 is bone broth healthy, and there are certainly a lot of soups, stocks, broths that are used in a variety of cultures, for medicinal reasons, cold and flu remedies, whatever it may be. I'm sure everyone has heard of chicken soup being used as a cold or flu remedy by a variety of cultures. And if we look at what's actually in these soups, it makes sense. If you're using high quality animals, there is a fairly high fat-soluble vitamin content in the meat itself. So if we take that meat and we boil it into a soup or a stock, of course it's going to be a nutritious source of food. It's going to have a vitamin content, a mineral content, and those vitamins and minerals will help your immune system, it will help your body heal and repair whatever it needs, especially fighting off a cold or infection. But what actually separates a healthy soup that has vitamins from a broth or something that seems to have no effect? It lies within the quality of the animal food and the amount of animal foods that you're putting in the soup. If you're putting lean, grain-fed chicken breast, or even just grain-fed chicken in general, and using that to make a broth, you shouldn't expect it to have a considerable vitamin content because of what the animal is being fed. If you were to take an older pastured chicken that had plenty of carotenoids and vitamins in its tissue and made a soup out of that, that's where we actually have a reasonable source of nutrition. And this applies to bone broth as well. But people tend to consume bone broth for different reasons, for collagen and electrolytes. And if we look at how bone broth is typically made with marrow bones, it doesn't really make a lot of sense because the reason we would have made soup or stock in a primitive setting is to extract nutrition that we would not have been able to get otherwise. In the case of marrow in bones, we can crack open the bones and take out the marrow. Maybe there is cartilage, tendons, or ligaments, or various very tough cuts of the animal that we would have boiled into soup. But I don't think the actual marrow tissue in the bones is something we would have boiled down. It was too precious as a source of nutrition. Not only that, when you boil meat or fat or organs for a long period of time, you do reduce the vitamin content. But if you couldn't consume the food in the first place, there's no point in arguing about its vitamin content. In this example, consuming bone marrow in a raw or lightly cooked state would preserve much more of the nutrition than bone broth cooked for hours and hours and hours. Now if people actually want to consume bone broth, the right way to make it would be with those cuts that are normally not consumable in their raw or lightly cooked state. And this makes a lot more sense. But why consume bone broth in the first place? People talk about the collagen benefits, possibly electrolytes that apple cider vinegar leeches out of the bones. But if we look at collagen, it breaks down into glycine and other amino acids when it's cooked. And these amino acids are just precursors to collagen metabolism in the body. If we look at electrolytes and the form of collated minerals that come out of bones when they're met with an acidic medium, these minerals are not available to the human digestive system. It's things like calcium carbonate that have a very low availability. What acidic medium would we have actually had access to in nature? There's a bit of a fallacy there. So electrolytes are kind of out the window because of the availability of the forms of minerals and bones. But let's take a deeper look at collagen synthesis. And the main issue here is what the amino acids that collagen breaks down into when it's cooked. They are just precursors and amino acids like hydroxyproline glycine will actually turn into oxalates without the presence of vitamin B6. Glycine and amino acid precursors being converted into oxalates isn't really too much of a concern in the context of consuming natural foods like bone broth. The problem here is when people go out of their way to consume high amounts of glycine and they're not getting enough of the other precursor nutrients in their diet. So if someone was to consume a large amount of bone broth every morning or before bed without getting enough of the other amino acids and B vitamins, it's arguably more detrimental and sort of an unnatural thing to do. Collagen metabolism requires large amounts of vitamin C as well as vitamin E in addition to amino acids. But the best way to get all of the precursors to collagen synthesis isn't actually by consuming the amino acid precursors. You're better off consuming high fat soluble vitamin foods like liver that has a lot of vitamin E, a lot of vitamin K2, and then foods like liver also have a considerable vitamin E content. So do things like egg yolks. Not only that, foods like liver are incredibly high in some of the B vitamins and amino acid precursors. So there's a big misconception here that kind of falls in line with conventional wisdom. You know how people think that if they eat fat, they're going to get fat, but it's actually opposite? The same thing here applies with collagen. People think that if they actually eat collagen, they're going to get healthier skin. That's like saying, oh, if you ate the skin of an animal or if you ate these inedible cartilage parts and consumed the collagen, then that would make your skin healthier. But once we actually look into the metabolism of these nutrients, it becomes clear that overall nutrient density in the diet is what's actually important, not consuming particular substances. You know, there are very specific building blocks to human life, being vitamins and minerals. If consuming those vitamins and minerals in higher amounts doesn't solve your problem, nothing is going to. What I'm getting at is consuming that marrow in its raw or lightly cooked state, consuming liver, consuming very high quality animal products like pastured eggs and raw grass fed dairy. These foods are going to give you substantial amounts of vitamins that will help your body synthesize whatever it needs. Vitamin A in liver is the precursor to cell differentiation and gene expression, how every cell in the body is made. If that doesn't dictate your skin health, then what does? The other thing is that bone growth is very high in histamine, so anyone who does have a histamine intolerance might have an issue with bone broth and the cooking method. People have brought up concerns about levels of lead in bone broth, but that actually has to do with the pollution of animal feeds