 Liver is literally the healthiest food on the planet. It has every single vitamin, mineral, element, and fatty acid our bodies need in its most available form, the animal form. Nutrients from plants are not as available to the body as the animal forms of nutrients are. Vitamin A, for instance, has a plant form beta-carotene and an animal form retinol. The body needs to convert carotene to retinol, but this isn't efficient and some people can't convert it at all. This applies to pretty much every single plant form of nutrients versus the animal form. Liver in particular is really the highest in just about every single one of these nutrients our body needs. There is some variance depending on what animal you're getting the liver from. Fish, for instance, tends to have a much higher omega fatty acid content, whereas migratory bird liver like geese or emus who sit on the egg for a long period of time tend to store large amounts of vitamin K in their liver. The reason liver is the healthiest food, even though there are some amazing nutrient-dense foods like eggs as well as fish eggs, bone marrow, brains, is that liver is the only significantly high source of vitamin A in nature. If you're deficient in vitamin A, which we can assume most people are their whole lives as they haven't been consuming quality animal foods, then liver is your only real solution. The only way you can get an optimal amount of vitamin A in your diet is by consuming liver. Taking a look at Kev's liver, keep in mind all the RDAs, the recommended dietary amounts, are a bit low. The dietary amounts are just to prevent deficiencies. They're not for optimal health. Liver has 2,400% of our daily vitamin A requirement. This is for a 100 gram serving. It has massive amounts of all the B vitamins, folate is significant to note, as many people are deficient even when eating a lot of meat. Liver is known for having adequate vitamin C as well as vitamins D and E in small amounts. Vitamin K is high as well, and this is veal liver. If we were looking at goose liver, the vitamin K would be marginally higher, I would say about 50% higher, not too much of a difference. The minerals are very balanced. In regards to the elements, liver is a great source of iron, zinc, super high in copper, has manganese, as well as small amounts of iodine. Even if it's not fish liver, there is iodine. When we take a look at EPA and DHA, it even has these preformed omega-3 fatty acids. Fish liver would be significantly higher in omega-3 fatty acids. It also contains conjugated linoleic acid and arachidonic acid, two very important nutrients for regulating inflammation and just improving overall metabolic function. Conjugated linoleic acid and arachidonic acid are only found in animal foods, and I think these two fatty acids are going to get a lot of publicity moving forward in the context of anyone following an animal foods based diet. I'll probably do a video on them within a week or two to explain their purpose and their function as I haven't really seen a lot of push for their benefits. The amount of copper in liver is the primary concern for any toxicity related issues. Your zinc to copper ratio is supposed to be about 8 to 1, so if you're consuming too much liver every day for a long period of time, and this would probably take maybe half a pound of liver to a pound of liver every single day for several months, you would imbalance your copper to zinc ratio. The way to alleviate this is to consume a normal amount of liver. You really only need like half a pound of liver a week, or you could consume livers that are lower in copper. Pulse free liver tends to have a fraction of the copper that beef liver does. I think it's about a quarter. So if you have like chicken or turkey liver that's much lower in copper. The problem with that is usually the chicken and the turkey liver are much lower quality than beef or lamb liver. If you do get fish liver like cod liver or cod liver oil, I mean cod liver oil has no copper. So if you are concerned about copper, the amount that's in cod liver oil is insignificant. And with cod liver oil you're still obtaining all the nutrients you need. It's just that cod liver oil is oxidized to some degree. Anytime you take an animal food out of the context of its natural environment, it will be oxidized. So every single one of these options has its pros and cons. For me what I have here today is some very high quality pasture raised turkey liver. Liver should be mild and sweet in flavor. It shouldn't really be bitter or astringent. A lot of people don't like liver for the taste and the texture, but if you have a high quality liver and you're preparing it properly, that's a non-issue. And if you guys are like, oh well Frank, I don't have access to grass fed liver or high quality liver, eating conventional liver is better than nothing. I mean you could swallow it down. You could take cod liver oil capsules. You could even take beef liver capsules, although I'm not too much of a fan of those compared to cod liver oil. As long as you get your liver in for your vitamin A, you're good to go. The conventional liver is not the end of the world, although it's not ideal and it doesn't taste that great. You're still achieving the goal of your vitamin A intake. So here we have the bowl of turkey livers. And as you guys see, this is a very dark color liver. When a food is darker, whether it's an animal or a plant food, it's usually an indicator of the nutrient content relative to the actual color of the food. If you had a carrot that was a darker orange than another carrot, the carotene content is higher. It makes sense. If you have broccoli that's a really deep emerald green compared to a light green broccoli, the nutrient content is higher. This applies to animal foods as well. When we have this super dark colored turkey liver compared to a chicken liver that might be even pinkish or very light colored, there's a significant difference in the vitamins, minerals, elements of these foods. When we said there was a variance earlier between different types of animal livers and where you're getting it from, there's also a huge variance from animal to animal. I've seen data showing that liver can literally be twice as high in vitamins depending on the quality. And the animal might not actually have high vitamin content in the liver if it was on a very poor quality feed or if it was malnourished. Animals store vitamins in their liver. That gets depleted if the animal is not getting adequate nutrition. So be wary when you are buying conventional