Expert: RawPalaeoGuy - 2/6/2008

Question
I am about to start eating organic raw bison liver. What are your feeling's on it and could you please provide me with a link on it's nutritional analysis. I searched the internet but had no luck finding it. I have a damaged optic nerve due to an MS exacerbation and feel that eating the raw  bison liver will help nourish my liver . I have read that chinese medicine correlates the liver with the eye and any eye problems must be addressed by healing the liver.Can you comment on this?

Answer
Liver has a huge amount of very useful nutrients in it. And raw organic, grassfed bison liver is an excellent choice. However, finding an extensively detailed reliable link describing all the various nutrients in detail of raw (grassfed) organic bison liver is rather difficult - though there is some info re grassfed bison muscle-meats.

There are one or two useful Nutrient-Databases online, organised by country, which can provide some information - trouble is only the US one is likely to have any links re bison-meats. Also, these websites   usually provide far more detailed information on meats from domesticated animals than they do for wild animals - and they don't seem to distinguish between grassfed and grainfed or between organic and nonorganic - a good idea would be to search under "liver" on any food-database, then, if you can't find "raw bison liver" you might look for/click on the entry for  the liver of a not-too different wild/undomesticated ungulate such as "raw moose liver"  or look at websites detailing the nutrients found in organic-raised/100% grassfed cattle etc. for a comparison.Here are a few sites which might help:-


http://tinyurl.com/36uag

(the above website has several entries for bison-meat but it's all different types of muscle-meat - the relevant entry for "raw moose liver" has some useful details re levels of vitamins/minerals and fats, which should provide a useful comparison to grassfed/organic bison liver )


Here's a more detailed than usual website-entry for "raw ox liver" from another food-nutrient-database(which doesn't state that the liver was grassfed or grainfed so one can probably assume it's the latter):-

http://tinyurl.com/yq5ryf


Here's a link with some very slight info:-

http://jds.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/1/46

Here's a comparison between grainfed and grassfed liver:-

http://tinyurl.com/yqj8sp


Re Chinese medicine:-  I'm not sure re some related Qi-oriented disciplines such as acupuncture, given that people I know have reported both positive and negative results with it. So, I'm not 100% convinced that different parts of the body are necessarily interlinked -

 - however, a number of raw-food-advocates seem to believe in the idea that various parts of the body are interlinked in some way (especially Aajonus, given his use of irridology). I seem to recall that  one member  of my group even once mentioned that eating raw dairy clogged up her liver, for some reason, and one-side-effect was that her vision slightly worsened on a temporary basis, but that's all I've ever heard re this.

At any rate, I wouldn't advise eating huge amounts of liver all the time - best to combine it with other raw foods as well, in moderation.

Hope This Helps,

RPG