Since the earliest use of liver in the treatment of pernicious anemia, however, new fields of observation have been made available both in the clinic and in the laboratory. We have been allowed the thrill of watching the patient through a few days of depression following the institution of liver therapy until remission occurs with its often sudden and almost unbelievable sense of well-being simultaneously with the maximum increase of the reticulocytes or new red blood cells. Then we have followed this remission through to completion, until the blood becomes normal, with a normal red blood cell level – that is 5,000,000 or more cells per cubic millimeter of blood. Perhaps even more dramatic has been the improvement in the disturbances of locomotion resulting from nerve damage.
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1934; William P. Murphy
In 1934, Drs. George Richards Minot, William Parry Murphy, and George Hoyt Whipple were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their findings concerning liver therapy in cases of pernicious anemia. Dr. Murphy recalls:
I started one of my patients on liver therapy. This patient, a man in his forties, was critically ill and partially comatose. In spite of his condition, I was able to explain to him that liver might be distinctly useful to him. We found that if a patient were fed half a pound of liver per day, it would take about five days to show an increase in red blood count. But this man seemed more ill on the fifth day. According to the policy laid down, my patient was a candidate for a transfusion. I stayed up very late that night trying to decide to give him the liver. It was a miserable night, but around midnight I noticed that his red blood cell count had increased slightly. That gave me courage to go on with the liver. When I saw his blood count go up, I went home and collapsed into bed, slept very poorly and was back at the hospital at seven o’clock the next morning. I approached his room with fear and trembling, and cautiously peaked around the corner to see if he was still alive. To my great surprise and relief he sat up in bed and cheerfully asked, “What time is breakfast?” His blood count was at the maximum and he not only survived but lived many years.
To show the remarkable recovery Dr. Murphy’s patients experienced after liver therapy, you can watch his motion picture, which he showed at his Nobel’s lecture:
Soon after, liver extract injections were developed and became part of the standard management of pernicious anemia. In 1948, however, B12 was purified from liver and isolated as crystals, and ever since, we’ve been using B12 supplements instead.
But, liver is a lot more than just B12. It’s nature’s most robust multivitamin, and we encourage everybody to eat it, regardless if they’re B12-deficient or not.
Liver: More Than Just B12
Liver has ranked above all other offal as one of the most prized culinary delights. Its heritage is illustrious –whether savored by young warriors after a kill or mixed with truffles and cognac for fine patés de foie gras.
Innards and Other Variety Meats (1974; Jana Allen and Margaret Gin)
Although clams are the richest B12 source, liver is actually our favorite. We like it because of the dense package of nutrients it offers. Beef liver, for example, is especially rich in a highly usable form of iron, the whole spectrum of B vitamins, vitamin A, copper, zinc, selenium, chromium, phosphorus, choline, and coenzyme Q10. This isn’t surprising, because the liver acts as a storage site for many vitamins and minerals.
Due to its robust profile of bio-available nutrients, liver is effective in curing nutritional deficiencies, promoting fertility, energy, good vision, hormonal balance, and bone health. It helps your immune system, and prevents cognitive and hematological decline. Liver is also famous for its unidentified “anti-fatigue factor”, named that way after a famous study in which liver-fed rats were swimming for much longer than a control group of rats. This factor was distinct from any known vitamin, and remains a mystery to this day:
After several weeks, the animals were placed one by one into a drum of cold water from which they could not climb out. They literally were forced to sink or swim. Rats in the first group swam for an average 13.3 minutes before giving up. The second group, which had the added fortifications of B vitamins, swam for an average of 13.4 minutes. Of the last group of rats, the ones receiving liver, three swam for 63, 83 & 87 minutes. The other nine rats in this group were still swimming vigorously at the end of two hours when the test was terminated. Something in the liver had prevented them from becoming exhausted. To this day scientists have not been able to pin a label on this anti-fatigue factor.
An article published in Prevention magazine in 1975, describing the experiment
Ancient cultures seemed to have grasped this – probably from trial and error over generations – because in so many of them liver was considered the most sacred, revered part of the animal. From the African savannas to the grasslands of the Americas, liver has been savored raw by hunters after a successful kill, or reserved for pregnant women, children, and sick people. As the Weston Price Foundation describes:
Practically every cuisine has liver specialties. Some cultures place such a high value on liver that human hands can’t touch it. Special sticks must move it. The Li-Chi, a handbook of rituals published during China’s Han era, lists liver as one of the Eight Delicacies. Throughout most of recorded time humans have preferred liver over steak by a large margin, regarding it as a source of great strength and as providing almost magical curative powers.
