Best beef organ supplements for women

It was through social media that many of us became aware of beef organ supplements. Their marketing made them easy to dismiss: the appeal-to-nature shtick and hyped-up health claims, hawked by some hirsute He-Man with a caveman aesthetic and an apparent allergy to wearing shirts. But as with all supplement types, we did our due diligence on the subject and found perhaps some kernel of truth amid the hyperbole. Maybe, we thought, beef organ supplements were more than just a novelty, particularly for women — statistically a cohort in awful need of offal’s nutrients.

The questions that remained were: To what extent can the desiccated offcuts of cattle confer real health benefits? And which products, specifically, offer the best possibilities of doing so? Here was a challenge we could chew on, and one to which we fully applied our experience and powers of research.

See below for the bite-size version of our findings. Then read further for the real meat of the matter.

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This guide was a long time coming. We spent months digging through the scientific literature to determine whether beef organ supplements held a defensible place of viability in women’s health regimens. This effort involved analyzing the nutrient contents of various bovine organs, assessing the nutritional needs of women at different ages, measuring one set of information against the other, and then identifying products that could actually provide value to the user. Whenever necessary (which was often), we corresponded with customer support reps to extract information that wasn’t readily available to the public.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

With beef organ supplements being fairly new on the scene, and therefore lacking real research into their effects, we approached the subject with a slightly different set of criteria compared with our usual guides:

• Transparency: How freely does a brand provide information about its nutrient breakdown and test results? These details are what allow us to deduce whether a product might be considered reputable, as well as safe and effective for the greatest number of people.
• Customer experience: What does the brand do to make your purchase worth your while?
• Cost: Which brand among reputable brands is the most affordable?

We discuss our findings below.

Transparency (re: safety and efficacy)

Advantage: Primal Queen

At this time, almost all beef organ supplement companies base their marketing on a common gimmick: “This is what our ancestors did.” The nutritional content of their products are hardly ever a front-facing consideration. That’s why, in our preliminary research stages, we contacted the customer support team of every brand we determined could possibly produce a worthy supplement. Some were cagey. Some doubled down on the gimmick (to quote one: “Our early ancestors never had access to a nutrient assay”). We immediately excluded them from consideration for this guide. If we can’t be certain what’s in a supplement, we can’t rightly recommend it.

But among the brands that were forthright about their products’ nutrient content, Primal Queen stood out as the most transparent. Without hesitation, a customer support rep emailed us the formal analytical report conducted by an ISO-accredited third-party laboratory, along with a certificate of analysis (which is also available on Primal Queen’s website).

What we found in the report was that Primal Queen contains a fairly modest amount of essential vitamins and minerals, but that the modest dosing could support the average woman’s health goals. Used in conjunction with a moderately healthy diet, it could feasibly carry users across recommended nutritional thresholds. It’s nowhere near as robust as a high-quality women’s multivitamin, but that was in its favor. Seeing as beef organ supplements are effectively whole-food multivitamins, we found that their best use case was as a gentler alternative to strongly dosed synthetic supplements that might cause nausea or gastrointestinal upset,41 and Primal Queen posed little risk of either.

Heart & Soil was another brand that showed no hesitation in sharing its supplement breakdown, but its analysis was missing key information. Most importantly, it showed no value for vitamin A, a nutrient that poses a fairly high risk for oversupplementation, nor did it indicate that the values were determined by a third-party lab.

(The only non-assayed brand in this guide is Codeage. Though the company doesn’t subject its beef organs to nutrient analysis, we’re comfortable recommending it as a budget pick for two reasons: a solid reputational pedigree and NSF certification, verifying that its product has undergone repeated safety testing.)

Customer experience

Advantage: Primal Queen

Because beef organ supplements have spent relatively little time on the market, most interested people are probably new to the beef organ supplements space. It’s hard to make a move toward trying a supplement that you aren’t familiar with.

Primal Queen makes the move much easier, offering numerous incentives to its customers:

• Free shipping: Whereas many supplement brands have removed free shipping from their subscription perks, Primal Queen offers it to everyone — subscribers and one-time purchasers, both.
• Freebies: Every subscriber gets some nice Primal Queen–branded merch. In addition to a glass capsule jar and a travel pill case, they also get a mystery gift (one of us got a water tumbler).
• Yearlong protection: Primal Queen comes with a 365-day money-back guarantee.
• Customer support: We’ve already described how responsive and helpful Primal Queen’s support team is.

