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Liver is possibly healthy and why supplements aren't always bad
I'm no fan of liver however liver was universally consumed by all peoples in the past. I saw a tv show on the bushmen of the Kalahari and one of the tribesmen told the tv show host to eat the liver of the porcupine because it was good for him, tribal peoples all believed that liver was healthy. That isn't something to discount. I can see that most ancient medical practices have validity for example blood letting, sunbathing and herbs that fight gut bugs are all extremely beneficial ancient medical practices.
Liver (and eggs) is different from other VA sources like butter, CLO, carrots and spinach which are high VA foods but nutritionally worthless. Paleolithic peoples were not consuming a lot of high carotenoid food or butter. Liver is extremely rich in the B vitamins, molybdenum, choline and more. It is hard to get enough choline without liver or eggs in the diet which suggests liver is an essential food for good health. Liver is full of nutrients that help process VA. Liver is very rich in riboflavin which is necessary for the conversion of retinol to retinoic acid. Why? Because it is liver and that is what livers do! They deal with VA among other things.
Food fortified with retinol, use of Retin A, accutane, cod liver oil, retinol supplements, butter and high carotenoid vegetables are all problematic partly because they don't come with anything to help process retinol.
Now I'm not going to start eating liver, no way, I'm way too shy of VA to start doing something wild like that. But I believe that successful VA detox is much more about having adequate amounts of supportive nutrients than eliminating every source of VA in one's diet.
I think that fish, eggs and low fat yoghurt can be helpful additions to the diet, I consider fish essential for optimum health. I'm also changing my opinion on the use of supplements for VA detox. I believe that Vitamin D, K2, magnesium, molybdenum, B1, B2, B5, folate, biotin, choline, Vit C and more may be helpful to supplement with while detoxing VA. A low VA diet is low in some of these, VA depletes most or all of them. We want to have most of the other essential nutrients in slight surplus rather than just adequacy for the purposes of the detox. A lot of supplemental nutrients are no good and many are in far too high doses so it is a bit of a minefield but if a supplement program is designed with knowledge and skill I believe it can potentially be very effective for dealing with VA toxicity.
File this under "topics I didn't expect to see this morning"! Good post and logical! It got me really thinking. I do agree that trad people considered liver healthy. I also think our tastes may guide us regarding liver (I'm sure all trad cultures also had individuals who hid the liver under their mashed potatoes when no one was looking.)
Things don't have to be black and white, and gray's a great color!
Regarding liver, hubs and I MIGHT be eating a small amount because we have a bad vice called BOLOGNA. (And now you know our deepest darkest secret.) (One of the ingredients in bologna is "variety meats" --quite possibly liver or other organs. ) Bologna's very nostalgic for us! A slice or two of bologna probably only has a tiny amount of liver.
We just got back on the yolk train...Just this week I switched our breakfast from sharing a large egg-white omelette to sharing a tiny omelette made with 2 whole eggs... Why? what Sarabeth posted regarding avadin, and also the fact that we are in the low ebb of egg production. And yes, the nutrition! It never felt RIGHT to toss yolks!
The flood gates of egg yolks have NOT opened, but we've stepped into the gray area. I do think that too many egg yolks are one of the reasons my cat got toxic. His canned and dried food was also very high in liver. But it also contained stupid non-carnivore carotene vegetable matter that a cat wouldn't have eaten.
Supplements can also be a gray area, they don't have to be all or nothing. I could even see hitting up supps once a week or something as a bit of insurance. sigh! Not sure I can make myself do it.
Regarding low-fat yoghurt, do we need to check with manufacturers to find out if VA is getting added in there? While asking that, I think many commercial yogurts are made from powdered milk (partially or fully). Even the best of them. I consider powdered milk an adulterated food. Farmers can be found on realmilk.com. DIY yogurt makers are cheap but why clutter your place with another gadget? A cooler can be set up to keep the milk warm for long enough to create yogurt. Instead of yogurt I just take about 1 cup of raw milk a day (in my coffee). And it's whole, so, another gray area there.
Fish -- very important. One of the roles of iodine is in apoptosis, and I bet that is super important for detox. Out with the old, and build a new body.
Hi @tim-2,
RE: Liver is probably healthy
I can’t disagree more with that statement. Liver is distinctly not healthy. The reason I can make that claim is because many people here have descended into their very serious health issues by regularly consuming liver ( and without CLO)
One clear example is from a mother who recently contacted me. She was regularly giving her two-year-old liver pâté. He became extremely ill, and his hair has turned completely grey. When a “healthy” food causes a two-year-old to become seriously ill and to go gray, then it’s clearly not healthy. Other accounts abound. So, I'm not buying the myths and legends of bushmen etc.
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy
Interesting conversation. So far I have to lean on the side of avoiding high dose vitamin a foods like liver, cod oil, carrots, orange sweet potatoes and similar foods. Vitamin D supplements as well as b12 and nearly every synthetic supplement I've tried in the past few years has made me feel much worse and drugged. Plus lanolin is used as rat poison so why would you buy and take a vitamin d supplement pill knowing its used as rat poison and that vitamin d is actually a hormone. The one vitamin A foods I have kept in my diet like lil chick is egg yokes. But this has been more out of necessity for protein and b12. I am a vegetarian and egg whites without the yokes don't make me feel great. I read an article from the well known late yogi Osho on the importance of combining the egg whites and yokes. He allows his disciples to include eggs in their vegetarian diet as long as they are not fertilized, which means the hen lays them without being impregnated by a rooster, so no soul incarnates in the egg from a spiritual perspective. I know there is some vitamin a in the egg yolks but I eat eggs maybe 5 times a week and its better than everything else I was eating on top of that all I believe. Here is a link to Osho on eggs. Of course it is just one mans opinion, but I have also found what he says to be true from my own experience just eating whites.
