CHAPTER 4

Marrow: The Body’s Blood Bank

Deep in the center of bones is marrow, a creamy substance valued by our ancestors for its life-giving, reproduction-enhancing, and brain-building fat and cholesterol. As the seedbed of blood and stem cells, it’s prized as a sacred, energizing, and regenerative food in native cultures all over the world. When devouring a kill, animals instinctively go for it, first sucking out marrow, then consuming the organ meats, and eating muscle meat last of all. Hunter-gatherers knew just where to tap the femur bone of a large animal to break it open and extract the rope of nutrient-dense marrow.

The word marrow is familiar in language and literature as well. Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Bone marrow has also played a major role in human evolution. As evolutionary anthropologist Professor Leslie Aiello of University College London puts it: “Bone marrow is highly nutritious, and contains many important elements for brain growth and development. It also takes much less energy to digest than plant food. Scientists have shown that brain size was beginning to increase in the later australopithecines, and it could all be down to bone marrow as brain food.”

Figure 4: Bone marrow is a soft, spongy tissue found inside bones. Red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are produced in the bone marrow.

With Professor Peter Wheeler of John Moores University in Liverpool, Aiello developed the expensive tissue hypothesis, which holds that humans were able to develop large “metabolically expensive” brains relative to body size because of an equivalent reduction in the size of the gastrointestinal tract. Without the adoption of a high-quality, animal-based diet, this transition would never have been possible.

Although marrowbones have largely disappeared from the modern table, they are just the thing for unapologetic carnivores who like to gnaw, lick, and suck their food and lustily experience an animal’s frothy, oily, and musky inner essence. Today marrow is often served in fine restaurants, usually roasted and presented upright to be eaten with little spoons that dig deep into the bone. Marrow may also appear as a rich garnish for filet mignon or as the high point of the Italian dish osso bucco. As an appetizer, it’s often spread like butter on pointy pieces of toast. As Anthony Bourdain put it, “If God made butter, it would taste exactly like bone marrow.”

What’s in Marrow?

The USDA doesn’t provide data on lamb, beef, or big game marrow, much less on the minor amounts hiding in fish or poultry bones. Reports on the amount and type of fat in bone marrow vary considerably, and there are significant differences in marrow type and amount among African ruminants, caribou, grass-fed beef, and factory-farmed beef. Different types of marrow are also found within the same animal. Arctic explorer and ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962) described two types of marrow in his book The Fat of the Land. The type from the lower leg was soft and “more like a particularly delicious cream in flavor,” while the other from the humerus and femur was “hard and tallowy at room temperatures.” The former suggests a marrow higher in monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs), the latter higher in saturated fat.

The percentage of fat in bone marrow also decreases with malnutrition and starvation. Indeed, a low level of bone marrow fat is considered a definitive diagnosis of starvation at animal autopsies. Researchers from Purdue found bone marrow averaged 91.54 percent fat in healthy cattle, but in malnourished cattle, the range went from 0.45 to 67.11 percent, with an average of just 18.82 percent.

In 1964, scientists analyzed the phospholipid content of human bone marrow. These make up only a small portion of bone marrow’s total lipid content, but they are very important. The team identified many types of choline, of which 44 percent was lecithin and 22 percent a combination of phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) and phosphatidylserine (PS). PE and PS are vital to nervous system function and are found heavily in the white matter of the brain, nerves, neural tissue, and the spinal cord. PS is known to improve brain function and mental acuity and may possibly protect us from MSG toxicity.

As for vitamin and mineral content, the limited data suggest a little iron and phosphorous and almost no calcium in the marrow. Where there’s fat, there should be fat-soluble vitamins, but reports of vitamin A in 100 grams of marrow run across the board at 240 IU, 67.2 IU, and 0.4 IU, which is just about zero. For some reason, vitamin D has not been analyzed, but one report has 0.3 mcg of vitamin K in 100 grams of roasted marrow. There’s much more research to be done to understand this nourishing substance.

Profound Benefits

However we eat it, straight up or dissolved in soup, the health benefits of marrow are profound. Wise tradition tells us so, yet precise and consistent nutritional data are not available.

Whatever’s in it, marrow seems to have the right stuff for healing and rejuvenation. Because it hides deep in our bones, few people realize marrow is one of the largest organs in the human body—yes, bone marrow is considered a primary lymphatic organ. Babies start out life entirely with red bone marrow, the place where myeloid stem cells and lymphoid stem cells, precursors to red and white blood cells, are formed. By adulthood half of human bone marrow is yellow, serving primarily as a storage site for fat. Interestingly, with severe blood loss, the body can convert yellow marrow back to red to increase blood cell production. In cases of starvation, the body draws on the fat stores in yellow bone marrow in an attempt to survive.

