Yeah. I'm going to recommend that you
not do that. Not because it's gross, but because it's dangerous. And
I've got the science to back it up. Hello, Primals. Welcome to Food Theory, the show
that gives you the raw truth about raw food. Today we're talking about The Liver King,
an influencer who showed up on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube just over a year
ago and has set the world on fire with his “ancestral” approach to living.
Basically, his idea is that mankind, and specifically the dude part
of mankind, have become scrawny, little wimpy men. And that's making us primarily
unhappy, leading to high rates of depression and anxiety in today's male youth. He broadcasts
statistics about our chronic male depression. And his claim is that there's only one path
to quality of life and happiness: Liver. That's right. That organ that you
systematically destroyed for four years at your frat house in college, that is the
most important organ for your ongoing happiness. But I should probably clarify, it's not
your liver. That's the important one. It's cow's liver. ol’ Bessie
over there in the corner, shaking in our hooves. According to The
Liver King, you need to be carving her up, grabbing as many internal organs as you can get
your hands on, and you need to be eating them raw. Also, you should throw in some eggs raw and
some bone marrow raw and some strawberries. "Rawberries!" Just kidding. Strawberries are not part of The
Liver King diet. This is a real guy. And yes, this is his quote unquote “diet”. It's
no wonder that this guy has been able to catch the attention of every dude-bro
podcaster from Joe Rogan to Logan Paul and any other broadcaster with “ogan” as a
part of their name. It's also been covered by the Internet commentary channels and
tons and tons of fitness professionals. And who can blame them when they're covering
a guy whose content involves eating raw meat, getting 2,000 pounds of ice delivered to him so he can spend the afternoon
chilling in a 36 degree ice bath. To letting the sun shine where
the sun don't normally shine. This guy is just a walking billboard that
says make content about me. The question is, though, how much of this is bunk?
Should you be doing anything that he recommends? Should you be spooning
yourself bone marrow like it's a Jell-O jiggler and munching down on
internal organs, walking dead style? Is there scientific evidence to support Liver
King's idea that a diet of raw meat gives you a health boost or an evolutionary advantage over
a typical diet? As someone who isn't a doctor, my answer is: I'm not a doctor and offer
no medical advice whatsoever. As someone on the internet who researches
weird food stuff though, heck yes, we said we're going to debunk this one. So,
ladies and gentlemen, get ready to talk liver. The Liver King's diet is only a part of a
whole lifestyle system that he calls the nine ancestral tenets, which are designed to bring
you back to the way your ancestors lived: cold, starving and riddled with parasites.
Oh, wait, sorry. I mean, powerful, strong and dominant over all other life on
the planet. The thing is, outside of the diet, many of these tenants are hard to argue with,
mostly because they're basically common sense. Take the very first one on his website.
Sleep. Get a lot of sleep. Great. Really shaking up the system with that
one. Turn off your phone at least 30 minutes before bed. Don't eat too
close to bedtime. This advice is touted by almost every wellness program out
there. Surprise, surprise, it works. So when he's like, this is how you should live,
it's like, Yeah, duh. But it's not by any means a unique insight on his part. Several other
tenants of his kind of play out this way too, like this principle; Move. Which recommends, shock
of all shocks, take a long walk outside. Bond, spend time with people that you love and support.
Sun, go outside. Even the ones that feel slightly less orthodox, like walking barefoot outside to
connect with the ground or doing cold plunges to improve your circulation. Sure, they may be
less common and not for everyone, but there are still tons of fitness experts out there that talk
about polar bear swims and barefoot running. I, on the other hand, am not a fitness expert. Heck,
I'm excited if I've managed to carry the heavy groceries in from the car. So I'm not here to
talk about his whole lifestyle package because honestly I think a lot of it's pretty basic and
can probably help a lot of us live healthier. No, my quibble today is with the
namesake of this channel, the food; the raw organs that he's peddling. That's really
where The Liver King's message departs from common fitness practices. It's also where it departs
from all food, health and safety guidelines. And as I'm about to show you, it's also where
he departs from his own fitness principles. So let's just take a look at his diet, shall we?
