Are Organ Supplements Just a Trend? Looking at the History

The 1920s and the birth of glandular therapy

In the 1920s, American and European doctors were experimenting with glandular extracts. The theory was straightforward: if an organ is deficient, give the patient dried extract of that organ. If someone was struggling with thyroid function, give them thyroid gland extract. If someone was anaemic, give them liver. If someone was weak and fatigued, give them adrenal.

This wasn't fringe medicine. Glandular and organ extracts were stocked by pharmacies, prescribed by physicians, and reported on in medical journals of the era. The legacy that survived from this period is striking: insulin, isolated from pancreatic extract by Banting and Best in the early 1920s, and desiccated thyroid extract for hypothyroidism, both emerged from this broader tradition of using animal-organ preparations to treat human disease. Other organ extracts of the period had no comparable evidence base and faded from medicine as more targeted pharmaceuticals were developed.

The theory behind it was vitalism, the idea that each organ has some vital essence, and consuming that organ supports that function in the body. Modern science would say that's nonsense. The active compounds in organ meat are specific nutrients: nutrients found in that organ at higher concentrations than elsewhere. Liver is rich in iron, B12, folate, and retinol because the liver stores them. Thyroid is rich in selenium and iodine because the thyroid needs them.

What the vitalists didn't understand, modern biochemistry explains. But the outcomes were real. Glandular therapy worked, not because of vital essences, but because organ meats and organ extracts are nutrient-dense in precisely the nutrients each organ needs to function.

They didn't understand the mechanism, but they were right. Organ extracts worked because organs are nutrient-dense.

Adelle Davis and the nutritional revolution

Adelle Davis was a nutritionist working in the 1950s and 1960s. She wrote books that sold millions of copies. She was beloved by readers and loathed by the medical establishment. Why? Because she recommended actual food.

She recommended liver so forcefully and so frequently that she became almost synonymous with it. She recommended eggs, butter, milk, organ meats, bone broth. She recommended these foods before they were trendy, before wellness was a marketing category, before Instagram made wholesome eating aesthetic.

What made her controversial was that she recommended these foods not as part of a diet, but as preventive medicine. Eat liver to prevent anaemia. Eat eggs to prevent protein deficiency. Eat butter to get fat-soluble vitamins. She was saying, essentially, that nutrition was medicine, and that disease prevention was possible through food.

The medical establishment wanted disease treatment, not prevention. The food industry wanted processed food sales, not whole food recommendations. Adelle Davis threatened both. She was investigated, criticised, sidelined. But her recommendations worked. People who followed them got healthier. The evidence was undeniable, which made the resistance even more fierce.

Weston Price and ancestral organ consumption

Weston Price was a dentist whose 1930s field research documented the dental and skeletal health of traditional cultures eating ancestral diets.¹ He examined their diets, their health, their skeletal development, their dental health.

Every single healthy traditional culture he studied ate organ meats. The Swiss alpine communities ate organ meats. The Masai ate organ meats. The Inuit ate organ meats. The Polynesians ate organ meats. Organ meats were not a poverty food, eaten only when muscle meat ran out. They were priority foods, often reserved for pregnant women, growing children, and the elderly.

Price documented this meticulously. He published photographs of skulls, dental records, dietary descriptions. He showed that when these cultures switched to modernised diets that excluded organ meats and included processed foods, their health collapsed within a generation. Their teeth degraded. Their skeletal structure weakened. Their disease rates skyrocketed.

What Price was documenting was the loss of nutrient density. When you remove organs from the diet and replace them with refined carbohydrates and seed oils, you lose access to the most nutrient-dense foods available. The collapse in health is inevitable.

What the traditional cultures taught us

Every culture that lived well for centuries did something similar: they didn't waste anything. Muscle meat, organs, bones, skin, cartilage, connective tissue, marrow. They used it all. And in using it all, they ensured that they got the full spectrum of amino acids, minerals, and vitamins that their bodies needed.

