Question: Are liver capsules as good as eating liver?

Liver pills are mainly for people who are not going to eat liver. That's the first thing. The second thing is, there are advantages to taking the dosing schedule of a little bit of liver every day.

Probably the ideal thing would be to have 10 to 20 grams of fresh liver every day. But the number of people who are going to do that are even smaller than the number of people who are going to eat the fresh liver. What the liver pills do is, number one, they give people who don't eat liver that frequently to get the nutrients that have absorption caps that are better off gotten in small doses at a time to get those every day. It gives people who are not going to eat liver at all a way to get liver in. I don't know. I mean, it's a tradeoff. Probably almost no one is going to eat 10 to 20 grams of liver every day. If you don't, are you better off taking the capsules or are you better off taking liver once a week? You're probably better off taking half and half, like take three capsules every day and still eat liver once a week. It's probably the best thing to do in that case.

I don't recommend anyone who would otherwise eat liver stop eating liver and take the capsules, but I do recommend the people who won't eat liver take the capsules. I think it's a nice thing to do. If you eat liver but take the capsules anyway, then take that in a lower dose because you eat liver. Like I said, eat one serving of liver once a week or twice a month and take two, three, or four of the capsules instead of six; two, three or four capsules every day. I think that's a happy medium that can have best approximates the best thing which is the 10 to 20 grams of liver a day.

This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/03/30/ask-anything-nutrition-march-4-2019

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome.