So, you may have heard me mention about how I eat raw liver these days.
No, really. I do.
Gross? Yeah. I know. Believe me, I don’t like liver. I don’t like the taste of it. I don’t really like the idea that it’s an organ either.
But, grass fed liver is one of the most nutritious foods you can eat. It’s packed full of natural Vitamin A in it’s most useable form – more so than any other food, and Vitamin A is a very important nutrient for the skin. Why else do you think Accutane’s made out of it? (a bad synthetic variety of Vitamin A, that is).
Anyway, I eat it raw because it’s more nutritious, and since I’m only doing it for the nutrients and not for my love of tasty liver chops, I actually find eating it raw less disgusting than taking it out and eating it for dinner. In my opinion, that would simply ruin my delicious dinner time meal.
I’ve devised a plan of attack though for getting it down without too much pain. Watch the video to learn my method of make eating raw liver a manageable endevour:
Gonna get yourself some liver and down a few shots? I thought so.
This video cracks me up! Props to you for getting those shots down! I’m doing raw, fermented cod liver oil right now, but when I’m ready to graduate to the raw liver, I’m going to review this post
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I haven’t tried the fermented cod liver yet, but it’s absolutely at the top of my list for things to try! It sounds amazing. The shipping is too expensive for it to Australia, but I’m going to get some when I get home
This is something I have actually been thinking to do, odd that you post a video on it
I actually am tossing around the idea of mini, and raw, pates. May be fun…thank you for this interesting post.
BTW the reason why I was thinking to do this personally is that many northern native tribes who consume seal will eat the raw liver, and really all of it raw. All lifestyles intrigued, the more rustic and simplistic the better
Yep, raw natural meat is very good for you, and raw meat is a lot easier to digest than cooked meat… although I prefer to cook my meat mostly just for … you know… taste, and habit, I suppose, I do eat my steak as rare as possible!
You had me at “throw up”.
i swear i am never going to try this!
ever! i have a question.how do you drink your bone broth everyday?do you just drink it?i tried to drink it today and almost threw up.is it really that beneficial?if it is, i guess i have to find some way to ingest it.
So you don’t like bone broth? I usually add it to my food to add flavour and nutrition whenever possible, but I often just drink it like tea if it doesn’t go with what I’m eating. I think it tastes really good… like drinking warm chicken noodle soup or something! I’m very surprised you find it so gross.
Yes, I mean.. it is beneficial, but if you think it’s absolutely disgusting and you can’t handle it, then it’s not very sustainable and you probably should just avoid it.
If you don’t like bone broth or you don’t have time to make it (like me), eat gelatin. Now Foods sells bags of beef gelatin. You might be under the impression that it’s not healthy, but man did that bag of gelatin make my stools perfect, my sleep better and my skin too…
Seriously, it’s not expensive at all (though it’s not as cheap as bones), and if you want quality gelatin buy great lakes gelatin (it’s from grass-fed cows).
You’re missing the magic ingredients: salt and pepper. I tried mine for the first time and thought it was awful. Then I added four cranks of fresh ground pepper, and 1/4 tsp of RealSalt, stir it a bit and now it’s awesome. I have 2c/day.
Lol – I’ve fallen out of my liver habit! I’ll have to get back into it. And I will definitely remember the salt and pepper next time, it really does sound like it probably helps a ton. Thanks Jeremy!
A year ago, I’d say hell no.
But now…I’m so down to try this!
It’s really difficult locating grass fed beef where I live.
Anyway, I’m really glad you did this video! Awesome!
Yah try it if you can find a grass fed liver!
What sort of chicken do you buy? I can only source organic corn fed chickens in the uk. Is this ok?
Hi Amy, well it’s better than non-organic. That’s what I eat if I’m traveling or don’t know where a farm with pastured chickens is
I love chicken livers! I cook them and eat 3 times a week usually with tomato soup. Beef liver is totally different story. My dog loves livers too so I have to share with him. I have and idea for eating raw livers: egg yolk, pepper, chopped onion, raw chopped liver. But still I’m afraid to eat it raw, too much blood!
Good idea! Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to sit down and eat it like a meal with spices, like you just mentioned or like the picture above. Hah it’s not so much the blood, just the taste of liver for me. I usually eat my steak as rare as possible.
You know, at first I thought it was gross too. But the more I eat it, the more I’m okay with it. I don’t mind the taste at all anymore. I just steam 2 ounces of liver (looks like a steak afterwards, but doesn’t smell like one
), lots of veggies, and I eat some gelatin with it (as I love the taste of gelatin). This is a great thing to do, since most of us ingest way too much muscle meat compared to organ meat and bones.
Eat nose-to-tail!