The only failing in Primal Queen’s customer experience is its website. It doesn’t have terrible design, per se, but it is obnoxious in terms of navigability. Case in point: if you want to make a one-time purchase, good luck locating the option for it. You’ll probably have to do as we did and email customer support for the link.

Cost

Advantage: Codeage Grass-Fed Beef Organs

Even without a direct subscription option, Codeage handily outdoes Primal Queen and Heart & Soil on cost.

Besides its affordable up-front price point, which is $22–$34 less than our other recs, Codeage’s per-day use cost is at least 2.6 times lower than that of either Heart & Soil or Primal Queen. The other two may perhaps offer more value in terms of nutritional value, informational assurance, and/or merch, but Codeage poses the lowest financial barrier to entry into the beef organs supplement space.

Below is a quick-comparison table laying out the key qualities of our top recommendations, to illustrate how they measure against one another.

Beef organ supplements are the desiccated, encapsulated offal of cows. Some supplements consist of a single organ, while others comprise a variety. The most common cuts that make their way into a beef organ supplement are the liver, heart, spleen, pancreas, and kidneys.

While bovine organs in general aren’t uncommon in the global diet, the specific cuts used in beef organ supplements scarcely make their way onto the average American plate. In the United States, only beef liver can be considered “normal,” but even that’s a rare dish compared with your chucks, ribs, steaks, loins, briskets, and shanks. Probably, their culinary disuse is due to (a) a broad aversion to the idea of eating vital organs at all and (b) the strong mineral taste that some organs typically have.

In the case of reproductive organs, culinary use is even less common. While Rocky Mountain oysters feature on a fair number of restaurant menus, they’re pretty much a novelty item, and bull testicles in general are more or less the domain of “raw carnivore” influencers who overuse terms like “ancestral” and peddle the attendant pseudoscience. As for the uterus and ovaries, they’re so rarely eaten by humans that their nutritional information has yet to be documented.

But uncommon use isn’t the same as having no use at all. In fact, beef organs can provide a host of nutrients in which some people, especially women, are often deficient.

At the time of this writing, there have been no human studies examining the effects of beef organ supplements as such. Yet we know that these supplements hold some health potential because beef organs themselves have been the subject of substantial research, and much of what holds true about the source food theoretically extends to the supplements made from them.

One of the best studies to date is a 2024 analysis of beef offal in which the researchers examined the nutritional content of certain cuts that had been desiccated and ground to a powder:1

A separate study has found, too, that beef heart and liver are fairly rich in coenzyme 10 (CoQ10), with a digestibility amounting to around 6.5mg per standard cooked serving size.2

These nutrients are essential for everyone, but many of them play an especially important role in women’s health:

• According to a 2022 systematic review, vitamin E supplementation may help with “postmenopausal hot flashes, vascular modulation, plasma lipid profile level and vaginal changes.”3
• In a 2024 narrative review, researchers noted that vitamin B2 is linked to “urogenital and reproductive health, hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and breastfeeding.”4
• Vitamin B6 may help regulate hormones and mood in menopause.40
• Insufficient vitamin B12 intake may contribute to reproductive issues such as shorter gestation and low birth weight.5 In menopause, it may also help maintain energy levels.40
• An insufficient calcium intake raises one’s risk of osteoporosis, for which women (particularly older women) are already at a higher risk.6 Phosphorus, too, is important in this regard.7
• Women are more prone to iron deficiency because of monthly menstrual blood loss, and copper is essential for iron metabolism.8 9
• A woman’s magnesium intake affects a wide range of health concerns, including polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), premenstrual syndrome (PMS), pregnancy, and menopause.10
• A 2020 review of studies found that zinc supplementation has a “positive effect on many parameters” of PCOS and may reduce the intensity of menstrual pain in dysmenorrhea.11 A later review concluded that zinc may also be an “effective remedy for alleviating symptoms of PMS.”12
• In reproductive health, CoQ10 may enhance ovarian function, increase egg counts, and improve embryo quality.13 Its potential energy-boosting effect may also help combat menopausal fatigue.14

Dose-wise, beef organ supplements are usually less robust than synthetic vitamins, but that isn’t necessarily a downside. Because synthetics are often highly dosed, they can cause symptoms such as nausea and gastrointestinal upset, especially when taken on an empty stomach.41 For many people, the comparably modest potency of a beef organ supplement may be more approachable.

