Does eating tons of Liver get you Jacked? (Liver King Finale) (Patreon)

A couple years back, I went out to eat at a fish place with a Japanese friend of mine in Tokyo. He’s really into fishing so I was asking him about different parts of the fish he liked to eat and monkfish liver came up. He said it’s really good for libido while doing this gesture making his limp arm powerfully straight. They didn’t have any monkfish at that restaurant, place so I went out and got some the next day. Whatever libido boost it provided was masked by the diarrhea it gave me.

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This brings us back to the question of how Liver King stays so jacked. Last time we took a look at whether his massive consumption of testicles increases his testosterone or not. The time before that, I mentioned how Andrew Huberman guessed that Liver King was probably on TRT at the least and we looked at whether certain aspects of his lifestyle might give him abnormally high testosterone. So today let’s look into whether massive amounts of liver might “boost” testosterone.

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Liver King often says in his ‘what I’m eating’ videos that he has liver with breakfast, lunch and dinner because “liver is king.” He told GQ that he eats about a pound (453g) of liver per day.

Here are the nutrients for 100g of liver.

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Liver King is getting 4.5x that, so:
427% Vitamin A
202% Riboflavin
81% Niacin
67% Vitamin B6
1246% Vitamin B12
80% Folate
76% Choline
28% Zinc
616% Copper
72% Selenium
117% Cholesterol

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The iron content listed in that chart seems way off, it should be much higher. Health Link British Columbia puts100g of beef liver at 5.75 - 16.75mg. By that, Liver King would be getting anywhere from 25.8mg to 73.4mg, which would be 148% to 421% the daily value. If you use the lower daily iron intake recommended by NHS.UK, it would from 296% to 842%

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So with that in mind, what stands out is the massive amounts of vitamin A and iron that Liver King is getting every day. (I wonder if Liver King gives blood to curb the hemochromatosis risk from all that iron. Excess copper could be an issue for him as well.)

Vitamin A is well known to be an essential food component that is involved in vision, maintenance of healthy epithelium, growth, bone formation, reproduction, and immune function.

The combo of vitamin A and iron might have testosterone boosting potential. In a 2004 study titled Vitamin A and iron supplementation is as efficient as hormonal therapy in constitutionally delayed children, 102 teenage boys with short stature and delayed puberty were separated into four groups: a control, a testosterone-supplemented group, a vitamin A- and iron-supplemented group, and a group that received both testosterone and the nutritional supplementation. Only the control group didn’t gain weight and begin puberty, the other three groups did. The growth acceleration of the vitamin-A treated group was on par with that of testosterone group. Based on increase in testicle size, they noted that puberty started after 9-12 months in the testosterone group, and it started after 12 months in the vitamin-A group.

However, they were using a mere 6000 IU of vitamin A per week to get this response in these puberty-challenged boys. 5000 IU’s of vitamin A is the daily recommended amount. So, these boys probably had pretty terrible vitamin A status. The question becomes: If fixing a vitamin A insufficiency puts testicular growth back on track, does getting tons of vitamin A make your testicles even more… invigorated? Well, it is understood that vitamin A is essential for sperm production.

I learned of the above study on puberty onset from Chris Masterjohn who holds a PhD in nutritional sciences. In an article of his titled Vitamin A: The Forgotten Bodybuilding Nutrient, he explains why it’s unfortunate that bodybuilders today eat a high-protein, low-fat, low-vitamin A diet. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin, making the low-fat nature of the typical bodybuilding diet even worse for vitamin A status. He even says in his article that it’s worth pondering “whether the athletes who resort to over-the-counter steroid supplements might be able to achieve similar results by consuming a traditional diet, rich in vitamin A.”

He explains that Vitamin A is stored in the Sertoli cells of the testicles and rat studies have shown that greater concentrations of vitamin A in the testes increase basal testosterone secretion. Not only that, Masterjohn explains:

“Transferrin [is also increased], which is responsible for the transport of iron; and a variety of growth factors including IGF-binding protein 4 (which transports IGF), androgen-binding protein (which transports androgens), transforming growth factor-beta (which causes cell growth but suppresses cancer) and steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (which is responsible for the transport of cholesterol into the mitochondria for its conversion to steroids). Vitamin A also decreases estrogen production in the male testes. Rats that are deficient in vitamin A experience decreased testosterone until the accessory sex organs atrophy, indicating that vitamin A not only aids in, but is essential to, testosterone production.”

