137: The Nutrient Gap Most Carnivores Don't Know About

MK: So here is a question I get all the time. It's some version of, "Mike, why bother with organ meat? You know, why eat liver or heart or kidney when I can just have a ribeye? Steak is already one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. Isn't that enough?" And honestly, it's a fair question, and a lot of...

There are a lot of carnivores out there that would argue that only eating muscle meat is enough. And I think for years, the answer from the ancestral health world has been some version of, "Well, because that's what our ancestors did," or, "Because predators eat the organs first." I know I've said this a lot, and that's fine.

Those things are true, but they're not really the answer. You know? They are more like a vibe. You know? What you actually want to know is how much more nutritious is an organ than a steak? Is it 10% more? Twice as much? 10 times? Because if the gap is small, who cares? Eat the steak and move on. But if the gap is huge, that changes things.

And until recently, we didn't really have a clean answer to that question, but now we do because our freeze-drying partner... You know, my wife and I launched MK Supplements to sell freeze-dried beef organs a couple of years ago, and our freeze-drying partner sent samples of ribeye, both grass-fed and grain-finished, or grass-finished and grain-finished, as well as freeze-dried beef organs, the very same ones that we put into our capsules, to a lab at the Utah, uh...

at the Utah State University and ran them against, you know, those different muscle meats a- and compared it nutrient by nutrient, and the results weren't subtle. You know? Some of these numbers are going to sound made up, but they are not, and that's what this episode is about. Welcome to the Primal Shift Podcast.

Real quick, if you're getting value from this episode, now's a good time to hit like and subscribe on YouTube or leave a rating on whatever podcast app you're using. It takes 10 seconds, and it's the single best way to help the show grow. All right, back to it. But before we get into the raw data, I wanna set, you know, the context a little bit and add some color to all of this because, you know, why even ask the question?

And here is the thing. About 98% of the beef that Americans eat today is muscle meat, you know, steaks, ground beef, roast, et cetera. Organs and bones, they'll largely... they largely get exported, are ground into pet food, or thrown out. But this is a modern- post-industrial pattern. You know, for most of human history and in nearly every traditional culture, organs were prized, you know, often reserved for elders, pregnant women, and growing children.

And my wife and I visited Norway, um, I think it was two years ago in, in winter to see the northern lights, and we met with a traditional reindeer herder, you know, from the Sami people. And I couldn't help but ask the question, you know, "Do you eat that reindeer nose to tail or you only eat the muscle meat?"

And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, they use every part of that reindeer. You know, they use the hides, they use the everything, nose to tail." And I said, "Well, what do you do with the organs?" And he said, "Well, we feed them to the dogs." And I'm like, "Ah, so I guess that, you know, native cultures or, you know, traditional cultures, they also just feed it to the dogs."

And I'm like, "Why is that? Is it because, you know, it's, it's a waste food?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, don't get me wrong." He said, "Here is the thing, you know, herding reindeer over vast terrain is a lot of work, but those who do the work are not us. It's the dogs. You know, if I get tired," he said, "I get just back into my, into my house and sit down and, and rest.

The dogs don't have that luxury. They're out for days in a row without food. They have to find their own water to get those reindeer herds, you know, from A to B in winter, you know, snow. It's, you know, not a very pleasant job." And he said, "Those are the ones who need... who are-- who have the most physically demanding job, and so they need to get the best parts of the reindeer, and those are the organs."

And I'm like, "Well, that makes a whole lot of sense now from that context." It's not a waste food for them. It's they are reserved for those who need it the most, who need to perform the most. And so historically, you know, the question would have never been why eat organs? It would have more been why would anyone not eat them?

But that's a historical argument. You know, let's actually get to, to the actual data. But before we get to the lab numbers, I wanna flag one thing because most carnivores that I know... or let me rephrase this. I don't know any carnivore personally who eats only muscle meat and nothing else. I think a lot of the strict carnivore dieters have noticed that they don't feel quite right eating only muscle meat alone.