low quality liver. You literally might only be getting half the amount of vitamins that you think you're getting, something definitely to keep in mind. Quality is super important here. Really over any other food you're consuming, if you want to consume something high quality, it should be the organ meats of the liver. And I've spoken about in the past the fats. Fats are where vitamins are stored, very important. So as I said, I have some turkey liver today. You could really smell the minerals on this. I mean, I don't have a great sense of smell. But I'm sure if you had one of those super noses, like those people that could smell everything, I used to work with a chef that could smell like someone's breath when he walked past them. I'm sure if you had that type of sense of smell, you could literally say, oh, I smell the copper. I smell the retinol. You can literally smell vitamins and minerals in food depending on the content of them. And they also have an individual taste as well. So if you do have a very refined sense of taste, a palate, you can differentiate between those things. This one is like a bit bitter. A lot of the time when you have an older animal and the liver is very dark colored like this, keep in mind it can be super bitter. Because of the certain vitamins get too high in the diet of the poultry. And this is kind of what happened here. It's like it literally, it burns your throat or whatever that. Whatever the mineral in this that's high is, or vitamin. And I think it's the retinol. It literally burns your throat. I'm going to try another liver to see if it's as bitter. Now this one, this liver isn't bitter at all. This one actually, this is what I mean guys. This one is really delicious. Like no bitterness, it's sweet, mild, minerally flavor. This is really good. I could buy a pack of turkey livers from the same farm. And one of the turkey livers in the pack will be delicious. And one of them, not so good. Really shows the variance in quality, the age of the animal, you know, what was that animal foraging for. Although the color of the liver is important and indicates the nutrient content, once the liver starts turning blackish purple and almost black, that can be telling you there was something wrong with how the animal was raised. And these vitamins, minerals, elements are in balance in nature to taste good. If an animal has a high nutrient content, if the food is good for you, it will typically have a nice taste to it. You know, that's why high quality grass-fed butter tastes better than regular conventional store bought butter. The same applies to liver. When the vitamins, minerals, all these things are in balance, it tastes the best. So an unbalanced liver, you know, you're still getting your nutrients, but just be mindful that maybe next time, try to get a different source or, you know, try to maybe even switch the animal you're buying the liver from to get something more consistently good quality. You know, there's a lot of things nature tells us in regards to food, how we taste, how we perceive it, you know, the state it comes in. You know, I can eat this raw turkey liver and it's delicious on its own as a natural raw food from an animal. Something that is commonly overlooked is the synergy of fat soluble vitamins if you're consuming a large amount of vitamin A from liver and you're not getting adequate amounts of all the other fat soluble vitamins, you can run into issues, specifically vitamin D3. If you're consuming, you know, 10, 15, 20,000 IU of vitamin A from liver per day, you need to be getting near the same amount of vitamin D3. This is a now liquid vitamin D3 supplement. This is on my Amazon shop, which is down in the comments below. I take between 10 and 15 drops of this. So between 10 and 15,000 IU per day. And this is the most important thing. You also wanna make sure you're getting enough vitamin K2. Most people do eat eggs or cheese on this diet. I personally eat fermented fat and meat. So any fermented product will help you get your vitamin K2, but if you're not getting all these vitamins synergistically, they do have antagonistic effects on each other. So not only will you not be in optimal health because you're missing nutrients, you might actually cause issues in the long run. I've actually had a few people come to me from PKD, the Paleolithic Ketogenic group. I think it's called Paleo-Medicina. They have a practice in Hungary. We looked at their blood work and their vitamin D3 levels were going down rapidly because the Paleolithic Ketogenic people were advocating that they consumed large amounts of liver without getting vitamin D3 supplementing or getting sun. And their D3 levels literally like got cut in half in a matter of two months. So keep in mind guys, nature is what we need to go by. If you're obtaining liver, hypothetically you would be hunting every single day out in the sun. That's why this is very important. To sum that up, you need to be consuming these vitamins in proper ratios. If one of them is too high and one is too low, that's where you run into issues. It doesn't matter if you consume incredibly high amounts of liver, vitamin D3, as long as all of the other nutrients are high. If you're eating a lot of liver for vitamin A, you need your vitamin D3. If you're getting a lot of copper from eating beef liver, you need to make sure to get some zinc, maybe from oysters to keep that zinc to copper ratio in check. Be very mindful of the overall nutrient profile of your diet and if it's realistic to what we could have done in nature. So thank you guys for watching. Please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon. It's right next to the subscribe button and share the video if you can. Recently I started my backup YouTube channel, Frankie's Free Range Meat. For any of you guys unfamiliar, I recently launched a meat company several weeks ago where you guys can order high quality animal products such as milk fed veal liver. So definitely check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com. If you want to place a pre-order before the end of May, a We Ship International. We have a bunch of high quality products, grass fed, raw cheeses, and a bunch of stuff we want to do in the future. So again guys, check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com. But if you guys can please subscribe to the new YouTube channel, I will be linking that channel at the end here. In addition to that, I do have a recipe for liver pate as well as a pan seared liver recipe that you guys can check out. Enjoy the rest of the week.