There are plenty of non-health-related reasons to eat the โodd bitsโ of the animal: organ meats, bones, skin, and miscellaneous parts that aren't chicken breasts or chuck roast. Thereโs the environmental argument (if weโre going to use up resources raising a cow to slaughter weight, why do we waste so much of the carcass?), the ethical argument (if an animal dies for you, you have an obligation to waste nothing), and yes, even the taste argument: once you find a recipe you love, offal is a discerning foodieโs delight.
Today, though, weโre going to focus just on the health benefits: the completely selfish reasons why you should eat more organ meats. Even if you donโt care about the environment, and even if you donโt really enjoy the taste, itโs still in your best interest to get some bones, organs, and other โodd bitsโ into your diet as part of a nutritionally complete diet.
Protein balance
First on the list is protein balance. All proteins are made up of amino acids, typically described as โbuilding blocks.โ Muscle meat and organ meats all contain several different amino acids, but here weโre mostly concerned with two of them:
- Methionine: found mostly in muscle meat and eggs.
- Glycine: found mostly in organ meat and bones (if youโre not huge on cracking drumsticks with your teeth, you can get it out of the bones by making bone broth and consuming that).
To illustrate this, hereโs a table showing the glycine content, methionine content, and glycine:methionine ratio of some common foods:
Food (per 100 grams) | Glycine (grams)* | Methionine (grams) | Glycine:Methionine ratio |
Plain gelatin powder | 19 | 0.6 | 32:1 |
Bones & bone broth | Unknown, but likely excellent (the USDA database doesnโt give nutrition data for bone broth. But considering that bones are one of the major ingredients in gelatin powder, and that gelatin powder itself is so high in glycine, itโs safe to say that bones probably have quite a bit) | ||
Pork skins | 12 | 0.5 | 25:1 |
Pork ears (cooked) | 3 | 0.1 | 25:1 |
Turkey skin (cooked) | 3 | 0.4 | 8:1 |
Chicken skin (cooked) | 3 | 0.4 | 8:1 |
Pork tail (cooked) | 2 | 0.3 | 7:1 |
Veal liver (cooked) | 2 | 0.7 | 3:1 |
Ham | 1 | 0.5 | 2:1 |
Canned tuna | 0.9 | 0.5 | 2:1 |
Grilled T-bone steak | 1 | 0.8 | 2:1 |
Fried eggs | 0.5 | 0.4 | 1:1 |
*Rounded to the nearest gram. If less than 1, rounded to the nearest tenth.
Most people today only muscle meat, with hardly any organ meat and bones and very little skin, so they eat a whole lot of methionine and not a lot of glycine.
This review goes into all the details about methionine and why you donโt want too much of it. Essentially, methionine restriction increases lifespan and improves metabolic health (body fat accumulation, insulin sensitivity, blood lipids, and all the related issues). This was mostly done in animal studies, but in human trials, a low-methionine diet also improved liver health and increased the rate of fat burning.
So, do you need to quit eating all those methionine-rich muscle meats altogether? Not necessarily: hereโs where glycine comes in. This is a simplification, but some research suggests that getting more glycine can help โbalance outโ methionine. In this study, for example, methionine restriction OR glycine supplementation increased lifespan.
The lesson: if you want to live longer and stay healthier while youโre at it, donโt neglect the odd bits, especially the gelatinous ones like bone broth, ears, tail, and skin. Human beings were not designed to get our animal protein just from the muscles. โHigh-qualityโ protein means eating the organs, bones, and skin, not just the steaks and chops! If you want to talk about a โbalancedโ or โwell-roundedโ diet, it better include all the important non-muscle proteins as well.
Micronutrients
Are you sick of hearing liver described as โnatureโs multivitaminโ yet? Unfortunately, itโs probably going to keep the nickname, because itโs just so true! The second 100% selfish reason to eat more organ meats is probably a little more familiar: theyโre almost unbelievably nutritious.
Hereโs a chart of the nutrient content of four organ meats and three โnormalโ meats:
All values are given per 100 grams of raw meat (thatโs about 3.5 ounces, not even a full serving for an adult). Values shaded in dark green are over 100% of the Daily Value for that nutrient. Values in light green are over 50%; values shaded in blue are over 25%. If you made a bar graph for all this data, youโd barely be able to read the values for anything else, because the โVitamin Aโ column for liver would be so far off the chart.
In other words: eat your organs! Theyโre good for you!
But Isnโt Organ Meat Full of Toxins?
This is the big health-related question most people have about organ meats, especially liver. The liver is often described as a โfilterโ for the body, which brings up mental images of the filter on your air-conditioner, encrusted with all the charming gunk and impurities that itโs keeping out of your lungs.
But cows are not air conditioners. A cowโs liver doesnโt โfilterโ toxins by trapping them within the liver and keeping them there, the way the filter on an air conditioner does. Instead, it gets rid of them by shunting them out into urine and feces: making sure they get out of the body. The toxins donโt stay in the liver, and the liver itself is perfectly safe to eat.
If youโre eating liver from cows that have lived under extremely toxic conditions, then the liver may accumulate toxins just like the rest of the cow, because the job of excreting it all is just too difficult. But in that case, the entire animal is dangerous to eat, not just the liver. If the rest of the meat is safe, the liver is safe, too. Especially if you're eating meat from truly grass-fed animals, the liver is just fine.
Summing it Up
In most cultures, nobody would even dream of throwing away all of an animalโs organs, bones, and skin. And this isnโt just a foreign tradition or restricted to โprimitiveโ cultures: just look at vintage American cookbooks to find endless recipes for liver, heart, tripe, and sausages featuring every imaginable part of an animal.
Itโs time to get back to that way of eating, not just because itโs less wasteful, but because itโs much healthier. โOdd bitsโ provide important micronutrients and proteins that are hard to get anywhere else โ theyโre an essential part of a complete human diet.
Need some recipe inspiration? Try a quick batch of liver pรขtรฉ: it really tones down the taste, and itโs fantastic with carrot sticks or pepper stripsโฆor just straight from the spoon!
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