 I grew up in the Midwest and my mother would make a pot roast once a week, whether we wanted it or not. And she would put it on the stove first thing in the morning and it would cook all day. And what started out as a very, very tough piece of meat with lots of gristle, by the time it went on our table at night, it was just soft and mushy. And so, unbeknownst to me, I was having a bone broth concoction at least once a week. She would also do the same thing with spare ribs. She would actually put them in a pot of sauerkraut and cook them all day. And by the end of the day, there was the spare of the pork meat along with all the collagen and gristle had fallen off the bones and had mixed in with the sauerkraut. To this day, I hate that dish because I had it once a week, whether I wanted it or not. But the point is, even as much as a generation ago, for me, this was a part of my normal cuisine and that came, my mother's family was primarily German and that was traditional, long-term German cooking techniques. So there's a long history in bone broth. It's been described as long ago as the Middle Ages and it was called Restorer. It kind of restored a broth. And then there was beef tea in Britain, speaking of growing up. Many of you can relate to the fact that consomme, which is basically beef broth, was considered a great soup and even at fancy restaurants, you would start with a bowl of beef consomme, which was bone broth. And if it was a really fancy restaurant, they would chill the beef consomme and it would be literally a chilled bowl of gelatin with beef flavor. So at that time, it was considered a delicacy. So, and I can remember when we'd go to a fancy restaurant, having a bowl of consomme was considered the ultimate in fine dining, fine dining that the poor were having back in the Middle Ages. So amazing how things come around. So, first of all, let's talk about scientifically back pros of drinking bone broth. Bone broth is a great source of some amino acids that do make collagen. But let's get rid of a myth, first of all. You can eat all the collagen you want, but one of the things you have to understand is we do not absorb collagen from our intestinal tract. All protein, no matter what it is, is broken down into individual amino acids. And those amino acids, which are small protein building blocks, are then absorbed through the wall of our gut. Now, once they're absorbed through the wall of our gut, you then reabsorb, then reassemble those amino acids into the proteins that you need. But there's actually no instruction book that came with the collagen you ate in bone broth to make sure that you take those individual amino acids and once you absorb them, make them back into collagen. You'll use those amino acids to make what your body thinks it needs. One of which is collagen, but certainly not all of which is collagen. So just taking collagen in whatever form does not gonna guarantee that you're gonna make collagen on the other side. So that's one of the biggest myths out there that the more collagen in bone broth, the more collagen you're gonna manufacture. Now, it's great to have the building blocks to do that, but remember you can get those building blocks without using bone broth and that's the important thing. You can make collagen out of other amino acids. Now, bone broth in general contains a amino acid called glutamine. Now, glutamine is interesting because we do know that the intestinal cells, that one layer of cells that lines our gut and that lining is the size of a tennis court inside of us. Those cells love glutamine. They actually use glutamine to grow and repair themselves and that's scientifically proven. So the fact that bone broth has glutamine is a very scientifically valid way of feeding gut cells. But I'm always reminded of a professor from Louisiana State University, Russell Blalock, who was a neurosurgeon. He's retired now, but he's written a number of books on what are called neuro excitotoxins. And one of his pet subjects was glutamine becoming a neurotoxin in excess, turning into glutamate, which is in fact a neurotoxin. And I was so impressed with his research when I first started doing the plant paradox that I urged people that if you were going to use glutamine as a supplement or glutamine containing foods like bone broth to help heal a leaky gut that you should probably do this for a limited period of time. I think probably three months is a maximum period. I'm not gonna put words in his mouth, but he would probably say less than that. In any event, I don't think that you need to have bone broth as a standard part of your diet to keep your gut healthy. But I do think it does play a good role in having glutamine available to cells for a reparative process. So that's probably my tip for the number one reason that this is useful. Now, number two, a lot of proponents of bone broth say that bone broth correctly is high in glycine. And now we're gonna take a little trip down nerdy road here. There is some very, very fascinating data, particularly in animals, that there are certain amino acids that age us rapidly, that turn on a compound called mTOR, or TOR, T-O-R, in our cells. And you're gonna learn a lot about this in the longevity paradox. Long story short, there are certain amino acids called methionine that absolutely positively activate mTOR. And if mTOR is activated, quite frankly, you're not gonna live as long and you actually may produce cancer. If mTOR is turned off, then it's actually compatible with living a very long time and living well and not having cancer. Okay, so what does that have to do with bone broth? Well, bone broth does not have a lot of methionine, which is a very, very, very common amino acid in animal protein. But it does have a lot of another amino acid called glycine. So what? Experiments in pigs show that if you put pigs on a methionine restricted diet, they will live about twice as long as their littermates who eat a normal methionine diet. Same calories in both groups, just by eliminating methionine. Well, that's pretty cool, except it's hard to have a methionine restricted diet with the exception of vegans because vegans actually plant proteins have very little methionine. And you're gonna hear that argument from me again and again and again in the longevity paradox. Back to glycine. You can take pigs, put them on a regular diet and add glycine to their diet. And glycine appears to act as if the pigs were eating a methionine restricted diet. Now, because I'm such an incredible nerd, I take glycine tablets twice a day because I don't hedge my bets. So, but bone broth has quite a bit of glycine and not much methionine. So of the animal protein products out there it's probably a pretty interesting safe bet. So those are the pros of bone broth. So if you wanna use it to feed your intestinal cells the enterocytes for a while, that's great. If you want to experiment with it as a longevity technique because of the glycine, that's okay. But it is animal protein. And as you'll see in the longevity paradox and as you learned in the plant paradox in the end animal protein ages us. I wish it didn't, but it does. And having said that as you learned in the plant paradox beef, lamb, and pork all have a sugar molecule called Nu5GC that can promote heart disease and cancer in us. Chicken and fish don't have it. So my personal feeling, if you can find true pastured chicken you're probably safer with chicken bone broth than any other thing. And in fact, back in the good old days a stewing chicken was how we ate chicken and we actually made chicken soup from stewed chicken because we got all of that collagen from the tough old bird. Okay, does this stuff go directly into your joints? Well, unfortunately it doesn't go directly into your joints. Again, you get the building blocks. So it's to me a lot easier to consume things like haluronic acid as a supplement. A lot easier to consume chondroitin sulfate, MSM, acetyl-L, glutamine, temporarily to get the same effect. So you don't have to have bone broth, but if you're gonna have bone broth I would head towards chicken rather than beef, pork, or lamb as your best choices. Okay, are there proven studies that bone broth in fact makes your joints better, makes your skin better? In fact, there's very few studies that have ever substantiated anything about this. In fact, there are some good studies that show that the collagen and bone broth is not a reliable precursor as a supplemental source of collagen and this is published data. So unfortunately it's just not the great panacea that people would like it to be. Now having said that, and I get this from my patients and I get this on the internet, we have a recipe for bone broth in the Plant Paradox cookbook and it's really easy to do. So it's in the book, but what you do is you take four pounds of pasture-raised animal bones, you take two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, put in some salt, please use iodized sea salt. It's readily available now, even Morton's makes it. Iodine is a critical component in your diet to make thyroid hormone. Please ditch the pink salt and ditch the plain sea salt and get iodine in your diet. I see a mini epidemic of hypothyroidism in this country and getting some iodized sea salt in people's diets is miraculous in getting their thyroid back to normal. As an aside, if you're not gonna do that buy yourself some spirulina tablets, you can get it at Trader Joe's, it's organic, it's cheap. Take about four a day and you'll get plenty of iodine that way. Sorry for the aside. Throw in some onions, some parsley, some garlic, put it in a pressure cooker or a slow cooker or a stock pot. And just like my mother did, just cook it all day. If you're using a pressure cooker, it'll take about 90 minutes. 10 hours in a slow cooker. Then just put it in a stock pot if you don't have either of those and just cover it and just put it on simmer for the day. Medium low heat will be fine. When it's done, you take a strainer, you pour it through the strainer and there you go. You've got your own set of bone broth. You can even, I think, put it in approved ice cube containers like silicone ice cube containers. And then you've got your own little bullion cubes. Freeze it. And then you can use that as your stock when making a lot of my other recipes or your own favorite recipes. You don't have to just keep it in the refrigerator. So it's a great way to make bone broth. You can get the leftover bones. Whenever, for instance, we had a pastured turkey for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. And we saved the bones from both of those birds and we cook those bones all day long, actually two days. And that's where we got our bone broth. So we're set now for several months because we're not gonna use it very often, but we're done and recycled our bird. So that's my take on bone broth. It is not the miracle cure all of you want it to be, but it's a great source of glutamine. It's a very interesting source for glycine, but just remember it's still an animal protein and it goes with those proviso. Thanks for watching, but don't go anywhere. The next episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast is waiting for you now. All the great spices of the Middle Ages were actually pursued because of their polyphenol content. And here's a fun fact. What's the highest polyphenol?