Technically, meat is not the only thing he eats, as he's also been documented to consume things
like protein powder and maple syrup and steroids. Oops. Yeah. After a year of claiming
his body was completely natural, that little revelation came out recently.
It's not very ancestral of you there, Brian. That's his name, by the way. Brian. Brian
Johnson. Don't worry, though. In a recent video, he very sincerely apologized for
lying to everyone over the last year. You can tell he's sincere because he did it
from atop his throne and also immediately shifted his admission of wrongdoing to
a completely unrelated topic. Reminder, this is the guy who started blowing up a year ago.
Dude is speedrunning that online influencer life. He even got that deep sigh that every influencer
does. Amazing. But okay. The steroid use aside, the majority of his diet is advertised
to be raw organ meats. Organ meat is usually not the part of the animal
that people find most appetizing. When it comes to chicken, stuff like the
liver and heart is part of the giblets that if you're buying the whole chicken
often come pre-removed in a baggie that most people end up feeding to their dog.
And that's only if the meat processing facility didn't just chuck it straight into
the trash, because at least in the U.S, most people don't eat those things at this point
in history. Liver and onion? Beef kidney? Those used to be prominent across Europe 100 years
ago when people couldn't afford the cuts of meat that we eat now but aren't considered the
tastiest parts to eat (speak for yourself) or the easiest parts to prepare these days. In fact,
liver is a notorious punishment food in movies. And if you're a zoomer who only watches
TikTok. Well, they hate liver over there, too. But if anything, far from being relegated to
dog food, organ meats are actually extremely dense in nutrients, absolutely packed with
vitamins and minerals. Liver in particular is absolutely deserving of being called king
of the food world because it's just loaded with iron. To put things in perspective. Red
meat is one of the richest sources of iron, and beef will typically have 2.6
milligrams of iron per hundred grams, while an equal amount of liver
would have 17.9 milligrams of iron. It is an S-tier source of iron, which
is important when many people suffer from iron deficiencies leading to
anemia, affecting 23% of all people globally. And for young children up to
age five, that number is closer to 40%. And besides iron, liver is also chock full of
other nutrients like vitamin A and B vitamins like vitamin B12. So it seems like this one
might actually be a point for The Liver King. It's a similar story for beef heart, which
has 6.4 milligrams of iron per hundred grams. Nowhere near as much as the liver, but
still more than twice as high as an equivalent amount of just a regular old cut
of beef. And the heart is also packed with the B-complex Vitamins; B2, B6, B12, all of
which are great for cardiovascular health. Yep, that means much like mega man absorbing the
powers of his defeated enemies. Eating beef heart will cause your heart to become stronger. Pretty
much every organ that The Liver King names here: pancreas, spleen, kidney. All of them packed
full of nutrients to the point where it really does have you wondering why we waste our
time eating boring old muscle tissue all the time. It's even true of the Rocky Mountain
oysters that The Liver King is so fond of. While testicles are far from the most appetizing
part of the cow. These Montana tender groins are indeed an excellent source of nutrition, while
they're roughly similar to regular cow meat in terms of protein content as well as other
nutrients that you'd expect to get from beef, testicles do have a slightly higher amount of
potassium with 100 grams of the stuff in there, offering about as much potassium
as a small to medium sized banana. That's not a euphemism, by the way.
I actually do mean banana. So, hey, if you can stomach it, go nuts. Ba
dum ching. Boy howdy, that's a winner. So what's the stigma then, against all these
superfoods? Well, one reason is that your boomer parents probably considered organ meat unhealthy
because they contain a lot of cholesterol. And back in the 1960s, the thinking was
that eating cholesterol in your food would lead you to have higher
levels of blood cholesterol, which then is linked to heart disease.
