Unboxing the Benefits of Bone Broth
By making bone broth a staple in your diet, you serve to provide your body with the building blocks to heal tissue, regenerate cells, and regulate energy in a form that is healthy and easy to absorb.
*Thank you to Kettle & Fire for providing this article*
Bone broth may feel like a new trend, but it is actually a return to a more traditional diet and the practice of consuming all parts of an animal. Throughout history, cooks have found laborious ways to extract every last nutrient from food sources such as slowly simmering meaty bones in a kettle of water for days to produce a delicious soup stock. A la bone broth! 1
Science has revealed that some of the nutrients in bone broth (gelatin, collagen, and the amino acids they contain) are difficult to find in many other food sources. For example, the amino acid glycine is most abundant in gelatin. The next best thing you can eat to get just ½ the amount of glycine? Pork rinds. 2 Now, even if you find deep fried salty pig skin to be tasty, it isn’t the healthiest of snacks.
By making bone broth a staple in your diet, you serve to provide your body with the building blocks to heal tissue, regenerate cells, and regulate energy in a form that is healthy and easy absorb.
While you may already know some of the more glamorous benefits of bone broth (such as promoting skin health, joint-pain relief, and healing digestion), did you know that it is also a powerful tool for nutrient absorption, antioxidant protection, and memory support?
These properties are hugely important, especially for preventative care. Bone broth helps to keep us healthy, not just “fix” us when we are feeling ill.
Nutrient Absorption:
Bone broth contains gelatin which improves gut integrity and digestive strength. In addition to containing glutamine (an amino acid that works to repair any leaks in your intestinal tract), gelatin has a unique property of drawing stomach acid into the stomach due to its glycine content. 3 Stomach acid enables the breakdown and absorption of nutrients into the body. Even if you are eating healthy, you may not be assimilating your food if your stomach acid is low. In addition, recent studies are linking low stomach acid levels with bacteria overgrowth. 4
Antioxidant Protection:
Often referred to as the mother antioxidant, glutathione is a tri-peptide composed of three amino acids–cysteine, glutamic acid, and glycine all of which are contained in bone broth. In addition, the body uses the amino acid glycine to recycle glutathione. Glutathione deficiency contributes to oxidative stress which leads to early aging and many diseases including liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. 5 6
Memory and Sleep:
Again glycine, abundant in bone broth, is the star of helping to promote sleep and aid in memory and cognition. It helps younger people perform better when under the stress of jet lag, or lack of sleep and helps improve memory and cognitive processes in older adults. 7
Now that research is unearthing why bone broth has been used for centuries to ensure health maintenance and repair, it seems logical to include it as a dietary staple.
Many companies are now packaging bone broth for consumer convenience. These broths vary in quality, but here at Kettle & Fire we are leading the charge in bringing bone broths with high-quality ingredients and excellent nutrient content to market.
We use only 100% grass-fed beef bones, and organic chicken bones to create broths rich in glycine and glutamic acid, boasting 10 grams of collagen per cup.
And taking bone broth into the modern age, we are adding even more health promoting ingredients such as the lion’s mane mushroom. Studies have found this medicinal mushroom to be supportive of brain health 8, protective of the gastric lining from ulcers 9, and anti-inflammatory 10 – giving Kettle & Fire’s Chicken Mushroom Bone Broth a nutritional boost beyond other bone broths.
Click here to order bone broth right to your door and learn even more about the many benefits of Kettle & Fire’s delicious and convenient boxed bone broths.
Dr. Michael Ruscio is a DC, natural health provider, researcher, and clinician. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bridgeport and has published numerous papers in scientific journals as well as the book Healthy Gut, Healthy You. He also founded the Ruscio Institute of Functional Health, where he helps patients with a wide range of GI conditions and serves as the Head of Research.➕ References
- McCance RA, Sheldon W, Widdowson EM. Bone and vegetable broth. Arch Dis Child. 1934 Aug;9(52):251-8. doi: 10.1136/adc.9.52.251. PMID: 21031965; PMCID: PMC1975347.
- Foods highest in Glycine
- Wald A, Adibi SA. Stimulation of gastric acid secreted by glycine and related oligopeptides in humans. Am J Physiol. 1982 Feb;242(2):G85-8. doi: 10.1152/ajpgi.1982.242.2.G85. PMID: 7065145.
- (1985) Bacterial overgrowth as a consequence of reduced gastric acidity, Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, 20:sup111, 7-15, DOI: 10.3109/00365528509093749
- Guoyao Wu, Yun-Zhong Fang, Sheng Yang, Joanne R. Lupton, Nancy D. Turner, Glutathione Metabolism and Its Implications for Health, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 134, Issue 3, March 2004, Pages 489–492, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/134.3.489
- Angélica Ruiz-Ramírez, Ely Ortiz-Balderas, Guillermo Cardozo-Saldaña, Eulises Diaz-Diaz, Mohammed El-Hafidi; Glycine restores glutathione and protects against oxidative stress in vascular tissue from sucrose-fed rats. Clin Sci (Lond) 1 January 2014; 126 (1): 19–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/CS20130164
- File SE, Fluck E, Fernandes C. Beneficial effects of glycine (bioglycin) on memory and attention in young and middle-aged adults. J Clin Psychopharmacol. 1999 Dec;19(6):506-12. doi: 10.1097/00004714-199912000-00004. PMID: 10587285.
- Samberkar S, Gandhi S, Naidu M, Wong KH, Raman J, Sabaratnam V. Lion’s Mane, Hericium erinaceus and Tiger Milk, Lignosus rhinocerotis (Higher Basidiomycetes) Medicinal Mushrooms Stimulate Neurite Outgrowth in Dissociated Cells of Brain, Spinal Cord, and Retina: An In Vitro Study. Int J Med Mushrooms. 2015;17(11):1047-54. doi: 10.1615/intjmedmushrooms.v17.i11.40. PMID: 26853959.
- Wang M, Konishi T, Gao Y, Xu D, Gao Q. Anti-Gastric Ulcer Activity of Polysaccharide Fraction Isolated from Mycelium Culture of Lion’s Mane Medicinal Mushroom, Hericium erinaceus (Higher Basidiomycetes). Int J Med Mushrooms. 2015;17(11):1055-60. doi: 10.1615/intjmedmushrooms.v17.i11.50. PMID: 26853960.
- Mori K, Ouchi K, Hirasawa N. The Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Lion’s Mane Culinary-Medicinal Mushroom, Hericium erinaceus (Higher Basidiomycetes) in a Coculture System of 3T3-L1 Adipocytes and RAW264 Macrophages. Int J Med Mushrooms. 2015;17(7):609-18. doi: 10.1615/intjmedmushrooms.v17.i7.10. PMID: 26559695.
Discussion
I care about answering your questions and sharing my knowledge with you. Leave a comment or connect with me on social media asking any health question you may have and I just might incorporate it into our next listener questions podcast episode just for you!