| | Water Fasting

What's the upper limit of vitamin A?

Couldn’t make sense of what I found: “The UL for vitamin A from retinol is 3,000 micrograms of preformed vitamin A.”

A slice of pan fried beef liver has 6272.6μg of Vitamin A. In my understanding of the text, this food alone would have exceeded the safe limits, but that doesn’t look credible.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamin-a/

https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/168627/wt1

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Answer

Keep in mind the UL is based on daily intake. So if you ate a slice of beef liver only once or twice a week, on average, you’d be below the TUL.

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Retinol toxicity is somewhat rare, usually only seen in people consuming actual supplements containing retinol, or people consuming overtly excessive amounts of liver.

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Beta-carotene, another form of vitamin A, effectively has no upper limit since the body can excrete it.

Answer

Most stuff I’ve read on eating beef liver, which I’ve just added into my diet- says not to exceed 4 oz per week. I split that up between two days, even though that would put me above that daily intake on the days I eat it. I think it matters more to keep your daily average below the UL. 4 oz per week is an average of about 1,250 micrograms per day, excluding any other sources, so I think I’m OK.

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