"Also, the fad that has survived for several years, namely only eating the egg whites (think white omelette) has been shown to be detrimental to one’s health as the proteins in the egg white need the yolk to be digested properly."
Grant your post is important and I'm glad you wrote it.
You are sounding the alarm (which needed so badly to be sounded) that vitamin A has extreme limits. That poor child with gray hair!
Still though... Why the liver traditions? I suppose the bottom line is: Liver's great! until it kills you ...
What if we were in charge of a starving polar exploration group? Would a dosing a tiny bit of polar bear liver to each person and dog be the smart thing to do? It has loads of important nutrients. I think we loose sight of the fact that the game of life was harder in the past and people lived closer to the bone.
What's more, Europeans thought of beer as a food. If you were lucky, your daily beer intake was punctuated here and there with wine and whiskey. I bet people's livers were in dire need of building blocks.
I've heard people talk of a liver "high" (with raw liver). I know of people who still douse themselves with VA even after hearing the Genereux story... because VA makes them feel good. VA intake keeps you out of detox mode, and detox can feel like crap.
Hi Grant,
Fair enough, thanks for replying. I'd personally be very happy to never eat liver again. I think that optimally VA should be low in the diet and these days people have access to other sources including supplements for nutrients that would be provided by liver consumption so I guess there isn't necessarily a good reason for us to consume it.
What I'm trying to reconcile is how it has been a part of uncivilized diets since day one and these people were healthy. Also, to get RDA's for many B vitamins is difficult without fortified foods unless one eats liver regularly. For example, a 3 ounce serving of beef liver supplies 83% of the daily B5 needs, 65% of the daily choline needs, 171% of the daily riboflavin needs, 54% of the daily folate needs etc. Nothing else comes close to this nutrient density.
Good quote. With regard to food and health traditions new ideas and practices are more often wrong than not and old time tested practices represent a safer path as if many generations of ancestors have done it it more than likely represented some benefit.
Impaired Vitamin A metabolism and excretion would appear a more likely candidate for the cause of VA toxicity to me than simply having moderate amounts of liver in ones diet without additional VA sources. However, I think this can potentially be genetic in nature rather than being a health condition that needs to be overcome in which case liver is off the cards. I think it is likely that many have developed a lower tolerance to VA since the start of the neolithic.
Inuit children feeding each other raw seal liver ^
Hi Josh,
Vitamin D can be used as a poison in very high quantities, the dose makes the poison. I think it is better to get D from the sun but that isn't always possible. When dealing with VA toxicity it makes real sense to supplement with D.
With regard to karma and food my personal thoughts are that the concept of karma is commonly misinterpreted by most. Many think of it as an accounting ledger where "good" deeds are balanced against "bad" ones. This is a comforting philosophy to many because it would mean that wicked people ultimately receive punishment for their transgressions. Based on reading and thinking about this topic I understand karma to be something completely different. I see it as subconcious imprinting that occurs due to trauma as well as imprinting of our sense of reality. I think that trauma can affect the spiritual part of ourselves and that this can carry between lifetimes. I think that our understanding of reality and how we see ourselves within it can carry between lifetimes too. Because this is what I believe karma to be I don't believe that I am harming myself spiritually by consuming meat or killing animals. If killing created negative karma then the act of living as a carnivore or omnivore would by default be extremely negative, this idea is absurd to me. This is not some rationalization to justify meat eating but something I came to through earnest inquiry and meditation on the nature of karma. I think that Henry Laurency's Hylozoics is perhaps the most accurate model of our spiritual nature we have.
However, retinol absorption and elimination is highly variable among individuals,
and some children develop vitamin A deficiency while
consuming marginal amounts of vitamin A and others do
not [74,75]. Body stores of vitamin A represent a balance
between its absorption and elimination, processes that
may not be well coordinated with one another. Therefore,
some well-nourished individuals may have relatively low
retinol stores because they absorb less, or excrete more,
retinol than individuals with larger stores. Similarly, a
marginally nourished child becomes vitamin A deficient
while a comparably nourished one that absorbs and/or
stores vitamin A better does not. Therefore, people with
lower retinol status may well absorb retinol less well than
those with higher retinol stores.
I think this is basically saying that the more toxic people are with VA the slower they eliminate it?
Vitamin A nutritional status appears to have significant effects on retinoid metabolism [16,51,56]. People
with higher retinol status appear to absorb retinol more
efficiently than people with low retinol status. The
amount of retinyl acetate isotope that is absorbed is
highly and positively correlated to their retinol liver
stores [16,51,56]. Furthermore, in a report of an individual with low retinol status who was supplemented with
retinol and achieved normal status, retinol absorption
improved after supplementation [51]. Dietary vitamin A
intake also appears to influence retinol metabolism. Very
low intakes of retinol appear to reduce (rather than increase) retinol utilization, even when retinol stores are
still adequate [16]. These results appear to be counterintuitive because it would seem that individuals with lower
nutritional status with respect to retinol should absorb
and utilize it more efficiently.