So what do they do? They add eggs. And that makes a whole lot of sense because eggs, especially the yolk, not so much the, the egg white, is also, if you wanna call it that way, a superfood. It is packed with certain nutrients, and it's one of the reasons why we raise our own poultry. I mean, we raise our own beef, our own pork, uh, poultry, rabbit Honey, you know, the whole nine yards we try to raise ourselves.

But eggs in particular are such an incredible food. It's... the yolk is what keeps the chick fed and thriving for the first three days after hatching. You know, all they need is the yolk, nothing else, and that tells you already everything you need to know about the yolk, that it has most of at least what a chick needs, a tiny chick.

Now, humans are a little bit different, but nonetheless, there is a lot in eggs that can close the gap, nutritionally speaking, if you add them to your carnivore diet. And so eggs help, you know. They, they bring in choline. They have a little bit of vitamin A, AKA retinol. They have some vitamin D. They have K2, especially if you consume eggs from properly raised hens.

And usually, for the most part, those are not the eggs you get in the store. Even if they're pasture-raised, that often doesn't really mean anything. But if they are really well raised, like in our case, we, you know, rotate them. They're really out on pasture on 45 acres they have at their disposal. You know, 30 hens on 45 acres, plenty of space.

Um, they get moved, you know. The, the mobile coop gets moved, so they're not exposed to the manure, etc. If you do that, then you can certainly bridge the gap or narrow the gap, the nutritional gap that is, but I don't think you can completely close it because not everything that humans need are in eggs, you know?

And just to give you a little bit of a comparison of egg versus liver, you know, a whole egg has about 150 milligrams of choline. Beef liver has 300 per 100 grams. You know, so you need about three to four eggs to match a small piece of liver on choline alone. You know, one egg has 8-80 micrograms of vitamin A.

Liver has 10,000 per 100 gram. You know? That's significantly more. You know, eggs have no heme iron, so no copper to speak of at least, and very little CoQ10, you know. But all of those things you can get specifically from organs. But if eggs make you feel better on a carnivore diet, you know, great. You know, that's real.

But you've only patched part of the gap. The rest is still sitting there, and we'll talk more about this throughout the rest of this episode. Now, let's get to the lab data, and this is really where I want you to pay attention.

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So we or our freeze dryer send samples of different organs, grass-fed ribeye, grain-finished ribeye, to the Center for Human Nutrition Studies at the Utah State University. You know, and Dr., uh, Stefan Van Vliet, one of the most credible nutrition researchers working in this space, has led that project.

And the organs we sent were freeze-dried. You know, freeze-drying removes most of the moisture, 98% of the moisture. There's probably, give or take, 2% moisture left in the freeze-dried powder. So if you take 100 grams, um, or let's say half an ounce of liver and you freeze-dry it the way we do, you end up with three grams of powder, basically.

So you significantly reduce the volume because liver and organs are like, what, 70% water? You significantly reduce, um, the volume, and you have a very concentrated form of micronutrients because most of the micronutrients remain intact. There is some degradation with the freeze-drying as with any processing, but it's fairly minimal comparatively speaking.

And then the ribeyes, they were also... They were not freeze-dried. They were taken fresh, but they accounted for the water content of the meat. So they basically calculated out 100% of the water, and that means we have a fairly fair apples to apples comparison. If we take 100 grams of the powder and 100 grams of the steak, again, without the moisture or after removing the moisture, we have an apples to apples comparison.

I say almost because, as I said, the freeze-dried powder has 2% or so moisture, so there is a 2% margin of error You know? But for the sake of this discussion, I think that can be largely ignored if we look at the numbers that we, that we got. And let's start with liver because that's arguably nature's multivitamin, and let's look at some of the individual micronutrients per 100 grams compared to grass-fed ribeye.

The gap to grain-fed ribeye was even larger, but we ignore this because I am a huge proponent of consuming the best version of the meat, and that is grass-fed, grass-finished, or generously raised, etc. So let's look at that. Vitamin B12, the 100 grams of liver powder had 73 times more B12 than the grass-fed ribeye.

42 times more vitamin A, you know, the real preformed kind your body uses, retinol, not carotenes. 430 times more folate, 280 times more vitamin D, 55 times more copper, 14 times more B2, and seven times more choline. You know? So one serving of liver really covers more daily vitamin requirements than any other whole food I've ever encountered.

