Cooking Meat, Rule Number Four: Make Bone Stock
More than anything else, the health of your joints depends upon the health of the collagen in your ligaments, tendons, and on the ends of your bones. Collagens are a large family of biomolecules, which include the glycosaminoglycans, very special molecules that help keep our joints healthy. People used to eat soup and stock made from bones all the time, and doing so supplied their bodies with the whole family of glycosaminoglycans, which used to protect people’s joints. Now that few people make bone stock anymore, many of us are limping into doctors’ offices for prescriptions, surgeries and, lately, recommendations to buy over-the-counter joint supplements containing glucosamine. And what is glucosamine? One of the members of the glycosaminoglycan family of joint-building molecules.
Veterinarians have been using glucosamine supplements to treat arthritic pets for decades. But physicians dismissed the practice as a waste of time, assuming that, since glucosamine is a protein, the digestive system would break it down into its component amino acids. Nobody can explain how, but studies have shown that glucosamine is somehow able to resist digestion and pass through the intestinal wall intact.154 Once it gets into your bloodstream, “…glucosamine has a special tropism for cartilage.”155 (That’s techno-speak for “somehow, it knows just where to go.”) Even more amazing, glucosamine can actually stimulate the growth of new, healthy collagen and help repair damaged joints.156 And collagen isn’t just in your joints; it’s in bone, and skin, and arteries, and hair, and just about everywhere in between. This means that glucosamine-rich broth is a kind of youth serum, capable of rejuvinating your body, no matter what your age. After decades of skepticism, orthopedists and rheumatologists are now embracing its use in people with arthritis, recommending it to “overcome or possibly reverse some of the degradation that occurs with injuries or disease.”157 Given these facts, it hardly seems far fetched to suggest that eating this stuff in soups and sauces from childhood makes joints stronger in the first place.
One of Luke’s golfing buddies, local Kauai born and bred, didn’t need convincing. As a child of a Filipino household, he ate lots of meat on the bone growing up. One day, chopping a goat leg to stir into stew, he asked his mother about the white, shiny stuff on the ends of the bones. She told him that he had the very same kind of material in his own joints. Instantly, he decided that eating that shiny cartilage would be good for his shiny cartilage. He has eaten meat on the bone ever since, making sure to chew on the ends. Now his friends are on arthritis meds, while he’s surfing and golfing twice a week.
Not only do bone broths build healthy joints, the calcium and other minerals help to grow your bones. One of my patients is a charming young boy whose father is a chef. The chef is 5 foot 10 and his wife 5 foot 5. Both parents are lactose intolerant, and so, for years his dad, the chef, made bone stocks and used them as a base for making rice, mashed potatoes, soups, and reduction sauce gravies. He did this so that he and his lactose-intolerant wife would get plenty of dietary calcium. Aside from calcium, bone broth also contains glycosaminoglycans, as well as magnesium and other bonebuilding minerals—basically a total bone and joint building package—most of which the chef didn’t know about. However, his son’s DNA did. This child of average-height parents started life at normal size, but his growth chart illustrates that, over the years, he’s gotten progressively taller than average. Now, at ten, his height and muscle mass are already off the chart. By the way, his teeth are straight, he doesn’t need glasses, and he is the number one swimmer on his team.
Coincidence? Misleading anecdotal data? I don’t think so. We all know that vitamin D and calcium are good for a child’s growing bones. And as we saw in Chapter 5, it takes a whole array of vitamins and minerals to build a healthy skeleton. Cooking meat on the bone extracts all those well-known vitamins and minerals, plus the glycosaminoglycan growth factors. To have tall, strong, well-proportioned children, we’re often told to get them to drink milk. And if we’re talking about organic whole milk—especially raw!—I’m all for it. But if it were my kids, I’d also make sure they were getting regular helpings of home-made soups and sauces, and anything else I could think of to get them to eat more stock.
The benefits of broth consumption far outweigh the benefits of taking a pill for a couple of reasons: First, the low heat used to slowly simmer the nutrient material from bone and joint is far gentler than the destructive heat and pressure involved in the production of glucosamine tablets. Second, instead of extracting only one or two factors, broth gives you the entire complex of cartilage components—some of which have yet to be identified in the lab—plus minerals and vitamins. Broth’s nutritional complexity makes it a nearly perfect bone-building joint-health-supporting package. And it’s no coincidence that it tastes great. Rich, satisfying flavors convinced the father of modern French culinary science, Auguste Escoffier, that stock was an absolute kitchen essential. “Without it, nothing can be done.”
Our ancestors probably discovered the magic in bones a very long time ago. In the Pacific Northwest, archeologic digs have uncovered evidence that, centuries before Escoffier, early Native Americans supplemented their winter diet of dried fish by deliberately fracturing herbivorous animal bones prior to stewing them. Not only did this release bone nutrients, it released the marrow fat and vitamins into the simmering soup. And anthropologists studying hunter-gatherers from Canada to the Kalahari find that this practice of exploiting bone and marrow nutrients was, and is, “almost ubiquitous.”158,159 While visiting a farm in New Zealand, I met a spry and engaging 80-something woman who told me about the Scottish tradition of “passing the bone.” In the little village where she grew up, nothing went to waste. Cartilaginous knee joints and bony shanks were especially prized, and passed from house to house. Each family would put the bones into a pot over the stove to simmer for a night before passing them on to their neighbor until the bone was “spent.” As she hiked with us over the rolling green hills of her estate, she explained that the bones were shared because she and her neighbors were convinced that “something in them was sustaining.” Indeed there is. So skip the pharmacy aisle and head straight to your local butcher for bones to make your own homemade stock.
For thousands of years, people all over the world made full use of the animals they consumed, every last bit right down to the marrow and joints. You might suppose that, over all that time and all those generations, our bodies, including our joints, might grow so accustomed to those nutrients that they wouldn’t grow, repair, and function normally without them. You’d be right. And what is true of bones is true of other animal parts. Over time, our genes have been programmed with the need and expectation of a steady input of familiar nutrients, some of which can only be derived from the variety meats, which include bones, joints, and organs.
Shanahan MD, Catherine (2011-04-22). Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. Big Box Books. Kindle Edition.
excellent mini-documentary Megan! Could I ask where you found the massive glass jar? Nothing I have around the house or seen in stores is big enough, so I just store the soup with the stoneware in the fridge, where it tends to take up too much space.