carbohydrate, low fat foods at a potluck.

As I got older I experienced two very common health problems.  Declining vision and acne.  These are considered very normal parts of life for many teenagers.  My vision started to get worse in elementary school and the acne started around high school.  I believe it was somewhere around the 4th grade that I got glasses.  And it seemed every year I needed to get a new prescription.  My eyes were getting worse.  The acne got worse as well.  I tried all the normal things to combat acne.  I washed my face religiously. I tried many face cleaning products and topical medications. I tried oral medication like antibiotics.  I ate a low fat, high carbohydrate diet.  Nothing seemed to work.  In fact it seemed like a lot of those things had no affect on my acne.

I certainly didn’t eat the best diet in college.  Remembering those days, I ate a lot of cereal, bread, ice cream, orange juice, oatmeal, low fat yogurt, pasta, pizza and ice cream.  I remember quite a few suppers of ice cream mixed with cereal. What was I thinking?  I certainly was eating significantly less meat and animals products than I do today. Soon after college, it seemed the acne improved somewhat.  However, my eyesight continued to decline.

Both the declining vision and acne persisted well into my adult years.  I had always heard that I would grow out of my acne.  However, I remember in the weeks leading up to my wedding (I was 24 years old at that point), hoping that my acne wouldn’t be too bad. I had contacts by that point which was great, but each year at the eye doctor my prescription got worse.

After getting married to my beautiful wife Carmen, things began to change.  First of all, I was eating significantly better than I had been in college thanks to her tasty and healthy cooking.  Second, Carmen began to share information with me that challenged my beliefs about what a healthy diet was.  Two of the first books I remember her reading were Gut and Psychology Syndrome and Nourishing Traditions.  I began to question whether a low fat, high carbohydrate diet was really healthy.  I also became motivated to start learning more about nutrition.  Wow!  I quickly learned how wrong my nutritional beliefs were.  Over time I realized there were numerous healthy fats and that meat was healthy as well.  I learned that consuming a lot of carbohydrates, even whole grains, could cause health problems.  I also learned that the way animals are raised dramatically affects the nutrition in our food.  I admit it, I became that annoying person that tells all their friends and relatives all about what I learned and how they should change their eating habits.  I also became a grass-fed beef farmer.  Here’s where things got really interesting.

After becoming a beef farmer and eating a diet more focused around red meat and vegetables, I realized that my acne was almost always gone and my eyesight had stopped getting worse.  I’ve now been mostly acne free for about the length of time that I’ve been a beef farmer.  I say mostly acne free because I still do get pimples from time to time.  Generally this happens soon after eating my old high carbohydrate, low fat, low meat diet.  For example I got one or two pimples recently after being at a hotel for breakfast.  What did I eat at that hotel’s free breakfast?  Something like this: Waffles with butter and syrup (that fake maple syrup), fruit loops with low fat milk, fat free sugar sweetened yogurt, scrambled eggs on an English muffin with a turkey sausage patty.  That’s a far cry from my normal breakfasts of steak and/or eggs and a glass of raw milk or occasionally homemade baked oatmeal or granola with whole raw milk.

Now there’s a little secret about the way I eat (OK there’s two secrets but I’ll tell you the other one later), I eat a diet that happens to be very high in preformed Vitamin A also known as retinol.  Beef liver, which is incredibly high in retinol, is a common meal at our house.  If you calculate what I eat compared to the average American, it would be quite evident that I eat significantly more retinol.  We’re getting to how real Vitamin A changed my life.

In 2015 I started my interest in genetics as it relates to nutrition.  I mailed out my saliva sample to have my genetics read, got my results back and started to learn how to interpret them.  I took the raw genetic data and ran it through some websites which could show what polymorphisms I had in my genetics.  A polymorphism is just a word that means “a difference” or a “genetic variation”.  As it turns out we’re not all the same!  I found out all kinds of things that were interesting, like my slow metabolism of caffeine, which explained why I could drink a cup of tea when I got up in the morning and it would affect my sleep that night.  In 2016 I found out something very important about my genetics, that I wished I had known my whole life. My body is significantly impaired at converting beta-carotene from plants into retinol (the form of Vitamin A the body needs).  I have learned that real Vitamin A (retinol) is very important for skin health and eye health.  It is no longer surprising to me that I struggled with two health issues that retinol is critical for.  I don’t believe retinol is the only thing that has helped heal my skin and stopped my eyesight decline.  However, I do believe that consuming foods high in pre-formed Vitamin A is a very important part of what brought me healing.  I also believe for those of us who have one or more BCMO1 polymorphism (between 40% and 50% of all humans), it is critical for our health to eat a diet that contains foods with plenty of retinol.  This polymorphism is one of the main reasons why some people’s health declines so quickly on a Vegan diet.  If you do have a polymorphism that inhibits the conversion of beta-carotene into retinol, consider eating more of the foods that contain pre-formed vitamin A: dairy, meat and especially liver.  Even if you don’t have a polymorphism that inhibits your conversion of beta-carotene to retinol, you should still consider increasing the amount of retinol in your diet because there are many people who are poor converters due other factors.

Here’s the other secret I promised you and I hope it’s good news to you.  I don’t always eat healthy and I don’t think you need to eat perfectly either.  I try to eat a higher fat, lower carbohydrate, nutrient dense, diet most of the time.  If I’m out with friends or on vacation or on a date with my wife, I don’t worry too much about following this way of eating.  Having fun is also part of staying healthy. The way I see it, if you’re eating right most of the time and occasionally eat poorly, your overall health should be very good.

I believe that real Vitamin A has truly changed my life for the better.  I wrote this article so that you could understand how important true Vitamin A (retinol) has been in my life and learn how it can help you.  I hope that learning this information will help you make changes to live a healthier, happier, and longer life and to help others around you do the same.