The Nutrients You Only Get From Red Meat

G'day mate!

Just back from Chicago after onboarding into a new role I can't name yet. It's a good one. Next stop is LA, filming with Max Jolliffe and Rich Roll. Training's been brutal in the best way: a track session of 2k and 1km efforts, a 2-hour bike at high cadence, and a 3300m swim. My body's asking for everything I've got, which got me thinking about what actually fuels recovery at that volume.

Which brings me to the burger.

Last week a mate and I cooked a ground beef burger and posted it. Someone asked why not just do a salad with a bit of protein instead. Fair question, but it's the wrong comparison. A little meat on a salad and a proper serving of red meat aren't in the same nutritional ballpark. That gap is where a lot of people are quietly running a deficit without knowing it.

In this week’s newsletter (4 min read):
🥩 Why "protein is protein" is the wrong way to think
🧬 The compounds that only exist in meaningful amounts in animal tissue
✅ What to actually do about it, without overhauling your diet

If you have a mate who thinks a bit of chicken on a salad covers it, send them THIS link.

Meat Isn't Just Protein

We've been trained to treat meat as a protein delivery system, swap it for beans or tofu and call it even. That misses the point. It's not the protein that makes animal food hard to replace. It's a short list of compounds that exist almost nowhere else in usable amounts: vitamin B12, heme iron, creatine, and preformed vitamin A, with taurine and zinc close behind.

Start with B12. It isn't in any plant food in a form your body can use. Not spirulina, not seaweed, not nutritional yeast unless it's fortified. B12 is made by bacteria, and animals accumulate it by eating things we don't. There's no plant-based backdoor to it.

What Heavy Training Actually Costs You

A track session, a high-cadence 2-hour ride and a 3300m swim in one week is real output. That's asking your oxygen delivery and your fast-fuel muscle systems to perform on demand, over and over.

The two things doing the heavy lifting, heme iron for oxygen transport and creatine for fast muscle energy, are both concentrated in red meat. Heme iron absorbs at roughly two to three times the rate of the non-heme iron in spinach or lentils. And creatine is nearly absent from plant diets. A 2018 randomised trial found the body's creatine pool measurably dropped within three months of switching to a vegetarian diet.

What Eight Months of Eating Liver Did to My Blood Work

For the past eight months I've eaten liver on a weekly rotation. Not because it's trendy, but because I wanted to see what it did to my numbers. My most recent Hone Health panel came back with the exact micronutrients tied to liver, B12, iron, copper and folate, at the best levels I've seen since I started testing.

A single 3-ounce serving of beef liver gives you close to thirty times your daily B12, and more usable vitamin A than a plate of carrots. Your body has to convert the beta-carotene in plants into usable vitamin A, and that conversion runs inefficient for a lot of people. B12 deficiency is common in vegetarians and vegans who aren't supplementing.

Recovery gets marketed as sleep and protein shakes. But it's also whether your body has the raw material, B12, copper, folate, iron, to rebuild tissue with. You can hit your protein target every day and still be short on the inputs that let that protein do its job.

What to Actually Do

You don't need liver every week to close this gap. A few practical moves:

• Red meat 3 to 4 times a week if you're training hard. It's the most efficient single source of heme iron, creatine and B12 together.

• If organ meat isn't your thing, a weekly serving of liver pâté or a liver capsule gets you most of the way.

• If you're mostly plant-based, supplement B12 directly and consider creatine monohydrate. Both are cheap, well studied, and close a gap food alone won't.

• Don't guess. A blood panel (Hone Health or otherwise) tells you where you actually stand instead of assuming your diet has it covered.

This week's recipe 40g Clean Burger with Triple-Cooked Fries 

15 MIN PREP · SERVES 2 · $5/serve

The burger that kicked all this off. Built on Force of Nature Ancestral Blend, beef cut with organ meat, so it quietly carries the B12, iron and creatine this issue is about. Smashed patty, cheddar, burger sauce, triple-cooked fries.

RECIPE HERE

Nutrition Breakdown: 790 cals · 40g protein · 52g carbs · 46g fat

Final thoughts

The burger-versus-salad debate isn't really about the burger. It's about whether you're getting the handful of compounds your body can't make and can't easily pull from plants. Eat the salad if you want the salad. Just don't mistake a little meat for covering the gap a proper serving closes.

Quick Notes

🎬 New YouTube vid my triathlon sprint in Iowa last week as I build on the Ironman block. Watch it HERE.

🥩 Force of Nature truly has the best meats you can buy for quality and sustainability. Use code churchill15 if you do choose to give it a try :)

📈 If you want to see where your own micronutrients actually stand, HONE is the one I trust and has been essential in dialing in my health beneath the surface-level.

#EatGoodFeelGood

— DC