You HAVE TO Eat Animal Liver

Well, ok. You don’t HAVE TO. But in my humble opinion, you should – and here’s my thought process:

There’s no such thing as “healthy.” One thing that has struck home to me is just how balanced the body is – what’s “good” for your thyroid might be “bad” for your pancreas; what’s “good” for your gut might be “bad” for your heart, etc. etc. etc. In other words, nothing is “good” for you, per se (that is, in and of itself.) Things are only “healthy” when they are balanced – in fact, the very definition of “healthy” is the balance of material formation that allows for a living being (you). This is why taking supplements is sub-optimal – Vitamin X isn’t “good” for you; it’s simply one essential piece of the living puzzle that you continuously need sustained.

This is why we eat living things. We probably *could* (in the purely abstract) extract nutrients, many of them at least, by eating dirt, rock, etc. – but by the time we processed those nutrients and balanced them, we’d be dead. In other words, in reality, it’s not possible – and thus, we eat living things that have already done most of the hard work for us. Whenever we chomp a plant or an animal, we are eating a living thing that has already done the hard work of extracting nutrients from the “raw” world, and brought them into some sort of balance that is similar to ourselves (this brings to mind the beautiful integration of Genesis – we’re not just incidentally created apart from living things; we’re different, but we’re somehow integrally part of the world we’re created in, dependent on eating other living things – which is a truly beautiful paradigm).

Fast forward this to liver, and organ meat generally: it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but when you eat, say, a sheep liver, that liver is pretty close to your own liver. One can comb the studies all day and overthink things, but common sense will tell you that you’re getting a flow nutrients from eating that liver that approximates the proportionality of your own liver’s composition, and therefor needs (same for heart, lung, etc.).

This is why not all food is equivalent – an egg from a factory farm is not the same as an egg from your backyard chicken. They look similar, taste similar, etc., but the backyard chicken, as a living entity, will have access to the world around in different proportions – and thus, its own body and the food it produces will be in a proportion that is more fitting to itself (and therefor you).

I get it. I’m being a bit poetic here, I’m skipping some of the in-between logic, and one could poke holes in all this by saying things like, “wait a minute – that’s doesn’t prove…” I’m not intending to prove. I’m intending to think simply, like music. In my experience, that’s the best place to start – starting from prove more often than not ends up in weird places, which is why academics tend to be so ungrounded (don’t we all, in certain respects, though).

I was laughing reading an article on this recently. The writer said, “now, ancient people taught that eating liver was good for your liver, eating heart for you heart, etc. But modern scientific studies haven’t shown…” blah blah blah. The writer then went on to go through a variety of organs, and kept saying things like “oh, and eating animal heart is good for you, because it has lots of vitamins and things like COQ10 (coenzyme, which is a heart-support supplement).” Here’s the deal: rather than buy COQ10, eat heart (if you can). You’ll get COQ10, and you’ll get it in a context that’s surrounded by a perfectly-balanced proportion of other enzymes, proteins, fats, etc. etc. – it’s almost as if it was intended to be that way!