A traditional diet built on nose-to-tail eating was, by accident or design, perfectly balanced. You got muscle-building amino acids from meat. You got glycine and collagen from bones and skin. You got iron and B12 and retinol from liver. You got iodine and selenium from thyroid. You got calcium and phosphorus and fat-soluble vitamins from bone broth. No nutrient was isolated. No food was elevated as magic. They just ate the whole animal.

Modern nutrition tried to extract individual nutrients. Modern industry tried to market individual foods as superfoods. Modern science tried to isolate single compounds and sell them as supplements. But the old way worked because it was holistic. The whole was better than the parts.

Why we forgot and how we're remembering

The shift away from organ meats happened in the mid-20th century for economic reasons. Processed food was new. It was convenient. It didn't require home cooking. It promised modern efficiency. The food industry promoted muscle meat as the status symbol of modernity, whilst organs were left to become pet food or rendered into unrecognisable forms.

At the same time, nutrition science began isolating nutrients and treating them as separate. You don't need liver. You just need iron. You don't need eggs. You just need protein. You don't need bone broth. You just need collagen peptides, isolated and purified. This reductionist approach made business sense. You can't patent liver. You can patent a purified supplement.

But the body doesn't work that way. The body works with wholes. With synergies between nutrients. With cofactors and enhancers that exist in whole foods but get lost in isolation. The people who followed the old way, eating organs and bone broth and whole animal, stayed healthier. The people who followed the modern reductionist approach got sicker.

Today's resurgence of organ supplements and organ meats isn't a trend. It's a return. It's the re-emergence of something humans knew for millennia and forgot for barely 70 years. It's Adelle Davis being vindicated. It's Weston Price's photographs being understood. It's glandular therapy being translated into modern language: nutrient density. It's the same medicine, with better biochemistry.

Modern science validating the old ways

Today's nutritional science is finally catching up to what traditional cultures knew. Research on organ meats shows they contain nutrient concentrations that muscle meat cannot match. Beef liver is exceptionally high in copper and B12 compared with muscle meat.² Beef liver contains 7 micrograms of B12. Muscle meat contains 1 to 2.

Research on glycine shows roles in collagen synthesis, sleep quality, and metabolic regulation.³ Where do you get glycine? Bone broth, gelatinous cuts of meat, skin, and organs. The very foods that modern culture abandoned.

Research on hydrolysed collagen peptides shows benefits for skin and joint outcomes.⁴ What are collagen peptides? Hydrolysed collagen from bones, cartilage, and connective tissue. From the exact foods that traditional cultures prioritised.

The mechanism that Weston Price observed, that traditional cultures stayed healthy on whole-animal diets and degraded when they adopted processed foods, is now understood at a biochemical level. It's nutrient density. It's nutrient synergy. It's the difference between eating foods that contain 50 essential and semi-essential nutrients working together, and eating foods that contain 2 or 3 isolated ones.

Modern organ supplements are not magic. They're concentrated nutrition. They're what your body was designed to expect, served in a form that fits modern convenience. The trend isn't new. The understanding is just finally catching up.

The bottom line

When you eat organ supplements or organ meats today, you're not chasing a fad. You're doing what healthy humans did for thousands of years. You're replicating what Weston Price documented in traditional cultures. You're following Adelle Davis's recommendation. You're using an approach to nutrition that the 1920s recognised as medicine and that modern science is finally catching up to explain. The old ways were right. We just forgot for a moment.

References

1. 1. Price WA. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. 1939.
2. 2. U.S. Department of Agriculture, FoodData Central. Beef, liver — nutrient profile.
3. 3. Li P, Wu G. Roles of dietary glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline in collagen synthesis and animal growth. Amino Acids. 2018;50(1):29-38. PMID: 28929384.
4. 4. Pu SY et al. Effects of oral collagen for skin anti-aging: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrients. 2023;15(9):2080.