With the popularity of the carnivore diet on the rise, there are a few concepts that have really got me thinking about what we currently eat. The main thing is in regards to organ meats.
We have known that organ meats are very beneficial to our health for a while, as they contain a lot of nutrients, but it is not something I paid too much attention to as I couldn’t really see myself eating them. After listening to Dr. Paul Saladino speak on a few podcasts and trying to dig into a lot of the research he has spoken about, the concept of eating nose to tail really makes sense to me. Currently, we tend to eat only muscle meats. Whilst I still think you get a lot of good benefits from muscle meat as a protein source, I think we could be doing a lot better for ourselves if we included some organ meats.
As Dr. Paul Saladino explained in a podcast “If you look at what’s in an animal, nose to tail, from a nutritional perspective, things really start to fall into place in a neat way, and you realize … Or what I’ve realized, is that if you eat an animal nose to tail, you can get all the nutrients that a human needs, in the most bioavailable forms, in the proper ratios…”
He goes on to explain how we need a proper ratio of zinc to copper, as an example, and how we can achieve this by eating nose to tail. There is a lot of copper in the liver, and for zinc, there is a lot found in muscle meat. So, eating nose to nail is kind of like taking a multi vitamin. It can help cover a lot of your nutritional needs.
For example, it is said that liver is one of the most nutritionally dense foods you could find. It contains the following:
Preformed Vitamin A (aka retinol)
Choline
Folate
Vitamin B12
CoQ10
Bio-Available Iron
Hyaluronic Acid
High quality beef liver also provides all the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, K & E) in highly usable forms, and provides meaningful amounts of folate, copper, zinc, chromium and hyaluronic acid.
Because of these nutrients, liver is able to help support the immune system, collagen production, support healthy joints, ligaments, and tendons, help with energy production, and can help brain, liver, and heart health.
The other thing to consider when eating organ meats to improve your health is the concept of like healing like. Traditional healers would often recommend eating the organ of a healthy animal for an organ that may be weak in the human. For example, if you had a problem with your heart, they would feed you heart from a healthy animal to help strengthen your heart. Whether you believe this or not is up to you but my take on it is that, it can’t hurt. If I eat some liver to try and help support my liver, as long as it doesn’t make me worse then who cares. I am still getting in a lot of quality nutrients from the liver I consume anyway.
When purchasing your organ meats, I think it is very important to make sure the animals were grass fed, were out in nature, and not treated with all sorts of antibiotics, hormones, and toxic things of that sort.
With all these benefits, I am going to start consuming organ meats. Until I can get in larger quantities though, I am going to supplement with them to get some of the benefits whilst building up the amounts I eat each day. Ancestral Supplements have a great line of products. All their products are:
Pasture Raised In New Zealand
Grass-fed & Grass-Finished
Hormone, Pesticide & GMO Free
Absolutely No Fillers (or) Flow Agents
100% Freeze Dried & Non-Defatted
Third Party Tested For Purity
Allergen Free
This is why I am going with them.
I want an all-round benefit so I will be starting with their Grass-Fed Beef Organs product as it contains liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, and spleen. And I will add in some Grass-Fed Beef Brain. This should give me a good foundation and then if needed I will look to target specific issues. For example, I may throw in some bone marrow to try and help with my connective tissue and bones. If someone has had their gallbladder removed then they may want to use some Ox Bile.
Finding little areas of improvement is always on my mind and this is something I am going to be trying to see if I can further improve my health and performance. If you want to supplement as you build up your ability to consume larger amounts of organ meats, then you can follow the link below and use code totalhealth10 to receive 10% off from Ancestral Supplements.