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.

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Unboxing the Benefits of Bone Broth

*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, protective of the gastric lining from ulcers, and anti-inflammatory – 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.

What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts or experience with this.

• Get help using this information to become healthier.
  
• Get your personalized plan for optimizing your gut health with my new book.
• Healthcare providers looking to sharpen their clinical skills, check out the Future of Functional Medicine Review Clinical Newsletter.

Dr. Ruscio is your leading functional and integrative doctor specializing in gut related disorders such as SIBO, leaky gut, Celiac, IBS and in thyroid disorders such as hypothyroid and hyperthyroid. For more information on how to become a patient, please contact our office. Serving the San Francisco bay area and distance patients via phone and Skype.