Review: Heart & Soil Beef Organ Supplements — Ancestral Gold or Expensive Liver?

Your great-grandparents ate the whole animal. Liver on Sundays, heart in the stew, marrow out of the bone. Somewhere along the way we decided the muscle was food and the rest was pet food — and lost the most nutrient-dense parts of the animal in the process. Heart & Soil exists to sell that lost nutrition back to you in a capsule. Here’s an honest look at whether it’s worth it.

Heads up: links on this site may be affiliate links — see the affiliate disclosure. It never changes the verdict. Also: not medical advice, and if you’re pregnant, read the vitamin A section below carefully.

What Heart & Soil is

Founded by Paul Saladino, MD — the “Carnivore MD” — Heart & Soil sells freeze-dried (desiccated) organ supplements from grass-fed, regeneratively raised cattle. The pitch is ancestral: organs were the most prized food in traditional diets, most modern people won’t eat them, so swallow them instead.

The product line

• Beef Organs — the flagship: liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, and spleen in a 3,000mg daily dose. If you try one product, it’s this one.
• Bone Matrix — ground grass-fed long bones for bone and joint support.
• Joint Support — trachea, scapula, and bone marrow; the collagen-and-cartilage angle.
• Whole Package / Her Package — organ blends aimed at male and female hormonal health (the former, yes, includes testicle).
• Colostrum — 3,000mg bovine colostrum for gut and immune support.
• Firestarter — marketed at fat metabolism and appetite.

The real benefits case

The strongest argument for these products is simply what organ meat is. Liver is arguably the most nutrient-dense food on earth: preformed vitamin A, B12 in huge amounts, folate, riboflavin, choline, copper, heme iron, zinc, selenium. Heart brings CoQ10. These aren’t marketing inventions — they’re measurable nutrition facts, and they’re nutrients modern diets commonly run low on. Freeze-drying preserves more of them than heat processing, though some loss of heat-sensitive B vitamins still occurs.

So if you will never eat actual liver — and be honest with yourself — capsules are a legitimate way to get some of what you’re missing. That’s the entire case, and it’s a decent one.

The honest caveats

• The supplement evidence is thin. There are almost no peer-reviewed human trials on desiccated organ capsules specifically. The benefits case is extrapolated from the nutrition of whole organ meats — reasonable, but extrapolation, not proof.
• A capsule dose is small. Six capsules is about 3 grams of freeze-dried organs — the equivalent of roughly half an ounce of fresh organ meat. Real liver once a week delivers several times more per dollar.
• The category has a labeling problem. A 2022 analysis of bovine liver supplements found most had labeling compliance failures and noncompliant nutrient claims. That’s the category, not Heart & Soil specifically — but it’s a reason to prefer brands that publish testing, and to treat label claims skeptically.
• Vitamin A is a real ceiling. Liver is extremely high in preformed vitamin A, which accumulates and is toxic in excess — and is a documented cause of birth defects. Do not stack liver capsules on top of regular liver meals or a multivitamin with retinol, and if you’re pregnant or trying to conceive, talk to your doctor first.
• The hormone-blend products outrun the data. Beef Organs stands on solid nutritional ground. Claims that testicle or blood extracts meaningfully raise hormones or fertility do not have human evidence behind them. Buy those for the ancestral romance if you want — not the science.

Verdict

The best version of this idea is still a cast-iron pan: real grass-fed liver once or twice a week costs a few dollars and beats any capsule on dose, cost, and evidence. If that’s never going to happen in your kitchen, Heart & Soil’s flagship Beef Organs is a well-sourced, sensibly formulated way to close the gap — buy it for the nutrient density, respect the vitamin A ceiling, and skip the exotic blends until the evidence shows up.

It’s the same rule we apply to cold exposure: take the ancestral practice, hold the hype. New here? Start with the map.