To break that down a bit:

・IGF is an anabolic hormone that stimulates the growth of bone, muscle and other tissues in the body.
・Androgens refer to sex hormones that generally confer “masculinizing” effects; the main one of course being testosterone.

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・Steroidogenic acute regulatory protein - This one is really interesting because it links back to something I was talking about in the previous Liver King article about eating testicles every day. As discussed, Liver King gets tons of cholesterol from bull testicles, and beef liver has plenty of cholesterol as well. Testosterone is synthesized from cholesterol in the testicles. Though it’s not necessarily as easy as chugging more cholesterol to get more and more testosterone. What’s interesting is that one of the papers I was reading for that article explains that “the rate-limiting step in steroid biogenesis is cholesterol transport into the mitochondria” - exactly the thing this steroidogenic acute regulatory protein does. So, considering higher vitamin A levels in the testicles increases this steroidogenic acute regulatory protein, it may be that increasing your consumption of vitamin A could speed up the rate at which your testicles can convert cholesterol into testosterone. (At what point do you get diminishing returns? I wasn’t able to find a paper on that.)

A study looking at the diets of 155 pairs of male twins found that vitamin A intake correlated with testosterone levels.

While of course testosterone is very important for muscle mass, vitamin A itself has a role in protein synthesis. An old (1978) rodent study found that vitamin A deficiency led to lower levels of muscle protein synthesis. Vitamin A and lactoferrin can stimulate protein synthesis in neonate calves and protein synthesis is depressed during vitamin A deficiency.

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One study on calves found that injecting vitamin A “enhanced postnatal muscle growth by promoting myogenesis and increasing satellite cell density.” Myogenesis is the creation of new muscle cells and satellite cells are precursors to skeletal muscle cells and are responsible for the ability of muscle tissue to regenerate.

Chris Masterjohn explains in his article that:

Vitamin A is not only depleted by a high intake of protein, but it is also necessary for the synthesis of new protein, which is the goal of the bodybuilder. … Cultured skeletal muscle cells increase the amount of protein per cell when exposed to vitamin A and D, but not when exposed to vitamin D alone.…The combination of a high-protein diet that depletes vitamin A and a low-fat diet that fails to provide vitamin A is a clear recipe for deficiency of this vital nutrient. Exercises that elicit a high demand for testosterone, such as squats and deadlifts, are often recommended for muscle growth, but without vitamin A the body cannot meet that demand for testosterone.

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So this is all very compelling but honestly it’s not clear whether you can just eat more and more vitamin A to enhance testosterone production or enhance muscle growth. What is the upper limit? Liver King is getting 427% the recommended daily intake of vitamin A but is that going to improve his testosterone production and muscle synthesis any more than say 150% your daily vitamin A?

Mike Mutzel gives a good breakdown of the hallmarks of steroid use and how Liver King checks all the boxes. The simplest explanation is probably the right one. With that said and, even with all these accusations, I’d like to keep my mind open to the possibility that Liver King is not lying about the juice. Not just because the tenets he preaches would actually be really helpful for a lot of people and he actually seems like a really genuine dude, but because as far as I know, no one does what he does. Seriously, who else works out twice-a-day like an elite level Crossfitter and chugs testicles, beef livers and bone marrow?

Shawn Baker seems kinda close because he eats a carnivore diet and works out like a madman - so why isn’t he as ripped as Liver King? Well, he pretty much eats only steak and no organ meats.

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Paul Saladino’s diet is a lot closer to Liver King’s. He’s mostly animal-based, he eats a few carbs here and there, he eats organ meats and he’s pretty ripped… but not anywhere near as big as Liver King. Then again, it sounds like his main exercise is surfing which of course isn’t going to be as hypertrophic as what Liver King does. He also doesn’t eat near as much organs like testicles or liver and certainly not as much volume as Liver King.

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As we discussed in the first post in this series, his ancestral tenets all seem like a great way to keep your testosterone as high as it can (naturally) be. While it doesn’t seem like the testosterone contained in bull testicles will directly raise your testosterone, the tons of cholesterol and ample saturated fat Liver King gets in his diet seems like a good way to support testosterone production. Then, there is evidence to suggest that having tons of vitamin A being shuttled into the testicles will in fact allow the testicles to produce testosterone from cholesterol at a higher rate.

While we don’t know the upper limit of these things, it seems like on the diet and lifestyle front, Liver King is doing tons of things right. Maybe all this paired with very unique genes could indeed render a physique like that. In any case, I think his message would really benefit most anyone and he leads a great example of what a really healthy lifestyle looks like.

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