Why I’ve Stopped Taking Organ Supplements

First of all, I want to start this post by stating that this is MY personal experience and decision in regards to organ supplements, and it is by no means a way of telling you what you should do about them for yourself. I hope sharing my experience can open someone else’s eyes about what may or may not be the best decision for their health. I’m all about asking questions and also being receptive to new information that goes against what I previously believed in order to determine if I need to make a different decision. I would encourage you to have the same mindset here :)

When I first read Lily Nichols’ Real Food for Pregnancy three years ago when I was considering getting pregnant, I was shocked by how many health benefits come from eating liver that I was not previously aware of (she also talks about liver in her new book, Real Food for Fertility. I highly recommend both books to all women who want to eat nutritiously and feel their best, whether or not preconception or pregnancy is a current factor). According to Nichols’ books, liver is richer in micronutrients than virtually any other food and is highly concentrated in choline, selenium, chromium, iron, copper, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K2, and B vitamins (including folate). Other organ meats, like heart and kidney, also come with similar power-packed nutrient profiles, however, may not be as readily available for purchase. There is a lot of controversy about vitamin A ‘toxicity’ and liver, but I would encourage you to peruse Nichols’ website to debunk that myth for yourself.

So, you might be thinking: if there are so many benefits to consuming liver, why is Ally even writing this blog post? Well, because although I have been incorporating small quantities of liver into our diet (in tacos, meatballs, etc.) about every other week ever since reading RFFP, I had also started taking multi-organ and/or desiccated liver capsules because I thought the health benefits would multiply. There’s a reason it has earned the title of “nature’s multivitamin”, right?! Heck, I had even seen certain influencers on social media throwing back dozens of liver pills a day and claiming they “never felt better”. I never went that extreme, but I did take the supplements relatively regularly, in addition to also consuming dietary liver ~weekly. I never noticed any glaring negative effects from doing so, but the body keeps the score…

A few months ago, I worked with Grace Shepherd to run a hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) on myself and it was eye opening. It revealed a lot of important information about deficiencies I was dealing with nutritionally (which was surprising to me because I consider my diet to be very well-rounded and healthy, but almost two years of combined pregnancy and breastfeeding sure is depleting on the body!) and, most notably, it revealed that my copper levels are dysregulated. I was advised to avoid beef liver - and incorporate some other nutrients - in order to bring down my copper levels and get them in balance with other minerals. Grace has a fantastic Instagram post on why she doesn’t make blanket recommendations of supplementing with liver/organs to every woman she works with, especially those, like myself, with copper dysregulation, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here and explain this nuanced topic to you. I highly recommend checking out her post and doing some further research on this yourself if you are also shocked by learning this. I know I was! This is also an incredibly informative blog article on the topic from Ancestral Fertility (another great social media follow, especially if you care about your fertility - and you should!)

While liver and other organ meats ARE packed with nutrients, let’s think about how they were consumed ancestrally (hint: it wasn’t through dozens of pills every.single.day like the trend seems to be now…) When a tribe killed an animal, they got one set of organs per ~hundreds of pounds of muscle meat. They had one opportunity to split the nourishing organ meats amongst their tribe until another animal was killed for food. Thinking about it this way, does it make more sense to cook with a few ounces of liver every few weeks - like I had been doing before adding supplementation - or consume a handful of organ pills every single day? I think you know the answer ;)

Everyone is bioindividual and has specific nutritional needs that are unique to their physiology, so why would it ever make sense to blindly supplement with a one size fits all capsule? It doesn’t! That goes for many supplements, not just liver/organs. My eyes were opened wide from this experience, and now I’m a huge advocate for testing nutrient levels before supplementing without knowing how they could possibly affect your body/symptoms. I would encourage you to seek out providers that can run different insightful tests for you before blindly entering into any ‘trend’, because it just might not be a good fit for you at all. I highly recommend working with Grace if you would like to run an HTMA; you can contact me if you’d like to look into your hormones through a DUTCH test; and my friend Katie - Live Wild Be Well - has a great preconception program that I recommend to anyone having nutrition or fertility issues (she was even trained by Lily Nichols herself!)

The moral of this whole post is to encourage you to test, not guess. You are a unique individual and shouldn’t blindly do anything for your health just because others do it. Research certain supplements and tools to determine if it is the best fit for YOU and know your body well enough for you to recognize when something isn’t quite right. I know I’ll get asked about what I’m doing now if liver truly is that healthy for you, so my plan is to limit it. I still cook with liver every few weeks, but that’s where our consumption stops - all organ supplements are out of this house now!
I hope I’ve inspired you to question this trend a little so that you can determine what would be best for your own unique health needs :)