Other beef organ cuts (i.e., reproductive organs)

Many women’s beef organ supplements, including one that we recommend, also include bovine reproductive organs (e.g., ovaries, uterus), whose nutritional information has yet to be documented. The philosophy behind their inclusion is a notion that some appeal-to-nature influencers call “like-for-like nutrition”: the idea that consuming a particular body part of a livestock animal will confer health benefits specifically in the corresponding body part of a human. It goes that if you want some kind of boost to your reproductive organs, then you should eat the reproductive organs of some terrestrial mammal.

To be clear, absolutely no scientific research supports this. Why would it? After all, eating a beef brisket won’t target your pectorals any more than would a flank steak, or a block of tofu for that matter. There’s no sorting department in your body coordinating the logistics of nutrient delivery, like: “Cow’s chest nutrients to the human’s chest! Ovary nutrients to the ovaries!”

At the same time, we can’t discount the possibility that a cow’s uterus or ovaries contain vitamins and minerals that could be beneficial to a human’s reproductive health. Beef in general is a good source of selenium,15 zinc,16 iron,17 and B vitamins,18 all of which are important for women’s fertility, so there’s a chance that bovine reproductive organs can serve some of the same utility as other beef cuts, including organ meats.19

Of course, some research needs to be done — a study on beef organ supplements or a nutritional assay of bovine reproductive organs — before we can say anything more conclusive on the matter. When that happens, we’ll update this guide accordingly.

Even with the huge absence of research on beef organ supplements, they’re essentially just whole-food multivitamins, so we can presume them to be generally safe so long as they satisfy a few basic quality standards:

• Third-party testing: Independent analysis can reveal whether a product has safe levels of contaminants. This is especially important since offal can contain high concentrations of heavy metals.20
• Testing transparency (or equivalent): A brand should be willing to share their certificate of analysis (CoA) with customers and other interested parties. Otherwise, one can’t be certain whether testing has actually been done and that the product complies with regulatory thresholds of contaminants. (In the absence of a CoA, the product should boast a certification that assures us of rigorous testing standards.)
• Sourcing transparency: Sourcing is an important factor with regard to the transmission of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare but 100% fatal illness. Because it’s linked to eating cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy,21 and the causative prion can’t be killed with cooking (much less dehydration),22 you want to be sure your supplement sources its beef from a country with a globally-recognized-as-safe cattle industry (e.g., Argentina, New Zealand).23
• Nutritional information: Ideally, with any supplement, you should have some sense of what you’re putting in your body. With beef organ products, knowing this information helps prevent oversupplementation, especially of the vitamin A in cow’s liver.24

(Most of our recommendations in this guide check all the above boxes. The one exception, Codeage, doesn’t subject its beef organs to nutrient analysis, but it has a strong reputational pedigree and a simple-enough formulation that we can deduce its nutritional values.)

One question remains about the inherent risks of consuming beef in general, namely its high amounts of saturated fat, which can raise bad cholesterol.25 26 On this front, beef organ supplements pose only the barest risk. The organs they use are lean compared with your more mainstream cuts, which minimizes the quantity of saturated fat. Plus, most beef organ supplements don’t contain enough source material to meaningfully degrade your health. There’s only so much desiccated meat you can fit into a capsule, and no matter how much “ancestral wisdom” is guiding a company, they can’t beat the physics game. With that being said, anyone who needs to severely limit their saturated fat intake should consult their doctor before incorporating a beef organ supplement into their health routine.

Beef organ supplements are best suited for non-vegan/non-vegetarian women who (a) need the specific nutrients that beef organs provide and (b) aren’t keen on taking traditional vitamin or nutritional supplements (e.g., you’re sensitive to the comparably high doses present in multivitamins).

Because beef organ supplements aren’t as nutrient-rich as their source food materials are, the ideal user is someone who gets a fair share of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes from the food they eat but needs just a relatively small push to get them past recommended thresholds. At the same time, someone who doesn’t consume sufficient dietary nutrients can still benefit: after all, for the nutrient-deficient, any additional intake is good.

