Increase Testosterone Level Naturally With Vitamin A!By Ed ClementsPlease feel free to replublish muscle-health-fitness.com articles. You MUST, however, include the the paragraph marked * at the bottom of this page. Vitamin A is often recommended for maintaining clear eyesight, supporting the immune system and ensuring correct cell division and growth, but you won’t often hear a doctor or nutritionist recommending you take Vitamin A to increase testosterone level naturally!
Despite this, studies suggest that by regularly eating Vitamin A rich foods you are helping to keep your anabolic hormones at optimal levels, allowing for greater increases in lean muscle weight and strength.
Keep up to date with the latest research on how to optimise anabolic and fat burning hormones, subscribe to the 'Muscle-health-fitness Ezine’. Subscribe and immediately receive four excellent free eBooks containing high quality information on building muscle and burning fat! For more information on accessing my free eBook downloads page click here. Use Fat soluble Vitamin A to increase testosterone level naturally and lower estrogen! Whilst ensuring a good supply of all of the fat soluble vitamins is crucial to good health, Vitamin A in particular is important in raising testosterone levels in the body. I talk a lot on this website about the benefits of testosterone, but let's quickly recap on all the great things testosterone can do for us: * Improve muscle mass and strength There's a fair amount of research showing that low Vitamin A levels result in lower levels of available testosterone, and that Vitamin A is also crucial in the production of testosterone. In one study on adolescent boys who were experiencing a delayed puberty, researchers found that correcting a Vitamin A deficiency with 6000 IU Vitamin A per week, with iron, ‘improved growth delay in CDPG to a similar degree as hormonal therapy.’(1) At the beginning of the study, Luteinising hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and testosterone levels were low in all subjects. The results are astounding! 1) ‘All active treatment groups (vitamin a and iron treated, and steroid treated) experienced a significant increase in growth velocity for the study period when compared with the control group. The magnitude of this increase was similar between treatment groups.’ 2) At 6 months, 100% of the Vitamin A and iron supplementated group was noted to have an increase in testicular volume to greater than or equal to 6 mL compared with none of the other active treatment groups or control group. At 12 months, all participants in the active treatment groups experienced an increase in testicular volume to 6 mL or more. 3) IGF-1 level increased in all active treatment groups. 4) ‘Vitamin A supplementation improved growth hormone levels in nine of 12 children treated.’ Vitamin A and iron supplementation allowed these adolescents to gain lean body mass by improving their anabolic hormone status i.e. increased ‘available’ testosterone, igf-1 and growth hormone levels. Vitamin A and iron were as effective as anabolic steroids at promoting growth in these adolescent boys! Chris Masterjohn describes the mechanism by which Vitamin A can increase testosterone level naturally: ‘Vitamin A crosses the blood-testis barrier in its alcohol form as retinol, where it is stored in the Sertoli cells and converted as needed to its more biologically active form, retinoic acid. Experiments with rats show that greater concentrations of Vitamin A in the testes increase basal testosterone secretion, as well as transferrin, which is responsible for the transport of iron; and a variety of growth factors including IGF-binding protein 4 (which transports IGF), androgen-binding protein (which transports androgens), transforming growth factor-beta (which causes cell growth but suppresses cancer) and steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (which is responsible for the transport of cholesterol into the mitochondria for its conversion to steroids). Vitamin A also decreases estrogen production in the male testes. Rats that are deficient in Vitamin A experience decreased testosterone until the accessory sex organs atrophy, indicating that Vitamin A not only aids in, but is essential to, testosterone production.’(2) So, ensuring a healthy Vitamin A status is not only essential to increase testosterone level naturally, but it will also lower estrogen levels! Controlling your estrogen levels is one of the most effective ways to lose fat, so as well as helping you to build muscle Vitamin A could help you to lean down as well. What foods supply Vitamin A? If you studied the diets of old school natural bodybuilders like Vince Gironda, Tony Sansone and the Saxon brothers, you would find that they contained an abundance of foods rich in Vitamin A. Typically these men would eat large quantities of eggs, butter and other dairy products, and would supplement their diets with desiccated liver (high in Vitamin A). Besides Vitamin A, these foods contain many other components that increase testosterone level naturally such as zinc, saturated fat, cholesterol and high quality protein.(see this article for more information on how diet affects T levels). It is not difficult to get the levels of Vitamin A you need to increase testosterone level naturally if you, like these great bodybuilders, eat eggs, butter and dairy products, and maybe occasionally have some liver pate or shellfish! You can also include colourful vegetables such as carrot, squash and swede that contain pro-Vitamin A (carotenes) in your diet. There is a lot of debate as to how effective the conversion of carotenes into true Vitamin A is. We know that in certain disease states such as diabetes and hypothyroidism you can’t make this conversion well, and children and the elderly also struggle with the conversion. It appears that beta carotene is the most easily converted of the carotenes, so you might want to prioritise eating orange vegetables such as carrots, butternut squash and sweet potatoes to get the amounts of Vitamin A you need to increase testosterone level naturally. The conversion of carotenes to true Vitamin A only happens when fat is included in your meals. This is because the conversion is carried out by bile salts and fat splitting enzymes in the upper intestinal tract – low fat meals don’t require bile or fat splitting enzymes so none become available to turn the carotenes into true Vitamin A. If you eat foods such as eggs and butter with the majority of meals, the fat naturally in these foods will ensure that the pro-Vitamin A in your vegetables will stand the best chance of being converted to the true Vitamin A that will increase testosterone level naturally.
