Mondays, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic.

For the month of May, we zero in on those best foods to help support a reduction in your own personal burden of stress. Today, let’s talk…

ORGAN MEATS.

For those who wish to know the ‘why’ behind this idea, I’ll give you three things to think about.

BECAUSE GUT LOVE + ANTI-INFLAMMATORY WORK

Much like last week’s post, and the one the week before, if you understand that a personal high burden of stress is really code for chronic inflammation, then it will make sense that in order to lower your own personal burden of stress, you need to look at reducing your body’s own inflammation going on.

Liver is a wonderful source of the animal version of Vitamin A (retinol) which is needed for a robust mucosal lining in the gut. That is your line of defence against the outside world! Building a robust lining there is a key piece to keeping your burden of stress down.

Organ meats are the secret sauce to helping reduce inflammation. They’re chock full of important nutrients like all the B vitamins (in their useable form, no less!) that is a necessary piece for your liver to do all the work she does. They also offer lots of choline, a key nutrient needed for liver and eye health, and all metabolic work.

Your liver is queen of clean up crew; she’s the orchestrator of your immune response; she is the hormone maker + clearer, and works in tandem with your pancreas to balance blood sugars. She kinda does all the things that are impacted by low grade chronic inflammation! The deeper you nourish the liver, the better you support metabolic health + everything that goes with it. This means reducing inflammation! Think heart, liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, bone marrow, tongue, and sure, brain. Get your offal on, kitten!

BECAUSE HORMONE + BLOOD SUGAR BALANCING

At the root of a higher burden of stress lie blood sugar and/or hormonal imbalances. Think of them as accelerators to the burden of stress. These two issues are well served by deep nutrition - you can literally nourish through these imbalances to help restore improved function in both cases! And quite often, the work is quite the same.

Kidney, heart and liver offer a fantastic amount of important minerals like Zinc, Selenium, Copper and Iron in balanced amounts, needed to nourish the body deeply. Those who are dealing with a high personal burden of stress tend to burn through certain nutrients at a faster rate: namely minerals, B vitamins and vitamin C. These are all nutrients needed to do the work of blood sugar and hormone balancing! And so I propose we nourish the body in order to support her through the work of resetting imbalances. Biggest bang for your buck? ORGAN MEATS.

Need more convincing? Check this out.

BECAUSE ANCESTRAL WISDOM

Again. For the third time. Listen. This is how the people who came before you ate. They feasted and used all parts of every animal they had to slaughter. Nothing was left to waste, every piece of the animal had a function. Organ meats were celebrated, and in fact were often the first piece to be consumed soon after slaughter. (1) Gram for gram, liver (especially beef liver) is the most nutrient dense food there is out there: nutrient density means more nutrients for the number of grams and/or calories consumed. It doesn’t take much!

Where to start? Find some liver páté you like at the grocery store. Source the good stuff from happy animals if you can, i.e. pastured sources.

Want to try cooking your own organ meats? Check this post out. Great variety of organ meats and recipes on offer there.

I recently tried the Ancient Blend puck of pastured ground beef from Gemstone Grass Fed Beef that I purchased at Amaranth Whole Foods in the NW of Calgary. 30% of the meat in the pound of ground is made up of organ meats. A great way to bring it in without having to change how you cook! Use as you would to make tacos, chili, spaghetti sauce, meatballs, burgers, etc.

I’m building some resources to share recipes soon. Hoping to publish before the end of the month, so keep your eyes peeled. (And sign up for the newsletter if you haven’t gotten it yet!)

Aiming to Keep Well? Got a high burden of stress? Want to start taming that inflammation dragon? Need some help in feeling real good?

Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.

*This is not medical advice.