Liver.
Yep, beef liver. Freeze-dried and placed into little capsules. Consuming beef liver is how Vince Gironda added 1″ to his biceps without even changing his workouts.
Vince Gironda was one of the original pioneers in the muscle-building world, just like Jack Lalanne.
Vince opened a gym in the 40s in California and trained all sorts of the top guys like Arnold and Frank Zane and many movie actors. A lot of the workouts people do today are just derivatives of principles that he discovered generations ago.
In 1966, he shared this in one of his books:
“Take 2 desiccated liver tablets every hour for 3 days and watch your measurements grow. I put one inch on my arm measurement without any extra workouts.”
This isn’t surprising to me. Liver is the storage depot of our most precious minerals/vitamins/peptides, and it’s the same story for an animal’s liver. It’s one of the most nutrient-dense things you can eat.
Deficient In Organ Meats
People in the Western world are chronically deprived of minerals and vitamins that our bodies need to work properly because of processed foods and a high-stress lifestyle.
Aside from poor health, being empty of minerals can make someone a “non-responder” to exercise, like lifting weights. They eat more, and they get fat instead of big.
This is because their body isn’t getting the nutrition it needs to build the muscles back bigger and stronger after a tough workout.
Without proper recovery, a tough workout just brings stress. And the body limps back to its original state over a few days of extreme soreness instead of adapting and bouncing back bigger and stronger.
This is why Vince Gironda claimed that getting a great body was 85% nutrition. Eating properly was essential for recovery and adaptation to the stress that your workouts place on your body.
Two Beef Liver Tablets At Each Meal
Vince recommended beginners to lifting ought to take two beef liver tablets with each meal, for 6 tablets a day.
(For his elite bodybuilders getting in shape for a show, it was normal for them to be consuming 50-100 tablets every day. I don’t know if the tablets were cheaper back then—I assume not—but that’s $25-50 a day just in liver tablets.)
Organ Meats Are Where The Nutrients Are
Anyways, I’ve been experimenting with liver tablets for over a good year now, and they’re one of the few supplements I’ve reordered time and time again. In fact, I don’t even really consider them much of a supplement.
I believe organ meats are something desperately needed in today’s diet.
Lions are famous for only eating important organs like the liver. And it was much more common to eat in the past. Ask your grandparents if it was normal to see liver and onions on the menu when they were growing up. Every past culture had a way of eating these foods—pate, liverwurst, haggis, roasted bone marrow, etc.
In the USA, research shows that the population is low in:
- copper
- iron
- selenium
- vitamin A
- folate
- vitamin b12
Even when we fortify foods with vitamin A (like milk) and folate (cereals, bread), people are *still* low.
All of those things are in liver. Not only are they in liver, but liver is the top food. Look it up, and you’ll see that liver is always the top source for things like vitamin A, copper, b12, folate etc. Not only that, but these minerals come in the most bioavailable form with all of their co-factors. Liver is the true super-food.
And if liver can help correct a deficiency in you, you can expect to see your ability to exercise, your overall fitness, and your health improve a ton.
Many People Don’t Like The Taste of Liver
Now the big problem is that most people hate the taste of liver and other organ meats. I read an article once blaming suburbia for it—prior to cheap refrigeration, organs didn’t transport as well from the country to the city as well as meat did. There was no access to organ meats, and so it fell out of rotations in the family’s dinner, and kids weren’t exposed to its strong flavour early on. (My kids love liver, which is surprising to me as I don’t love the flavour, and my wife loathes it.)
One option is to take tablets, especially a mixed tablet of organs like this one. (And if you buy from this link, you’ll be supporting me and the Outlive project.)
How to make beef liver taste better
Another option is learning how to enjoy its flavour. Preparation like soaking the liver in water and changing that water a few times has made it much better tasting for me.
Another option is just to have a small amount and have it more often. It might be like blue cheese, alcohol, or coffee, and you just need repeated exposure for your body to enjoy the taste.
Lastly, if you’ve never tried these things, eat them from a restaurant. My intro to eating kidney and heart was from an Asian restaurant down the street that knew how to prepare it properly.
Gaining Muscle Through Health
Anyways, I’m certain that by including more of the whole animal into your diet, you can radically improve your recovery, leading to bigger and leaner muscle gains—while also improving your health.
Eating meat without the organs is like eating the egg whites without the yolk—you’re missing a good chunk of the nutrition, and they work best together.
If you are looking to get into the best shape of your life and become bigger, stronger, leaner, and healthier, I’d like to invite you to join our program. You can make a crazy amount of progress in just 90 days. Here’s the link:
https://outliveforever.com/true-gains/
