Episode 5: Ancestral Wisdom, Modern Science

Your great-grandmother didn't take vitamin pills. She didn't optimize her micronutrients or track her selenium intake. But she had energy. She didn't crash at 2pm. She didn't need the weekend just to recover from the week.

What did she know that we've forgotten? She ate the organs.

This episode bridges the gap between understanding the problem and seeing the solution—by looking backward at what humans ate for 200,000 years before we decided organ meats were "gross."

In this episode:

• Why every traditional culture on earth prioritized organ meats—and what happened when they stopped
• The bioavailability gap: synthetic vitamins absorb at 15-30% vs. food-based at 80-90%
• Why beef liver is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet (3,000% daily vitamin A, 2,000% B12)
• Weston A. Price's research on traditional cultures—and how health deteriorated within one generation on Western diets
• The "orchestra vs. one violin" problem with isolated supplements

Key insight:

Organ nutrition isn't a trend or a biohack. It's a return to what humans always ate—and what your genes still expect. The question isn't whether it works. The question is how to get it in a form your modern system can actually tolerate.

The problem we're focusing on:

There are two reasons people don't eat organs: it's culturally foreign, and when they try supplements, they have a terrible experience. But that terrible experience isn't because the concept is wrong—it's because the processing is wrong.

Resources mentioned:

• Weston A. Price Foundation research
• Comparative bioavailability studies
• Anthropological nutrition research
• USDA nutrient density data

Next episode: "Why Organ Supplements Fail (And What's Different)" — If you've ever thrown away a bottle of liver pills because they made you sick, this one's for you.

Chapters

• 0:11 Introduction
• 0:49 She Ate the Organs
• 1:24 Perspective Shift
• 2:11 Generations
• 3:07 Assimilation
• 4:17 A Clean Diet might not be Everything
• 5:16 Our Ancestors didn't need to Biohack
• 6:03 Weston Price
• 7:58 Conclusion

Transcript

Welcome back to Beyond Normal Labs. I'm Kate, and this is episode five.

Your great-grandmother didn't take vitamin pills.

She didn't optimize her micronutrients. She didn't track her selenium intake or worry about her zinc-to-copper ratio.

But she had energy. She had vitality. She had something we've lost.

What did she know that we've forgotten?

She ate the organs.

Liver. Heart. Kidney. Thyroid. The parts of the animal that modern culture has taught us to throw away — or feed to our pets.

Your great-grandmother didn't see these as "supplements" or "superfoods." She saw them as food. Essential food. The most nutritious parts of the animal.

Today, we're talking about why that matters more than you might think.

Here's a perspective shift that changes everything:

Humans have been eating organ meats for over two hundred thousand years. Every traditional culture, on every continent, in every climate, prioritized organs over muscle meat.

The Inuit in the Arctic. The Masai in Africa. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe. They all shared one nutritional practice: they ate the organs first.

This wasn't superstition. It was survival wisdom, passed down through countless generations. They didn't have laboratories or nutrition science, but they knew — through observation, through experience, through the health of their people — that organs were essential.

And then, in the span of about two or three generations, we stopped.

Post-World War II, as industrial food production scaled up and cultural preferences shifted, organ meats went from dietary staple to dietary afterthought. We started feeding liver to our dogs. We started throwing away the most nutritious parts of the animal.

In evolutionary terms, this shift happened in the blink of an eye. Our genes haven't changed. Our nutritional needs haven't changed. But our diets have transformed completely.

And our health has suffered for it.

Now, you might be thinking: "Okay, but we have supplements now. Can't we just take vitamins to make up the difference?"

Here's what the science actually shows:

Synthetic vitamins — the kind you find in most supplements — have an absorption rate of about fifteen to thirty percent. That means for every hundred milligrams you swallow, your body might actually use fifteen to thirty.

Food-based nutrients — the kind found in organ meats — have absorption rates of eighty to ninety percent.

That's not a small difference. That's a three to six times difference in what your body can actually use.

But it goes deeper than just absorption percentages.

When you take an isolated synthetic nutrient — let's say selenium — you're getting one molecule, by itself, without the supporting cast it needs to work properly.

When you eat liver, you're getting selenium alongside vitamin A, alongside B12, alongside iron, alongside zinc — all in the ratios that nature designed, all working together synergistically.

Taking isolated selenium pills is like hiring one violin player and expecting a symphony.

Eating organ nutrition is like hiring the entire orchestra, already rehearsed, already in tune, ready to play.

This explains something that frustrates a lot of health-conscious people:

You can eat an incredibly "clean" diet — organic produce, grass-fed meat, wild-caught fish, no processed foods — and still be nutritionally depleted.

Because even the healthiest modern diet is missing the most nutrient-dense foods humans have ever eaten.

Let me give you some numbers:

Beef liver contains over three thousand percent of your daily vitamin A. Over two thousand percent of your B12. Massive amounts of iron, selenium, zinc, and copper — all in bioavailable forms.

Ounce for ounce, liver is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet. Nothing else comes close. Not kale. Not blueberries. Not salmon. Nothing.

And thyroid glandular? It contains actual thyroid tissue — with naturally occurring T4, T3, and the cofactors that support thyroid function — in the form your body evolved to recognize and use.

Your ancestors didn't need to "biohack" their energy or "optimize" their thyroid function. They just ate the whole animal, including the organs that supported their own organ systems.

Your body wasn't asking for more drugs. It was asking for what humans ate for two hundred thousand years — and stopped eating fifty years ago.

This isn't just ancestral speculation. Modern research confirms what traditional cultures knew intuitively.

In the 1930s, a dentist named Weston A. Price traveled the world studying traditional cultures that still ate their ancestral diets. He found remarkable health — strong bones, straight teeth, resistance to disease — in populations that prioritized organ meats and animal fats.

When those same populations adopted modern Western diets, their health deteriorated within a single generation.

More recent research has shown that organ meats provide nutrients in forms that are dramatically more bioavailable than synthetic alternatives. The co-factors work together. The ratios are balanced. The body recognizes them as food, not foreign chemicals.

This is why you can take a multivitamin for years and feel nothing — but people who add organ nutrition often notice changes within weeks.

It's not magic. It's just giving your body what it actually evolved to eat.

So if organ nutrition is so powerful, why isn't everyone doing it?

Two reasons.

First, most people in modern culture find the idea of eating liver or thyroid unappealing. We've lost the taste for it. We've lost the preparation knowledge. It feels foreign now.

Second — and this is the bigger issue — when people DO try organ supplements, they often have a terrible experience. Nausea. Burping. Stomach upset. Feeling "off" for days.

They try it once, feel awful, and conclude that their body can't tolerate organ nutrition.

But that conclusion is wrong.

The problem isn't organ nutrition itself. The problem is how most organ supplements are processed. And that's a solvable problem.

Here's what I want you to take from this episode:

Organ nutrition isn't a trend. It isn't a biohack. It isn't some new discovery.

It's a return to what humans have always eaten — the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet, in the forms our bodies evolved to use.

The question isn't whether organ nutrition works. Two hundred thousand years of human history already answered that.

The question is: how do you get it in a form that modern digestive systems — especially sensitive ones — can actually tolerate?

That tolerance issue is exactly what we're addressing in episode six. Because if you've tried organ supplements before and they made you miserable — that's not because the concept is wrong. Something else was.

Thanks for being here. I'll talk to you in the next one.