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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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