Now, if you say, "Well, but, you know, some of those, you know, excessive numbers, aren't they problematic?" Like vitamin A toxicity, you know, being one of those things. And here is the thing, using vitamin A toxicity as a very specific example. There are zero reported cases that I could find of vitamin A toxicity stemming from the consumption of ruminant liver, and ruminant being the operative word here because, yes, you can certainly get into trouble if you eat polar bear or seal liver.

And I would argue maybe the liver of any carnivore because usually those livers have dramatically higher levels of vitamin A than the liver of a ruminant animal, meaning cows, sheep, goats, camels, even horses. They're not, you know, true ruminants. They're hindgut fermenters. But nonetheless, for the sake of this argument, the liver of those animals is not high enough in any micronutrient to cause you issues.

I mean, maybe unless you eat 11 pounds of liver every day. Nobody does that. In regular amounts, and I'm talking about- Couple of ounces per day or, you know, three to nine grams of freeze-dried beef liver powder, you're not gonna get any issues with vitamin A toxicity or toxicity of anything else for that matter.

Let's switch to heart, you know, because that's, that's the mitochondrial powerhouse really. Freeze-dried or heart in general, doesn't have to even have to be freeze-dried, has 65 times more CoQ10 than ribeye. That's 183 micrograms per 100 grams of heart tissue. And CoQ10 is what your mitochondria uses to generate energy, you know.

And the heart just happens to be the most metabolically active muscle in the body, so it's loaded with that stuff. It, it makes a whole lot, lot of sense. It has also a good amount of heme iron, not quite as much as spleen, which we'll cover in a second. It's super rich in B12 and P... and B1 and potassium.

It's actually a relatively good source of potassium, um, within the animal kingdom. And here is the thing from a consump- consumption perspective, heart actually tastes a lot like slightly richer steak because it's a muscle. So if... I would argue that for most people, if they close their eyes and they eat a piece of heart grilled or prepared the same way as a steak, they probably cannot tell that they are eating or- an organ.

Kidney and spleen, you know, those are really the specialists. You know, kidney has 340 times more folate than ribeye and 775% m- of your daily B12 in a single serving, and, uh, also a whole lot of choline. And spleen is arguably the king of iron, 65 times more heme iron than ribeye. You know, it's, it's, it's the highest heme iron food I've ever come across.

So if you're struggling with low ferritin or iron deficiency anemia, this is probably something you wanna include in your diet. Now, this is also probably not very common if you're on a carnivore diet because it's not that muscle meat doesn't have any iron, it does. But if you're maybe coming from a plant-based diet starting with carnivore, the iron in muscle meat might not be enough to get you back to levels where you should be, or it might take you forever and three days.

But from a big picture perspective really, you know, no single organ does it all. They each specialize. Now, liver is arguably the most well-rounded one if you could say. So if there's... If you only wanna consume one organ, make it liver. But they're really all specialists. You know, liver wins on, you know, fat-soluble vitamins and B vitamins.

Heart dominates Q- CoQ10. Kidney leads with folate and choline. Spleen owns iron by a margin. But together, they cover virtually every essential nutrient your body needs. Ribeye is a great food. I love ribeye. It's by far my favorite cut, but it's not complete food. The animal as a whole is. So what are you gonna do with this?

What should you do with this? You know, I'm not telling you that- that you need to eat organs every day, and I'm telling you that, you know, they are a magic food or whatever. I'm also not anti-plant or a strict carnivore. You know, we grow vegetables on our homestead while we raise, you know, uh, cattle for beef, we raise hogs for pork, we raise rabbits, we raise poultry, anything from chickens to guinea fowl, to turkeys, uh, to ducks, and we had geese in the past.

We have, uh, honeybees, you know, for raw honey. So I'm by no we- means in either, you know, camp on either side of, of those... of, of that food spectrum. But I follow an animal-based diet, and I realize that eating animal-based and eating very much carnivorous leaning means consuming the entire animal, the marrow.

