The Dirty Secret Beef Organ Supplement Companies Don't Want You To Know

The pretty pictures, fancy marketing, beautiful packaging, and happy influencers hide a secret that most beef organ supplement companies don’t want you to know.

The cows know what's really going on.

What’s The Dirty Secret Of The Beef Organ Supplement Industry?

The dirty secret is that they don’t make anything. They don’t get the organs directly from the farmers; they don't make the raw materials; they don’t put them into capsules; and they don’t bottle them. This means when you buy nearly every brand of beef organ supplements, you don’t know who you’re buying from. They aren’t supplement companies; they’re marketing agencies. By offloading all the real work of making supplements, they can pump a massive amount of money into advertising and marketing. This arrangement helps to make these companies record profits, but it comes with significant downsides for the buyer.

Beef Organ Supplements: The Downsides Of Secrecy

It might be easy to say, well, what’s the big deal about not knowing who makes the products? Does it really matter? The company tells us where the country the organs come from, has pictures of cows, and sometimes shows us some test results, that’s enough, right? No, it’s not, and here are a few reasons why.

First up are the cattle farms themselves. A country of origin, which is pretty much all of what the companies reveal, doesn’t tell you if the farms had good or bad practices, or whether the cattle are grazing in sprayed pastures or near heavily sprayed cropped areas, which can lead to pesticide drift on the grazing area. It doesn’t tell you if they are drinking from polluted water sources. 

Stating that the cattle were grass-fed and finished does not reveal whether they grazed on wide-open pastures or were penned in feedlots and fed alfalfa pellets. Hell, most of these companies don’t know because the raw materials are from middlemen who collect the organs from a vast number of farms and mix them together, some of which may be good and some may be bad. They have no chain of custody and no way of tracing each batch of organs back to the individual farms. 

Regenerative farming is another popular claim on beef organ supplements. Unfortunately, until the term is regulated, any company can claim its organs come from regenerative farming. In New Zealand, especially, this is becoming a problem. Due to overgrazing, many pastures are fertilized with imported nitrates to speed grass growth. This is leading to massive water pollution. Dumping tons of nitrates on pastures is not, in any way, regenerative farming. Regenerative farming is supposed to improve the environment, not make it worse. Large numbers of beef organ supplements sold in the US are made with organs from fake regenerative farming. However, the companies either don’t know or don’t care. You cannot know whether the products are made with ingredients produced through regenerative farming if the companies don’t source their ingredients directly from the farms, but instead rely on a middleman. 

Freeze-drying is a popular way of drying beef organs. There are multiple ways of doing freeze-drying, and some are better than others. If done too quickly, it will degrade the organs. It should be done slowly over forty-eight hours. Seeing freeze-dried on the label does not mean it was done correctly. Most suppliers choose the faster method because it is more profitable. Often, companies selling beef organ supplements don’t know how they were freeze-dried, and many don’t even know there are different ways to do it. 

After drying, the organs need to be milled. How they are milled matters greatly. Traditional milling creates a lot of heat, which can damage fragile compounds. To prevent this problem, companies should use a different milling method that protects organs from heat, called cryogenic milling. Most companies don’t reveal how their ingredients are milled, and many don’t even know. 

Beef organs require unique handling and processing; they should not be just another ingredient added to an existing facility that manufactures all kinds of things. They should be produced in a facility built specifically for them, not in one where beef organs were an afterthought added on because the contract manufacturer saw a chance to jump on a trend and make some extra bucks. 

You cannot possibly evaluate the quality or ethics of a supplement if you don’t know who makes the ingredients that go into it, or the finished product. No amount of marketing or flashy packaging can change that. How can you know whether the raw material suppliers or manufacturing facilities have had many quality control or manufacturing problems and violations uncovered during inspections if you don’t know who they are?

The NXGEN Wholefoods Difference: Transparency And Vertical Integration

While other companies hide who makes their products and raw materials, NXGEN Wholefoods takes the opposite approach. They believe in complete transparency from pasture to bottle. 

Who makes NXGEN Wholefoods beef organ supplements? Well, they do! They get the organs directly from a group of regenerative family farmers in the Lake Eyre River Basin of Australia. Each lot of organs is traceable back to the individual farms and cattle they come from. Once they receive the organs, they use a specialized freeze-drying process, followed by cryogenic milling, to ensure the organs are not damaged by the heat generated by traditional milling. After that, they encapsulate and bottle the products. All of it is done in-house at their state-of-the-art TGA-certified (the Australian version of GMP) facility, purpose-built for the unique requirements of beef organ supplement manufacturing. To learn more about what makes them different from other companies, check out this blog. For the complete checklist of what to look for when choosing a beef organ supplement, click here.

Don’t settle for vague claims and million-dollar marketing; instead, demand real transparency in the beef organ supplements you buy!