It seemed like common sense at the time, but just like how a high fat diet doesn't
necessarily lead to a high fat body, the current scientific consensus on cholesterol is
that dietary cholesterol has little to no effect on your blood cholesterol. It turns out that the
health experts of the 1960s were wrong. The main reason that the USDA recommends cutting down
on high cholesterol foods isn't because of the dietary cholesterol itself, but because high
cholesterol foods tend to have high amounts of saturated fat, which would be a problem for
those suffering from heart disease. But actually, beef liver and beef heart tend to be leaner.
They tend to have less saturated fat than the equivalent amount of beef. So it looks like Liver
King is actually ahead of the game on this one. So that's two points for The Liver King? Wait, this is still the same guy who doped up,
lied about it, profited and then apologized atop his throne right? I'm siding with the
throne guy? No, no, that's not right. Well, hold on to your ancestral horses there
friends, because the tide’s about to turn. While it might seem tempting to
jump mouth first into the nearest cow liver. There's one problem. Tell him, Gordo. There's a reason we don't serve steaks and chicken
like sushi. They're likely to carry pathogens like salmonella and dangerous E.coli strains.
Ditto for listeria and campylobacter. There's just no shortage of bacteria that can cause
food poisoning. And this is serious business. According to the World Health Organization, 600
million people get food poisoning every year. And of those, around 420,000 die. But
clearly, people do eat sushi and carpaccio, raw chopped beef and live to tell the
tale. So what's going on with that? While eating raw meat doesn't automatically
cause you to get foodborne illnesses, all meat has bacteria living on its surface.
So unless there's a really compelling upside to eating meat raw instead of cooked,
you're taking a lot of unnecessary risk. There are cultural dishes like carpaccio
and kitfo that definitely involve raw meat. And those are primarily eaten as part of
special dining experiences, not everyday for three courses breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Liver king it's tons of raw meat, and he sent packages of it to people like Danny Gonzalez from
high end meat suppliers like White Oak Pastures, where even though they purport to have some
of the safest and best products in the world, they still cook it all, including the
good old Rocky Mountain oysters they send out. And that is talking about a specialty
supplier. For the vast majority of people, especially in the U.S., who go grocery store
shopping and not to a specialty butcher shop. It's not going to work like this. They
don't have a good sense of whether the meat they buy would be safe to consume
raw. And the USDA would back up the claim that it's never safe to consume raw. The
USDA lists its guidelines for cooking all beef organs to a minimum temperature of 160
degrees Fahrenheit or 71 degrees Celsius, and never leaving it undercooked. And in case
you think that the USDA is just being stingy, they only actually recommend cooking
regular beef to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just medium. The biggest thing here is
that the outside surface of the meat, the place where bacteria builds up first and fastest. It
needs to get a really strong hot cook. That is why most nice restaurants are able to serve you
rare steak because they know that they're going to get an incredibly hot cook on the outside in
order to kill all the most dangerous bacteria. In fact, in an ironic twist, one of the
biggest reasons to eat organ meat has historically been that it's economical
for your family. Kidneys and livers have historically been much cheaper than muscle beef
because it's less tasty and harder to cook. But to get liver and kidneys that you would even
consider eating raw, like from White Oak Pastures, which we know The Liver King trusts. You're
paying $22 a pound for that beef liver, $14.50 a pound for beef heart, both significantly
more expensive than most cuts of beef, including USDA choice, T-bones and strip steaks,
some of the most desirable meats on the market. At the end of the day, these products are not
remotely affordable for the vast majority of people. For a solution that he purports is going
to solve the world's mental health problems. No, it's just not accessible to
the vast majority of the world. So scores now tied: Liver King 2, us 2. It's
not safe or economical to consume raw meat, but let's just say those aren't factors.