Low fat, high protein diets damage testosterone levels! Diets that are high protein quickly deplete Vitamin A stores. Eating the ludicrously high levels of protein that many bodybuilders do will deplete Vitamin A levels and will depress your testosterone levels. Mary Enig, Phd writes, ‘High-protein, low fat diets can even cause blindness (due to Vitamin A deficiency), as occurred once in Guatemala where huge amounts of instant non-fat dry milk were donated in a food relief program.'(3) This is Vitamin A deficiency reaching extreme levels, but even a slight Vitamin A deficiency could cause lesser symptoms such as low anabolic hormone levels - something we don’t want! Studies show that a reasonably a high fat diet , i.e. 35% or greater, promotes optimum testosterone production. Whilst, the high levels of fat and cholesterol in such a diet will probably be the driving force behind the improved testosterone, one of the reasons for the testosterone increases could be that the high fat foods will be supplying you with much more Vitamin A than foods on a low fat diet would. The requirement for Vitamin A goes up with strenuous exercise and, particularly, heavy exercises such as squats and deadlifts that require great levels of testosterone to be performed. By choosing to eat low fat, low Vitamin A foods, many bodybuilders are probably creating a sub clinical Vitamin A deficiency that is causing low testosterone levels and undermining their attempts to build muscle and to get ripped! Improved protein utilisation! What a lot of bodybuilders and strength athletes don't understand is it’s not how much protein you eat but how much you utilise that is important in gaining lean muscle mass. As we’ve just seen, Vitamin A levels become depleted on a high protein diet and this means testosterone levels may fall below optimal. As well as this, some studies suggest that low Vitamin A levels may also mean protein is used less efficiently than it is when adequate vitamin a is consumed. Rodents who are fed a Vitamin A deficient diet synthesise protein at a slower rate than rodents fed sufficient Vitamin A.(4) Also, in vitro, muscle cells injected with Vitamin A and Vitamin D derivatives showed ‘increased protein content per cell’ whereas controls did not after a 72 hour incubation.(5) Safety Even though vitamin a is able to increase testerone level naturally, you don’t want to consume too much Vitamin A. Very high doses of Vitamin A , i.e. 300,000 IU plus, can cause acute toxicity symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and a splitting headache. Long term supplementation of high doses of Vitamin A have the potential to cause hair loss, dry skin and liver damage. Aside from all the above concerns, studies have shown that getting too much Vitamin A will not increase testosterone level naturally but will actually suppress testosterone levels. In the study on adolescent boys, only 6000 IU/ week of vitamin a was used to increase testosterone level naturally. This amount (and much more) can easily be reached through eating Vitamin A rich foods daily, so I don’t feel most people need to supplement – and this cuts out any toxicity risk entirely. Another word on toxicity... There are numerous experiments showing that the amount of natural Vitamin A ingested before it becomes toxic is much higher than with synthetic Vitamin A supplements.(6) Another thing to bear in mind is that the amount of Vitamin A you can handle safely drastically increases when you get sufficient levels of Vitamin D every day(8). This is one of many reasons why everyone should make sure their Vitamin D level is optimal, and should either supplement vitamin D3 or get enough midday sun each day to keep it at a healthy level. (Vitamin d has also been shown to increase testosterone level naturally).
Finally... If you are already eating enough Vitamin A to increase testosterone level naturally then eating more will probably not improve your gains... ...But, if you're one of the many bodybuilders and strength athletes that has become slightly deficient in this crucial vitamin, then adjusting your diet so you get enough every day could make all the difference in your struggle to gain size and strength! * Ed Clements, creator of muscle-health-fitness.com, is an independent health and fitness writer who specialises in dietary, supplementation and weights training advice for improving body composition and hormone balance.
5 Related Articles: Useful Sites: References and Footnotes (1) Zadik, et. al., "Vitamin A and iron supplementation is as efficient as hormonal therapy in constitutionally delayed children," Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2004 Jun; 60(6):682-7. |
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