You know, we even use the chicken feet. When we butcher chickens, we save the feet and we boil them down, or we cook them in a-- put them in a slow cooker to extract the collagen and all of the good stuff. Even in feet, you know, there are nutrients that benefit us, you know? And so nose to tail is really where the magic happens, so you can be as certain as possible that you don't have any gaps that you might not even be aware of.

And in the simplest version, you know, just add liver once a week. There are many ways on how to, you know, prepare liver from pate to liverwurst to, you know, just pan-fry it. A lot of people like it with, with, uh, with onions. I'm not a huge fan of onions because I don't do well with them, even though I like how they smell in the pan and I certainly like the taste, but they're, you know, more on the, uh, more on the toxic side of, of plants that I would-- that would not be my favorite.

Um, you can dice the liver into small cubes and freeze them individually and then just, you know, chew them individually while they are frozen, and you don't taste anything. Or if none of that is your cup of tea, you know, freeze-dried capsules like the one we sell at MK Supplements are the easiest way. We use that a lot really, even though we have access to fresh liver from the animals that we harvest, and when we do, we eat them.

We ac- I also share them with the dog, with a German Shepherd who is a true carnivore, but he also eats nose to tail. He eats the entire rabbit. He eats the entire animal, including the bones, everything, you know, not just the muscle meat. I don't think there are dogs do well on eating only muscle meat. He even eats, I should point out, the stomach contents, the partially digested stomach contents of the rabbits we feed him.

So even he is not a strict carnivore, not even a nose to tail carnivore. He also adds... gets some plant matter from the stomachs that he consumes, you know, of the animals we feed him. But nonetheless, you know, for us, freeze-dried is Incredibly convenient. You know, the kids are not complaining. They just pop a couple of capsules.

Sometimes they chew them. A l- actually, my niece, she chews the liver capsule. She likes the taste and the texture of the powder. That's not everyone's, uh, kid's cup of tea, I suspect, but she does that. Um, and another thing I wanna point out is in all of this discussion that, you know, yes, we look at, you know, ribeye and, and grass-fed and, and this and that, and regeneratively raised, but the truth of the matter is that the nutrients in the food we consume very much depend on the nutrients that are in the soil.

And I know this firsthand because we did a bunch of soil testing, and I've realized that there are certain nutrients, certain micronutrients like magnesium, that are deficient in our soil. And if they are not in the soil, they're not gonna be in the forage that our animals consume or in the plants that we grow in the garden.

And so that makes even more a case of eating things that have higher levels of nutri- nutrients naturally, like the organs, because you might not be getting everything you need from the muscle meat and from even if you eat veggies or, you know, eggs and stuff. If the stuff is not in the soil, less of it is in the animal, and so you might actually need more than what your daily value suggests because our soils have degraded, not only the ones on our pasture, on our property.

That's really a nationwide problem. Soil fertility has decreased dramatically, and as a result, nutrient density of the foods we consume. So we need more and more nutrient-dense foods. We need more concentrated sources of nutrients than we maybe did in the past, maybe a couple of hundred years ago. And so that is even more of an argument to eat nose to tail and to include organs.

So that's just something I wanna point out. Now, if you like this episode, give it a thumbs up, share it with someone who could use it, you know, or who, who thinks that eating only meat is gonna be enough, or eating meat and eggs is gonna be enough. I would argue that if you really bring it back to the question we started, you know, how much more nutritious is an organ than a steak?

You know, now you have the answer. It's not 10%, it's not double. We are talking 73 times more B12, 430 times more folate, et cetera. There are significantly more nutrients, and that's an... the easiest way to close the gap that I'm certainly... I'm certain you have just based on soil fertility and all of the other factors we've discussed.

So again, if you got something out of this, you know, share it with someone. who'd benefit, subscribe to the show, drop a comment, especially if you got pushback. You know, engagement is always good for the algorithm, good or bad. And if you want to try the supplements I make, you know, head over to mksubs.com.

I appreciate the support. We're a small family-owned business. We try to do things the best way we know. And we're going to wrap it up. See and hear you hopefully in the next episode.