Is It Bad to Eat Organ Foods Like Liver?

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Is it bad to Eat Organ Foods like Liver? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Alex Ask the health expert. Margie1234 from Instagram asks, is it bad to eat organ foods like liver? I like organ foods like liver, and recently someone told me that it's very bad because of the stored toxins in it. I thought that was a Myth. Hey, it's JJ and I've got Dr. Sarah Ballantine. She's known as the Paleo mom with me to answer this question. She she just happens to be the world's leading expert on the autoimmune protocol diet, and she also manages her own three autoimmune diseases through diet and lifestyle. Plus, she has an amazing gift for translating complex scientific research into understandable, actionable strategies. And on the side, she's a professional improv comedy performer. She'll be right back.

Stay with me. Hey, J.J. virgin here.

Okay, real talk.

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Liver is probably the most nutrient dense food that we could possibly eat. It is rich in just about every essential nutrient, including some that it's really easy to not get enough of if we're not embracing the nutrient dense superfoods like liver. So liver contains really high amounts of all of the B vitamins, including being a really important source of vitamin B12. It's loaded with minerals including phosphorus, iron, copper, magnesium, iodine, calcium, potassium, sodium, selenium, zinc, molybdenum. It has all of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. It is very rich in the amino acids glycine and proline. It contains Coenzyme Q10. It contains some really important essential fatty acids. Organ meat in general is really important to incorporate into our lives. But liver gets this sort of bad rap for being full of toxins because the liver's job in our body is to detoxify, right? So one of the things the liver does is it helps our bodies get rid of metabolic byproducts. So that is the waste of our cells after our cells consume energy and do whatever function they have, as well as toxins that we may have been exposed to. So the liver is thought of as a filter, right? It filters all of these things, but it has this reputation for then storing these toxins and it doesn't. So the liver detoxifies in basically a two step chemical reaction. And what it does is it either creates a fat soluble inert byproduct that if it's fat soluble it goes to the gallbladder to be secreted into the intestines with bile the next time we consume food. And then ideally it would bind with fiber and be eliminated. Or the liver can produce a water soluble inert product as it's detoxifying that gets sent to the kidneys in order to be packaged up with urine. So what the liver does is it renders toxins into inert compounds and then sends them to the appropriate organ for elimination. What the liver stores is actually all of the various nutritional resources that are required for those chemical reactions. So rather than storing the toxins themselves, those toxins are actually circulating through our body. The liver is taking in only the amount that it can process at any given time. It processes it through these chemical reactions and then sends it sends it for elimination once it's turned into an inert substance. So actually, when we think about supporting our liver's detoxification processes, one of the best foods we can eat is liver because it's rich in all of those nutrients that our bodies need need for all of those chemical reactions to detoxify. And actually, studies that have looked at, for example, heavy metal accumulation in tissues show that organ meat in general accumulates less heavy metals than, say, bone or muscle meat. And that actually makes organ meat some of the safest meats that we could possibly consume. So sorry, you're not off the hook. Actually, no matter how you look at it, eating organ meat is really essential for optimal health. We just can't reach nutrient sufficiency, meaning that we get all of the nutrients that our bodies need for optimal health from the diet without embracing the sort of snout to tail approach to health, where we're respecting the animals that we're eating by making sure nothing goes to waste and making sure that we're eating all of the organs from that animal that we can, including the liver.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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