Since liver has the reputation of being an inexpensive but “complete” food, dishes employing it are often recommended for dieters who wish to eat sparingly but well.
Regardless of one’s reason for eating a lot of liver, the danger is the same — it can provide too much vitamin A. Because liver is an animal’s storehouse for vitamin A, we can acquire much more of it than we can handle if we eat a lot of liver nearly every day.
In extreme cases, when hungry explorers have eaten nearly all of the liver of a shark or of a polar bear, both of which contain exceptional amounts of vitamin A (many thousands of times the recommended daily allowance for humans), sudden death from brain swelling has occurred. In the more usual cases, when people have eaten beef or chicken liver several times a week, the illness is much less dramatic.
Typically, Emergency Medicine (17#8:105) reports, the symptoms of milder and more usual cases of vitamin A intoxication include long-lasting headaches and blurring of vision. Victims also sometimes complain of a momentary loss or sudden dimming of vision lasting but a second or two.
Another fairly common symptom is a pulsating swishing or ringing noise in the ears. There may also be nausea and vomiting in some cases, but these symptoms are less common and occur, in addition to the other symptoms mentioned above, only when the blood vitamin A level suddenly rises even further above normal following ingestion of a vitamin tablet.
Proof of this diagnosis is simple and involves simply taking a blood sample and sending it to the laboratory for measurement of the vitamin A level. Since prevention is better than cure, avoid this problem by eating liver only in moderation. For instance, giving a baby a can of ground chicken liver every day might well provide him with too much.
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