PS. I’d love to try out brains once, I’m fascinated by that thought
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Haha, my boyfriend’s parents took us down to Melbourne this past weekend and we went to a tapas place… veal tongue was on the menu, so I ordered it. It was so good! I have the whole cow tongue in my freezer, maybe I’ll get brave and cook it up now that I had my first taste of tongue haha. Unfortunately I didn’t get the brains.
You go girl! I started “eating” raw liver about a month ago…my method was to cut it into little pill sized pieces, then freeze them on a cookie sheet and then transfer to a ziplock bag once frozen. Every day I just swallow a couple like pills while they are still frozen. I haven’t gotten any liver taste at all doing it this way, though you would have to swallow quite a few pills to equal 1 ounce I think. This was a great video!
That sounds like an even better idea! I’ll probably do that next time…
I am sooo going to try this one day!
Thanks for this! I have tried cooking liver with all sorts of stuff, making pate, even dipping bacon in pate- and I just can’t handle the taste. I think this method is brilliant- not ruining a perfectly good meal, but still getting all that nutrition. Now, I just need the guts to do this with the bison liver in my freezer…
To be honest, I you do still taste the liver a bit even with my method…. I actually think it’s better if you don’t stir the lemon juice into the liver like I did in this video…. because then the lemon juice kind of sits on the surface of it and acts as a coating that protects your taste buds from liver taste. So yeah. If you do this method, don’t stir the juice into the liver.
Or try the other method mentioned here, which is cut into really tiny pieces, freeze on a baking sheet, and then just swallow when they are very frozen. ….. this sounds even easier! (in my method, the liver does defrost quite a bit when you’re grating it)
Haha! I don’t eat raw liver, though I eat something like 4 ounces of cooked liver weekly. It doesn’t help my skin that much, since I don’t think I’m retinol-deficient anymore. I am not zinc deficient anymore either (I used to take zinc but now it tastes metallic to me, so I don’t supplement it anymore).
I believe the benefit of liver is simple though : for those muscle-meat lovers who ingest a lot of cysteine, tryptophan, … liver and gelatin can really balance the amino acids. People forget they need to eat the other half of the animal (bones, organs, skin …) too, and not just the muscle.
Be sure not to eat polar bear liver
! If you’d eat an ounce of that you’ll probably die… (it has loads and loads of retinol, I believe it’s 900k IU in 100g of liver).
Noooot really a fan of liver, raw or cooked, lol. I like the suggestion of eating it in “pill” form, frozen. That has potential! Haha.
Since this is all about Vitamin A, I have a question. Instead of liver, how about… carrots? I read that half a cup of raw carrots is equal to four times the recommended daily amount of Vitamin A, and I loooove raw carrots with a bit of hummus or veggie dip. How does that source of Vitamin A compare? Is it really significantly less effective than Vitamin A from meat?
Hi Kitiara,
There’s a lot of misconceptions about that… the form of vitamin A found in vegetables is beta carotene, which needs to be converted to true vitamin A in the body. Studies have shown this conversion isn’t very effective… more so in some people than others. So when they say that a carrot or sweet potato has that much Vitamin A, it isn’t reeeeally true. Foods like liver, butter, and cod liver oil are in the form of retinol and is much easier absorbed and used. I should do a post about this.
Here’s some more info:
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/vegetable-vs-animal-sources-of-vitamin.html
Have you ever tried eating it like sashimi with some soy sauce and wasabi?
No… never thought of that! It sounds like a good idea…. although I think the livery taste would still kinda ruin it. I’d be more inclined to try that with the other organs I have…. heart maybe, it seems to be the most mild tasting
I never thought you could make liver taste good until I learned how to make pate. If anyone owns a food blender, it’s really a great idea to make your own pate because it doesn’t taste like liver at all and you can put it in salads or add it to meals or slap some mustard on it and eat it like finger food.
I’m going to have to try that….. do you make raw liver pate? or cooked liver pate? And what kind of liver do you use?
What about chicken livers? Are grass fed beef livers the only safe raw livers to eat? Are chicken livers ok to eat raw? I have only seen lamb and chicken livers…and haven’t seen the beef livers.
Hi Heather,
I realize I forgot to mention what KIND of liver I was eating… I’m eating beef liver, but other livers are fine too as long as they are from pastured, naturally raised animals that have eaten their natural diets and are free of hormones or antibiotics. And if they have been frozen for two weeks.
Thanks Tracy,
I just ready your log and it really made me feel so normal and less crazy for having done just about the exact same methods you have gone through….daniel kern seemed to work, but like you said, its very drying and I was destroying things with its bleach-ee-ness, and I figured that there has to be a better way.
