Can You Get Vitamin A From Plants? It Depends on Your Genes. | Chris Masterjohn Lite #43

Can you get vitamin A from plant foods? It depends on your genes.

Listen to this podcast to learn how to figure out your BCO1 genetics and how this impacts your vitamin A requirement.

Vitamin A is found in the form of carotenoids in red, orange, yellow, and green vegetables, and in the form of retinol in animal foods, especially liver. BCO1 helps you convert the carotenoids to retinol, which is the form you need to have in your body to be healthy. Many of us have genetic impairments in BCO1. In fact, for genetic reasons alone, if you took 100 of us, half of us would make the conversion less than half as well as the other half. A quarter of us would have our ability to make the conversion slashed four-fold.

But it isn’t *all* about genetics. There are many other factors -- thyroid health, iron, protein, zinc, vitamin E, parasites, oxidative stress, heavy metals, polyunsaturated fats -- the list just goes on and on for the things that can affect this conversion. Knowing your genes is helpful, but only one piece of the puzzle.

Listen to the podcast for how I recommend handling this.

I recommend testing your BCO1 genes with StrateGene, which you can get here:

chrismasterjohnphd.com/strategene

For more information on how to get the StrateGene report, watch this video:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2017/12/04/know-need-care-mthfr/

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Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.