Skip to main content

Bone Broth? Do This Instead

Move over, juicers: there's a new elixir in town. Boil some bones for a day, along with vinegar to extract the nutrients, and voila--you have the latest health drink. Well, you have it if you're willing to spend a whole day cooking it or pay $8 for a little carton of it. After all, it's water that bones were boiled in.

Photo from https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-skull-table-decor-417049/

Hold on, says Dr. Davis. He reports that bone broth is high in lead, and the ideal amount of ingested lead is zero. There's also not that much nutrition in bone broth. Who'd have guessed?

Nutrients in bone broth. Note the vegetable ingredients, the source vitamins A and C. Click to enlarge. Source: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/551729/nutrients

When he said this at the last meetup, some members in the chat said, "What about organic bone broth?" Does it matter? Let's discuss.

Even if organic bone broth isn't infused with (much) lead, it's pretty much expensive water. Regular broth is a fraction of the cost, or practically free if you boil a chicken, beef tongue, ribs or other meat yourself. There's another product available known as food. Certain foods like chicken wings, beef tongue, heart and pork rinds contain collagen, which the bone broth is supposed to have. Chicken wings only take 40 minutes to cook; pork rinds can be had as fast as you can open the bag and stuff one in your mouth.

But let's say time and money are no object. Is there some unknown value in bone broth, something people always had until recently, some Chesterton's fence we tear down at our peril by not partaking in it? WebMD says, "People have been making bone broth since the beginning of humankind. Anthropologists think people drank liquid infused with bones and other animal parts as early as prehistoric times." But homo sapiens have been around ten times longer than pottery. How did they make bone broth before that? Besides, wouldn't hunting, gathering, or a dozen other things have been a better use of their resources than boiling bones? (Think gathering firewood, hauling water, and keeping the fire at the right level over several hours.) One archaeologist in the Science News article speculates that people might have been boiling bones to extract fat and marrow, but the article also says that they might have been boiling meat, starchy vegetables, or snails and clams--or they might have even been making alcohol. 

The Weston A. Price Foundation promotes bone broth. But the book written by its namesake, Nutrition and Degeneration, about the diets of primitive but healthy people around the world, refers to bone broth only once. The Swiss villagers Dr. Price studied made soup out of the "bones and scraps" of sheep once a week. Indians of the Canadian Rockies, on the other hand, cracked the bones to get at the marrow and "nutritive qualities." 

Bone broth is the new vegetable juice, only worse. At least vegetable juice (probably) doesn't have lead in it. If you want nutrients, collagen-rich foods are out there, they're cheaper, and they taste great. 

Comments

Jan said…
Love the clarity, Lori! Well said.

Popular posts from this blog

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh.  Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good.  I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds.  Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Infrared Light: How much is too much?

It's the sort of thing that sounds like quackery: a pad with tiny red LED lights and a few buttons that's supposed to help you heal, just $30 on ebay. I never would have bought it, but Dr. Davis gave a presentation on infrared light late in 2024. Since I was still suffering from achilles tendonitis after being floxxed , I decided to try it.  I wrapped it around my ankle and turned it on the lowest setting for five minutes. Nothing seemed to happen, but the next day, I wrote,  My tendonitis is GONE after one 5-minute treatment! I didn’t feel it doing anything, I didn’t think it was going to do anything (at least not that quickly), but for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten out of bed and started walking normally and didn’t have any pain reaching with my left arm. I'd been shuffling around like an 80-year-old woman after getting out of bed in the morning. The tendonitis returned, but it was improved. I eventually had physical therapy for it, and now, apart from a l...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Gym Influencer Doubles Down and Should Have Regretted It

Jennifer Picone isn't the most abusive gym influencer--far from it--but she may be the most annoying. In a video she posted that went viral, she was working out in a gym when another member appeared in the background by the free weights. The member was minding her own business, not looking in Picone's direction, when Picone got up and told her to move. After filming, Picone edited the video with a note about "Gym etiquette lesson #47" and accused the other gym member of "[doing] that 💩 on purpose."  Shaming other gym members has gotten to be such a big genre that Joey Swoll has a YouTube channel, with half a million subscribers, dedicated to calling out these content creators. Just for Picone, he took a break from his vacation to tell her to mind her own business. This may be the first time that Joey Swoll has taken one of his followers to task. The fact that she follows him and still doesn't know better than to treat the gym like her personal studio sh...

Stay in your car!

If there's ever a lunatic outside your vehicle, do not engage. Stay in your vehicle. Drive away or call the police. Drive over the curb, lawn or median if necessary; just avoid putting innocent bystanders at risk.*  Save yourself from lunatics like a boss. Screen grab from video by Fredrik Sørlie on Youtube . That advice might have saved a 69-year-old delivery driver from being attacked by former NFL player Mark Sanchez, who for unknown reasons was in an alley after midnight in downtown Indianapolis and decided to pick a fight over a parking space. I say might have because I haven't seen any video of the attack. But other incidents over the years bear out the safety of staying in your car. A neighbor was assaulted and robbed after she got out of her car after someone followed her home and blocked her driveway. And remember Reginald Denny from the LA riots? The victim maced and stabbed Sanchez, but suffered a bad cut to his face and tongue and looks like he was badly beaten. Bo...