How to use liver capsules to avoid too much vit A?

Does anyone know how to take liver capsules (ovine) without raising vit A levels too much? It is not recommended to eat liver daily but rather once a week, but how do I know how to dose liver capsules? My doctor suggested I try liver capsules after I failed to get my ferritin levels up even on prescription ironm and I read about this product containing liver from Icelandic lambs. There is no way I could ever eat actual liver, hence the capsules. Each capsule contains 500 mg and the recommended daily dosage is 2-6 capsules. However, I suspect that could mean too much vit A in the long run...? Is there any way to use liver capsules safely?

[siddooo1]

Hi

I take Liver capsules and find them to be very good at raising my ferritin levels. I usually take 2 a day (750mg) so 1 & 1/2 grams a day. I think the weekly limit for eating Liver is 200 grams, so nowhere near that amount. I haven't noticed any symptoms of Vit A overload.

[Hidden in reply to siddooo1]

Thanks for the info!

[SeasideSusie Remembering]

PurpleCat71

It is not recommended to eat liver daily but rather once a week, but how do I know how to dose liver capsules?

That's not quite right. The advice is to eat no more than 200g liver per week, it doesn't matter if have it all in one meal or have some every day, the limit is 200g per week.

It might be worth you contacting the producer of the capsules to ask if they can tell you how much actual iron is meant to be in the liver capsules or whether the 500mg capsules actually contain 500mg liver if that information isn't already available on their label. I didn't do very well on them and never had an answer when I asked this question. Prescribed iron tablets contain 65-70mg elemental iron per tablet 210mg tablet.

This article might be of interest, they mention a couple of brands but others may be different.

consumerlab.com/answers/des...

Solgar brand -They say it provides 2mg iron per 3 capsules of defatted capsules

Ancestral supplements - 2.2mg iron per 6 of their non-defatted capsules

It mentions there is a high amount of Vit A in the non-defatted versions.

I found the capsules were expensive compared to eating liver.

[Hidden in reply to SeasideSusie]

Thanks SeasideSusie,To be honest, I have not been very impressed with the Icelandic lamb liver capsules; the iron content is not mentioned on the package. I imagine there is a big difference between the amount of iron you will be getting from2 capsules compared to 6 capsules daily, so without knowing how much iron you are actually ingesting that would be difficult to estimate. These capsules were very expensive; I won´t be reordering them.

I recently visited the Ancestral website; they are quite pricey, and also add iron to their thyroid hormone supplement which is difficult to understand as iron is said to inhibit absorption of thyroid hormone.

Solgar might be a better option for me as I´d prefer to know how much iron I´m taking.

I did try to eat black pudding every week for a while but did not notice much difference to my ferritin levels.

[KT77]

I dont think you can avoid vitamin A when taking liver. I took Ancestral supplement liver and it was way too much vitamin A for me. Maybe you can try their spleen instead of liver. Spleen has much much more iron and no vitamin A. They also have Vitality blood supplement which combines beef blood spleen and liver. Blood has the highest amount of iron. And if you dont fancy animal supplement there are iron tablets called Blood Builder that will raise iron levels pretty fast. Much better than prescription iron. You can get blood builder on amazon and it has impressive reviews. I like them. Hope this helps.

[Hidden in reply to KT77]

Thank you, that´s really good to know! I briefly tried Spatone but it would seem that´s mainly for maintaining optimal iron levels, not raising them as each dose only contains 36% of the RDI. I will look the supplements you mention up!