Would it be better for you nutritionally if you could eat the meat raw? The
answer again is a resounding no. The other major reason that humans cook food
is, are you ready? Humans have evolved for this. You know, from those ancestral heritages
that The Liver King keeps talking about, you want to be king of the planet
like The Liver King? Cook your food. That's what our homosapien grandparents did
to get ahead of all the other species out there. It's what set us apart from all the other
animal species on earth. Author Polly Shulman, writing for the American Museum of
Natural History, puts it like this: Compared to chimpanzees, our closest living
relatives, we have, quote, puny digestive systems. We have smaller teeth, weaker chewing
muscles and shorter gastrointestinal tract. Those shorter gastrointestinal tracts matter a
lot, since that means less opportunity to extract nutrients from our food. And you see, that becomes
a problem because compared to the adult chimp, the adult human needs about 400 more calories every
day. That's because we have bigger bodies and bigger brains. How is it then that we humans, with
our bigger energy needs, are able to get away with having weaker and shorter digestive systems? Well,
it's because we pre-digest our food using tools. Instead of relying on strong teeth and
strong jaws to chew our food. We rely instead on our strong brains to digest
that food before it ever enters our body. We use tools to crush, cut, grind food into
smaller bits before it ever enters our mouth. And most critically, we cook our
food. The proteins in uncooked meat have intermolecular bonds that are tough
to break because when you think about it, raw meat is just whole muscle. It's tough stuff.
Cooking the meat though, denatures those proteins, it changes them into a form that allows the
enzymes in our digestive system to actually get at the proteins and break them down so our
body can use them. We don't lose nutrition when we cook our meat. We actually make much
more of it accessible to our bodies more easily. And what about all those valuable
vitamins and minerals in the organ meat? Well, they're still there, too, when you cook it.
Iron in liver isn't going to magically change into some other element just because you heated it a
little bit. You want concrete proof of that. One reason people don't like liver is that it's easy
to overcook, meaning it dries out in the pan. The concentration of all the minerals inside
becomes higher, bringing out the unpleasant "iron-ie" flavor because there's so much of
it in a small piece of meat. That said, cooking the liver ahead of time means that
our digestive juices have to do less work to pull nutrients from food, which is why we
can get away with having smaller digestive systems compared to animals. Liver King
likes to tout the ancestral lifestyle, but our human ancestors relied on fire for
cooking and tools for cutting and grinding as a way of pre-digesting the food. Our ability to use
tools is what sets us apart from other animals. It's why humans are weaker than chimps when it
comes to raw strength. Ultimately, we beat chimps evolutionarily. Liver King seems to think that
eating raw meat is paying homage to our human ancestors. But it's our brain and our stovetop,
not our biceps, that make us the winning species. So eating raw meat, well, that's the exact
sort of “sub-primal'' behavior that he makes fun of in front of his audience. And if that
weren't enough of a theory A FOOD THEORY! Well, I'm pretty sure he knows all of this. Like
many an Internet charlatan before him, he's selling an aspirational brand, not science. This is what he's selling: success.
There's no science in that quote. There's confidence and wealth. And that
is what all of this is really about. For a guy whose tenants involve connecting
with the earth, he's very willing to fly off in private jets. And in fact, this quote redefines
ancestral living as going on far off adventures, living in mansions, not exactly bringing
Flintstones level realness over there. At the end of the day, the liver king for
all his ancestral tenants isn't really living ancestrally. He's projecting a very specific
image and then selling the feeling of being powerful and primal to men, mostly young men who
he identifies as depressed and under confident. He's happy to charge them $48 for a two month
supply of supplements from a company he owns. While he flies around the world doing meat
related stunts because that's all they are stunts. And while we've shown that he may be
completely wrong about the raw meat from a health perspective, nutrition perspective and
even historic perspective. In the end here, there is one thing, and one thing only, that
shall always remain king: science. Instead of following the private jets, massive pecs and
testicle bites, follow the research and decide for yourself. But, hey, that's just
a theory. A FOOD THEORY! Bon appétit. Speaking of dangerous food trends, find out
the truth about NyQuil chicken. That's been a popular one on the social media lately.
That video is on the left. Or if you want to just keep pumping more iron into your
system and don't feel like consuming liver, click the video on the right to
find out why you should be eating chocolate and not spinach. As always,
my friends, I'll see you next week.
