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.