Stem Cell Regeneration

The most rejuvenating part of bone marrow is its ability to perform hematopoiesis, the process by which stem cells generate the platelets, leukocytes, and erythrocytes needed for coagulation, immunity, and oxygen transport. Add in osteoblasts and osteoclasts for bone building and resorption, fibroblasts for connective tissue, and the hormone osteocalcin to help regulate blood sugar and fat deposition, and it’s evident why marrow is revered in many cultures as the very source of life.

Bovine marrow and spleen also contain high levels of a class of lipids important in cell membranes known as alkylglycerols (AKGs). AKGs serve as powerful immune system boosters, helping us fight infectious diseases and even cancer. The AKG story began in Stockholm in 1952, when Dr. Astrid Brohult got the bright idea of serving bone marrow soup to children suffering from leukemia, a cancer that develops in or spreads to the bone marrow. Although the children improved dramatically, they strongly disliked the soup. Dr. Brohult and her husband, Dr. Sven Brohult, then determined to identify the active component found in bone marrow. A decade later, they identified it as AKG and shifted their research interest from bone marrow to shark liver oil, a concentrated source well suited to supplement manufacture.

Today research on bone marrow stem cells represents some of the most far-ranging work in modern science. Stem cells can be transformed into functional neural cells and have been used to treat irritable bowel syndrome, ischemic heart disease, and HIV; they are injected into patients seeking renewed vitality and eternal youth at anti-aging clinics. While Father Technology’s high-tech stem cell treatments offer the excitement of promise, Mother Nature’s low-tech bone broth is safe, effective, and available to all of us here and now.

“ Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis

I have lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. I was forty-two, the mother of four children, very healthy and into yoga and martial arts when my world came crashing down in 2002. I was then diagnosed with a pericardial effusion, which is a lot of fluid and inflammation around the heart. I had major surgery and was told to accept a “new normal” for my life. That was not easy because I was put on very bad meds—prednisone was the least of it. The chemotherapy drugs ruined my life. I lost everything I knew as normal. I lost my husband, my friends, my ability to parent properly… the ability to do much at all. The only thing I gained was sixty pounds from the prednisone, which kept me alive, and I use the term alive loosely because it was more like existing as a zombie. I landed in the hospital many times, sometimes every two weeks. I had a TIA (transient ischemic attack) and organ failures and felt every part of my body crashing in. I finally went off the steroids and chemo because of these side effects, but I was also nervous about developing leukemia or bone cancer down the road. I said to my doctors, “Kill me now.”

The pericardial effusion was my first symptom of lupus. Rheumatoid arthritis followed. This all started with an outbreak at my daughter’s school of something called fifth disease. It’s normally a minor infection for children, but when it happens to adults, it can be severe. It has the effect of switching the immune system on, and then it’s always on. I also got mycoplasma pneumonia, also called walking pneumonia. Mycoplasma are neither viruses nor bacteria. They mutate, they change. They are almost impossible to get rid of and are a probable cause of autoimmune disorders. I got help from a cutting-edge doctor who knew of Dr. Tom Brown’s protocols and put me on the antibiotic doxycycline. I stayed on it for three years. It helped the lupus and RA a lot, but my digestive tract ended up overwhelmed.

In 2012, I started practicing yoga again in an amazing studio in Aventura, Florida, which I had founded myself years before. Out of the blue, I ran into my former student Diego Rutenberg. He took one look at me, pulled me aside—pulled me hard—and said, “You have to listen to me.” He told me about broth and using its cartilage, which was something I could relate to because I’d loved to chew on bones as a child. He told me about functional medicine and how I had to go see Shantih Coro. I did. Shantih’s program for me included custom probiotics, cod liver oil, fermented vegetables, and other things, but mostly a lot of broth. I had to commit, and I did everything without fail. For months and months I lived on broth with well-boiled vegetables like my grandmother used to make. I ate marrow and it was delicious. I loved the broth so much I got addicted. I lost weight. I could tell I was losing toxicity too. My color was better, stomach pains gone, and ability to do yoga returned. Today I am in remission, and that fact alone tells you everything.

—Carla Berkowitz, Aventura, Florida ”

Dr. Weston A. Price learned marrow was highly prized by Native Americans of the North. “It is important that skeletons are rarely found where large game animals have been slaughtered by the Indians of the North. The skeletal remains are found as piles of finely broken bone chips or splinters that have been cracked up to obtain as much as possible of the marrow and nutritive qualities of the bones. These Indians obtain their fat-soluble vitamins and also most of their minerals from the organs of the animals. An important part of the nutrition of the children consisted in various preparations of bone marrow, both as a substitute for milk and as a special dietary ration.”

When Price devised a nutrition plan for an orphanage, the meal included bone marrow. “About four ounces of tomato juice or orange juice and a teaspoonful of a mixture of equal parts of a very high vitamin natural cod liver oil and an especially high vitamin butter was given at the beginning of the meal. They then received a bowl containing approximately a pint of a very rich vegetable and meat stew, made largely from bone marrow and fine cuts of tender meat.”