The Weston A. Price Foundation
It’s no wonder they would prefer liver over steak. Here’s a table we made, comparing the nutritional value of 100g non-cooked beef, lamb, and chicken livers to a 100g non-cooked rib-eye. We used common varieties (rather than grass-fed, which would be even more nutritious). Note the differences in vitamin A, B12, and folate:
| Beef Liver | Lamb Liver | Chicken Liver | Ribeye Steak | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vitamin A | 16899 IU | 24609 IU | 11077 IU | None |
| Thiamin (B1) | 0.2 mg | 0.3 mg | 0.3 mg | 0.1 mg |
| Riboflavin (B2) | 2.8 mg | 3.6 mg | 1.8 mg | 0.1 mg |
| Niacin (B3) | 13.2 mg | 16.1 mg | 9.7 mg | 3.2 mg |
| Pantothenate (B5) | 7.2 mg | 6.1 mg | 6.2 mg | 0.3 mg |
| Pyridoxine (B6) | 1.1 mg | 0.9 mg | 0.9 mg | 0.4 mg |
| Folate (B9) | 290 µg | 230 µg | 588 µg | 5 µg |
| Cobalamin (B12) | 59.3 µg | 90.1 µg | 16.6 µg | 3.1 µg |
| Vitamin C | 1.3 mg | 4 mg | 17.9 mg | None |
| Calcium | 5 mg | 7 mg | 8 mg | 10 mg |
| Copper | 9.8 mg | 7 mg | 0.5 mg | 0.1 mg |
| Iron | 4.9 mg | 7.4 mg | 9 mg | 1.9 mg |
| Magnesium | 18 mg | 19 mg | 19 mg | 18 mg |
| Phosphorus | 387 mg | 364 mg | 297 mg | 168 mg |
| Potassium | 313 mg | 313 mg | 230 mg | 305 mg |
| Selenium | 39.7 µg | 82.4 µg | 54.6 µg | 16.5 µg |
| Zinc | 4.0 mg | 4.7 mg | 2.7 mg | 3.8 mg |
Now, you can see why we love liver as much as our ancestors did.
Do You Eat It Raw or Cooked?
Either raw or cooked, liver is an extraordinary source of nutrients, and in our opinion should be an occasional, frequent part of everyone’s diet.
If you read Vardish Fisher’s novel Pemmican, he describes buffalo hunts and how the Native American women would eat the livers raw. This was actually a common practice in many cultures. Raw liver had been eaten for millenniums, long before Minot and Murphy published their results on its use for pernicious anemia in 1926.
Some people swear by the benefits of raw liver. According to Dr. Whipple, at least in dogs, raw liver was more effective than cooked liver throughout his experiments:
Whipple, Hooper and Robscheit studied the effects on haemoglobin and blood regeneration of a variety of treatments – iron pills, bread and other foods, and even arsenic and germanium dioxide – among which only raw liver showed real promise. Serendipity is said to have played a role in this discovery. Whipple had noted that blood regeneration was poor in dogs fed cooked liver following chronic blood loss. Had it not been that a lazy laboratory technician had given the dogs raw liver, the much more dramatic response might not have been discovered at that point in history.
Recognising, treating and understanding pernicious anaemia; Sinclair L (2007)
One of our readers, Christy from Texas, is using raw bison liver to supplement when she’s running out of B12 shots:
While it is extremely difficult to get doctor approved prescription for Methyl-B12 injections in Texas USA, it is not as difficult to get a buffalo. I was able to obtain a raw, grass-fed buffalo liver to eat, which after whipping and then freezing into little cubes, I will eat just a little bit each day, until your shipment arrives. I doubt I can eat the 120grams/day of raw liver as in the original 1926 historical treatment (yuck!) but I will eat as much as I can inspire myself to swallow. Today, I was able to eat 15 grams of frozen, raw, grass-fed buffalo liver cubes mixed with Worcestershire sauce, divided in a morning and evening serving. There are old, ancient stories of the indigenous women of the Texas Indian tribes eating raw buffalo liver after the bow and arrow hunt, so if they can eat it, I will try.
For those of you interested, Christy gets her bison liver from North Star Bison, who guarantees 100% grass fed. Her recipes:
Frozen Bison Liver Cube: 1 raw bison liver blended with garlic powder & gluten-free Worcestershire sauce, then frozen into small cubes in a tiny ice-cube tray.
Avocado Liver Snack: Half Avocado, 0.5oz raw buffalo liver cubes, chopped red onion, drizzled olive oil & gluten-free Worcestershire sauce. Parsley on top.
Raw Liver Safety
In all honesty, we’d be careful with eating raw liver. Bacterial contamination is a real threat. While deep freezing is effective at killing parasites in fish, it’s not as effective against hardy, pathogenic bacteria like E. coli, campylobacter, or salmonella. Even a small amount of these could lead to food poisoning. Also, eosinophilia research suggests that ingestion of raw animal liver is a possible mode of infection of human toxocariasis:
Collectively, it is proposed that raw cow liver is a significant infection source of toxocariasis in the patients with eosinophilia of unknown etiology.
If you do choose to eat raw liver, make sure it is pasture-raised, and comes from a source that you trust. Never eat the raw liver of confined, grain-fed animals. Please, do not take this lightly. If we didn’t know the origin of the liver, we would never eat it raw.
If you don’t want to have to deal with sourcing high-quality liver, or if you don’t have access to pasture-raised liver, you can buy desiccated liver capsules instead.
How Much Liver to Eat?
The main concern with eating too much liver is vitamin A toxicity. For example, Merck Manual describes an acute vitamin A poisoning in children after taking a single ~300,000 IU dose of synthetic vitamin A, or a daily dose of 60,000 IU for a few weeks.
However, if you eat a 100g portion of liver once or twice a week, you’ll do great. The amounts of vitamin A such liver portions will give you will be far below the toxicity thresholds induced above. Still, they’ll highly enrich your diet with nutrients.
If your family doesn’t like the taste of liver, you can sneak it into their diet by straining raw liver into sauces as you cook them. As long as it doesn’t overpower the flavor of the sauces, they won’t even know it’s there. To reduce the smell, you can leave the livers overnight in the fridge, marinading in lemon juice and some herbs and spices.
Enjoy 🙂