I also quit coffee for 2 weeks to see if that was causing it but it didn’t seem to matter.
Then, with this Candida cleanse happening, I started February 9th, nice and slow to ease into it – I have been doing it the last few weeks (but not getting rid of the coffee.)
I have so much more energy, its kinda crazy and my skin has improved somewhat.
(And ultimately, I believe its your state of mind/stress that makes my skin the worst.)
I’m glad to see you are seeing improvement with it! It’s true though that stress and frame of mind is a huge factor too… some people are more prone to stress acne than others, but yeah… it’s a much bigger factor than most people realize
Why not just add the liver to your smoothie?mmmmmmeat shakes! I take decicated liver pills for now and that helps a lot for anyone who wants the benefits of raw liver but isn’t up to the challenge of eating it raw… The pills are defatteted and freeze dried. Yum. Stinks tho. Liver is full of iron as well as the full spectrum of b vitamins which you need to absorb iron. Just thought I’d add that because a lot of women have lower than desirable heme counts.
So def eat your liver ladies! Tracy I love how informative your site is and your vids are awesome! Thanks!!
Lol…. no way! So do you buy the pills or make them yourself? If you buy them, I imagine they’re pretty expensive, right? I’ve fallen off the liver wagon since transitioning back to Canada from Australia, but I do have a frozen beef liver calling my name from the freezer…… I swear I’d make the effort, but it’s frozen in one big liver clump! .. hard to grate, and I don’t want to defrost the whole thing and have to eat it all in one go. ah, excuses, excuses.
Waaaayyy!! haha! The desiccated pills I buy are (I think) $26 for 500 and you would take a couple a day… whatever that works out to. Totally worth it for the iron deficiency problems I had. I read about it in the book Healing With Whole Foods… LOVE that book!! There are a few other ingredients in them but taking them means I don’t have to eat the raw liver like you do (so well in fact) and when you’re travelling… it’s sort of dreamy to know you can still have what you need. I am not into elemental supplements for my body, if my body needs something, I need it to come from real food.
as for the frozen liver conundrum… Why not chop the liver and then flash freeze it on some parchment paper… when it’s frozen, crumble it into a ziplock and then it’ll be ready to use instead of having to grate it. Yum.
That’s what I would do… cut them up and freeze them… but since the liver is already frozen, I don’t know if I should thaw it and refreeze it?? is that food safe? lol
Oh yeah, do not do that. The quality of the liver will go waaaay down if you thaw and refreeze. Not recommended. Your method is the best in that case. Actually, the BEST method is to delegate the job to your boyfriend! Acts of service in relationship are sexy! haha!! Cheers!
Thanks for the advice! I bought some raw liver today but was at a complete loss as to how I was going to get it down.
Funny, I’m from Vancouver too and I cured my own adult acne through diet analysis and lifestyle changes too. Great blog.
Thank you for this!! Pickle juice and plugging your nose masks the taste fully – until you become accustomed to it. Use juice from good pickles – find a brand without bad preservatives – I use Bubbies which is made in Canada for an American company. I look forward to my liver & pickle juice every a.m.!
Funny, I read an article about a group of researches who were studying in the North Pole due to climate changes. Apparently, 3 of the scientist got stuck in the mountains due to the ice. Since they had no way of coming back. The only way for survival was to eat meat or the liver from Polar bears which they killed (Don’t ask me how they did it!) And well. A polar bear’s liver contains a lot of Vitamin A. Not sure the amount but it was a huuuuge number! However, due to only eating the liver.. Two of the scientists died from Vitamin A toxicity (Or just because they couldn’t keep on anymore) The last one of the group of 3, before he died. He discovered that his acne cleared up due to the Vitamin A because of the Liver.
…However he died after that apparently. The 3 scientists or researchers were later discovered months later. But the last guy wrote in his journal about the liver and his acne. Quite interesting don’t you think?
I think i’ve heard fo this whole polar bear liver thing. It’s interesting… must have been a heck of a lot of liver. I don’t understand though why they only ate the liver and not the rest of the meat???
I think they did so as well, but I think it’s here where the huge number of Vitamin A that a polar bear liver contains comes in the picture.
But Vitamin A does have a positive effect on acne neither the less, accutane consists pretty much of a synthetic vitamin A. So the vitamin A from a Cod liver oil or just liver should have a positive effect on your acne.
You are so cute. HAHAHA.
Bottoms up! You’re funny
The ex-vegan in me is horrified that I’m even considering this, BUT – I have access to an excellent source of local, organic, grass-fed animal products and I feel like it’d be a shame not to try it at least once. I’m intolerant to lemon so maybe I’ll take the pickle juice suggestion. Thank God I’m good at doing tequila shots lol.