Beef Liver : Live Like a Modern-Day Ancestor
Beef liver has received a lot of attention lately. People are eating it raw, adding it to hamburgers and meatloaf, and/or taking it as a supplement.
Beef liver is more than the “latest health trend,” this is an ancestral dietary strategy that, no doubt, helped our ancestors survive.
Life Without a Multivitamin
Imagine a meal as a hunter-gatherer. Here’s what it would look like If you wanted to snack on some walnuts:
- Hope it was the right time of year for walnuts to be in season and ripe
- Find a walnut in the wilderness
- Gather walnuts in their hull and shells from the ground or climb the tree for more
- Shred the hull and break the shell to extract the meat that’s bound up inside of tight nooks and crannies.
- Eat what you can and share it with your tribe
- Hope to remember where you found it this time next year
This is vastly different from how we eat walnuts today. There was no gobbling down handfuls at a time fresh from their plastic containers. It was a similar process for every type of food that was hunted and gathered.
Now, imagine having to do this to sustain about 2000 calories a day to support normal physiologic function. On top of this, you also need to hit your RDA of vitamins and minerals to ensure you didn’t become sick or disabled – these were not forgiving times for the ill.
On top of all of this, you have no concept of nutrition/food sciences whatsoever. All you have to go off of is how you feel when you eat certain foods. Some give you immense amounts of energy and stamina, some make you vomit immediately, and others make you wildly hallucinate.
Imagine just how great people must have felt after eating the liver, kidneys, heart, and other organs of the game they hunted for several cultures across the globe to have hailed them as sacred.
A Sacred Art
The sacred reverence for organ meat and liver specifically has been observed across several modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes.
In his worldly travels, Dr. Weston A. Price notes that the Tribes of the West Nile in the Belgian Congo of Africa revered liver as so sacred that it “could not be touched by human hands.” He noted their superior physical stature and physiological health in his writings. (1)
The Inuit tribes of the Northern Hemisphere reserve the organs for pregnant women and children.
Like the West Nile tribes, the Neurs tribe of Sudan believes the soul resides in the liver and that eating the soul of the animals passes that strength along to those who consume the liver. Dr. Price noted that the women of this tribe were over 6 feet tall and the men over 7 feet. (1)
Nature’s Multivitamin
Liver is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. There is no other single food source of so many vitamins and minerals. It’s easy to see how our ancestors came to revere the liver as sacred.
100g of beef liver provides: (2)
- 9 mg of iron 27% RDA
- 4 mg of zinc 36% and 50% RDA (for men and women, respectively)
- 76 mg of copper 1084% RDA
- 7 µg of selenium 72% RDA
- 189 mg of B1 15% RDA
- 76 mg of B2 212% and 250% RDA (for men and women, respectively)
- 2 mg of B3 82.5% and 94% RDA (for men and women, respectively)
- 17 mg of B5 154% RDA
- 08 mg of B6 83% RDA
- 290 µg of folate 5% RDA
- 3 µg of B12 2470% RDA
- 330 mg of choline 60% and 77.6% RDA (for men and women, respectively)
- 4950 µg of retinol (16900 IU of vitamin A) 550% and 707% RDA (for men and women, respectively)
*These numbers are estimated averages and may vary depending on the age, geographical location, and diet of the animal*
100g of liver is about the size of the palm of your hand. The nutrients provided in this amount are more than sufficient to meet the body’s daily demands. In fact, even a much smaller amount of beef liver would meet the RDA of various nutrients.
Our ancestors did not have organ meat available daily. These were often the prized delicacies of their most recent hunt. For fat-soluble vitamins, a single large intake could support the body’s needs for several days to weeks. The boost in other nutrients provided immediate energy and vitality.
Liver is Not “Full of Toxins”
A common concern that’s thrown around about why people shouldn’t consume liver claims that “it’s full of toxins,” but this just simply isn’t true. It’s not supported by research, and it’s founded on a misunderstanding of liver physiology.
This myth was created on the basis that the liver is responsible for clearing out toxins. This is true; the liver produces several enzymes that convert and remove toxins from circulation. Somewhere along the way, this was misconstrued to suggest that toxins were ‘stored in the liver.’
Toxins are not stored in the liver any more than they would be in various other tissues. They pass through in circulation the same as they would pass through the heart, muscles, or kidneys. Enzymes in the liver pull them out of the bloodstream and pass them into the intestines for elimination.
In fact, fat tissue has been scientifically proven to act as a storage site for various toxins (3)
Perhaps we should be more worried about the toxins in a ribeye steak than in liver or liver supplements.
Health Benefits of Beef Liver Supplements
Beef liver is an excellent whole-food source of copper, iron, zinc, B vitamins, and retinol. Numerous studies highlight the vital role of these nutrients in various facets of health. Unfortunately, there is very little modern research on the direct impact of beef liver on health.
Nutrition science quickly became preoccupied with isolated nutrients after the advent of the synthetic multivitamin. Many studies on whole beef liver were performed in the early to mid-1900s, but their health implications are still increasingly relevant today.
A 1951 study in rats found that beef liver powder permitted them to swim longer in cold water than rats given synthetic B vitamins (4).
Rats fed pork, beef, and calf liver had faster growth rates than rats fed beef muscle meal in a study performed in 1934 (5)
In 1934, William P. Murphy won the Nobel Prize for curing anemia and pernicious anemia by feeding liver to patients and animals in his studies. It was later discovered that the B12 in beef liver was responsible for curing pernicious anemia. At the time of his work, this vitamin had not yet been identified (6).
A more recent study performed in 2019 assessed the quality of sperm in men who consumed various types of meat. Men who consumed organ meat had 24% higher sperm morphology compared to those who ate no organ meat (7).
Beef Liver Supplements – The Modern-Day Ancestor
There’s no denying that consuming beef liver in transformative to heath. But we would be fools to believe that everyone is going to add liver and onion to their weekly menu.
The fact of the matter is that most people are not going to eat beef liver for the simple fact that it just doesn’t taste good. Most people prefer the taste of muscle meat. If this weren’t so, grocery stores would have isles of organ meats instead of various cuts of rounds, rumps, and tenderloins.
This is where beef liver supplements can bridge the gap. Just like a multivitamin, a small, daily intake of quality beef liver powder can do far more for your health than a concoction of synthetic vitamins and minerals.
Quality matters with beef liver supplements to ensure you’re getting all of the invaluable nutrients it offers. That’s why we believe our Beef Liver IQ is the best on the market for its nutritional quality, value, and intake needs.
Our beef liver is intentionally undefatted and freeze-dried to preserve the naturally occurring retinol and fat-soluble vitamins which are lost during other forms of processing.
We source from grass-fed and finished cows from New Zealand as this has shown to be the most nutrient-dense soil region, resulting in more nutrients in the liver itself. Because we don’t use fillers and flow agents, only 4 capsules are needed to get 3 grams of beef liver daily (compared to 6 capsules from other leading brands).
Resources::
- Price, Weston A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects. Price-Pottinger.