and what the animal is being fed. You really want to make sure to use high quality, pasture raised animal products to making your bone broth. So overall, I think bone broth can be a source of some nutrient density. I think it's a great way to utilize parts of the animal that you wouldn't normally be able to consume. In the case of actually benefiting from things that people are talking about, like collagen synthesis and electrolytes, there are definitely better venues for that. If you guys are interested in the recipe, I have an upload from a while ago that you can check out that I'll show at the end of this video. What I like to do is just follow a very classic French brown stock recipe, but to use those knee joint bones, those high cartilage bones. And although I suggest that you consume the marrow in its raw or cooked state, initially, without boiling it for hours and hours, you can still take those marrow bones that you scoop the marrow out of and make broth out of them. There's still fatty tissue and cartilage on those bones that you couldn't get off. If you guys do want to support the channel, please subscribe and share the video. If you guys want to check out my Amazon shop, I do have some products I use in my day-to-day life on there. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter. If you guys are on there, please drop me a follow. And if you guys would like to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations, regards to anything, maybe you want some bone broth cooking lessons, you can reach out to me via email frankatofanoatgmail.com or contact me through the form on my website. A lot of people think bone broth is kind of like this holy grail of nutrition, why in the reality, all it might have is small amounts of fat-soluble vitamins and some minerals. That being said, it's not a bad way to hydrate yourself. It tastes good and it's certainly applicable for a lot of culinary things. And I'm going to show you guys kind of a classic French stock recipe that I applied to my bone broth with a few kind of like paleo things in there, like throwing in some vinegar and using some kombu for some umami flavor. Okay, so I roasted some marrow bones in the oven at the hottest temp, which for me is 550. And we just want some nice brown color. Hopefully your marrow bones have some meat on them. If you want a more flavorful, more like beef-driven stock, definitely add some muscle meat to this. So in regards to caramelizing vegetables, it's a lot more work. Like you have to chop them up smaller, you have to spend time cooking them. I haven't really tested around with the flavor difference too much, but raw vegetables make a delicious stock. So it's not for me. This is for my family, so I'm not really too worried about the flavor, although I might test that out in the future. So here is one to one to one ratio of celery to leeks to carrots, and then two parts onions. So it's mirepoix is traditionally two-part onion, one-part carrot, one-part celery, and the stock, traditionally, stocks also have some leeks in them for some different depth of onion flavor. Okay, something else that's very traditional is thyme. And I don't have fresh thyme, but dry thyme is just as good. We just don't want to really add too much of it. Much more concentrated. Every stock has a bay leaf. I don't really like adding more than one. Overpower the stock very easily. And one other thing that I always add to my stock is kombu, and this is seen traditionally in making dashi. It adds like an iodine-eaten mommy flavor that for me makes a huge difference in my stock. So this is a bit full, but once we cover this with water and it boils for a few hours, the size of the vegetables is gonna be greatly reduced. So I'm using reverse osmosis water from my tap, and I'm also gonna add some vinegar to kind of break down the bones. This I have a red wine vinegar from Napa Valley Naturals. This is very fragrant, very flavorful. I probably shouldn't be using this in this, but I don't really have another use for it. Just a bit of red wine vinegar in there. You can use red wine vinegar, you can use apple cider vinegar. I find that something like apple cider vinegar, I associate more with pork and chicken, and whereas red wine vinegar goes good with red meat, like marbled bones. So now I'm gonna put this on a heat where I'm gonna bring it to a very low simmer, and I wanna keep it on a low simmer, and this is probably gonna go for about 24 hours. I'm gonna keep adding water to it and reducing it. The main difference between this and a beef stock is the beef stock, you would caramelize the meat in the pan, and then deglaze it with red wine, whereas this one, we're just roasting the bones in the oven and adding vinegar instead. I guess those are the two main notes that, this will be like a lot richer, it will have less beefy flavor, it'll have like a balance of acid from the vinegar, but it won't have like a deep rich beefy flavor. So this is kind of where you want the stock to be. It's like, it's definitely bubbling, but it's pretty much as low of a simmer as possible. I'm gonna keep it like this for, I don't know, maybe 10, 12 hours till tonight, and by then the water level should have gone down a bit. We'll add some more water and put it back on the stove. All right, so the liquid has reduced by about half. You know, the size of the vegetables has greatly reduced, as you could guys see. Like I had water and vegetables in this and I couldn't even, it seemed like the pot was almost too small, but I'm gonna fill this back up to the top of water and we're just gonna let it go overnight. It's been 10 hours, roughly. All right, I've filled it back up to the top. So in the morning, this should definitely be done. Okay, broth has gone for, you know, about 20 hours total. We added more water once. So now all I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna take it off the heat. I'm gonna add maybe like two cups of water to help it cool off quicker and then we'll taste it. All right, I forgot, we do have to strain this. So as you can see, super dark brown stock. I might have to add a little salt to this to taste it because it's not seasoned, but maybe it'll be fine with the seaweed. Definitely needs a little salt, but it is way too hot to eat. So again guys, the point of bone broth is mainly for a possible small amount of minerals and just something tasty you can have. This is just like a really flavorful vegetable broth. You know, the amount of bones I put in there with the amount of meat. I don't really taste it, but it just adds a little bit of a richness to it.