Specific cohorts that may benefit the most from such supplements are:

• Women during or after menopause
• Women with severe PMS
• Women with PCOS (possibly)
• Pregnant women (possibly)

(We say “possibly” because PCOS is a complex disorder that may not respond to supplemental treatment, and pregnancy really requires the guidance of a medical expert to yield the best outcomes for both the mother and developing fetus.)

Who are they not for?

Beef organ supplements may be inappropriate for the following populations owing to undue safety risks:

• People with gout: Anyone with gout should limit their intake of beef and other red meats.27 Taking a beef organ supplement would be an unnecessary risk factor.
• People with iron overload: Iron overload, or hemochromatosis, is when the body absorbs and stores excessive iron, which can eventually damage vital organs.28 With this condition, one may need to avoid taking an iron-containing supplement.
• People who already consume enough vitamin A: Beef organs, especially the liver, are rich in vitamin A, of which adult women should not consume more than 3,000mcg from animal or supplemental sources. Excessive intake may result in headache, blurred vision, nausea/dizziness, muscle aches, discoordination, and even death.29
• People with alpha-gal syndrome: Typically caused by the bite of the lone star tick, alpha-gal syndrome induces an allergy to red meats.30 Consuming a beef organ supplement may cause a life-threatening reaction.
• People who consume enough nutrients: If your dietary and supplemental nutrition are already up to par, there’s no point in getting more from a beef organ supplement. In fact, doing so could be toxic.

Outside of these populations, too, beef organ supplements should be regarded with at least some degree of skepticism. Bear in mind that no credible scientific body has yet published any research on beef organ supplements, so any purported health claims are unsubstantiated. At best, they can provide you with relatively small doses of nutrients commonly found in foods and other off-the-shelf health products, with no meaningful advantage in bioavailability.31 That all goes to say: even if you’re a suitable candidate for beef organ supplementation, you ought to rein in your expectations. While the all-natural, whole-food aspect of these supplements may be appealing, they aren’t any more effective for women’s (or anyone’s) health than a high-quality multivitamin with comparable nutrient values.

Best for most women

Of all the beef organ supplement brands we’ve contacted, Primal Queen has been probably the most customer-responsive, at least among those that specialize in the niche. Its customer support team typically answered our queries within 24 hours, and their responses were thorough enough that we never needed to ask follow-up questions.

We lead with this praise because it was through customer support that we could ascertain Primal Queen’s nutrient values. Based on the analytical report we received, we’ve found that each day’s serving (two capsules, 337.5mg per capsule) provides significant amounts of vitamins B2 (18.1mcg, or around 1% RDA) and B12 (0.232mcg, around 8–10% RDA), as well as iron (0.32mg, 1–3% RDA).32 33 34

The word “significant” here is conditional. In an objective sense, the amounts of B2 and iron (not to mention the nutrients whose levels are too scant to remark upon) are quite low. But comparatively, Primal Queen is a richer source of iron than Codeage, and on a capsule-to-capsule basis, its nutrient content looks something like a Heart & Soil Lite. For most women who eat a balanced diet, Primal Queen is therefore the definitive supplement: something that tips the scales of nutrition in their favor, rather than substitutes for a healthy lifestyle.

Another factor that we appreciate about Primal Queen is the breadth of its consideration for customers. Besides the solid support team, the company takes uncommon measures to ensure that users trust and enjoy their product:

• NuFlow excipient: a natural, organic alternative to synthetic agents for improving stability, structural integrity, and/or absorption. NuFlow is Clean Label–compliant and non-GMO, and it accommodates halal and kosher lifestyles.
• ScentCerts: a miniature scented insert added to each bag. It imparts a minty fragrance and flavor to the capsules.
• Freebies: Subscribers get a glass jar in which to store their capsules, a travel pill case, and a mystery gift (for one of us, it was a quasi Dixie Jazz cup–inspired water tumbler).

The one fail point of Primal Queen’s customer experience (CX) ecosystem is its website. It’s so designed to promote subscriptions that you’ll have a tough time finding the option for a one-time purchase. In fact, it seems the only way to choose that option is to email the support team for a link. We see no reason to alienate what is likely the largest cohort of potential customers, especially in light of everything else the company does well with its CX.

Pricing and returns

As a one-time purchase, Primal Queen costs $64 ($1.06 per serving, $2.13 per day). Even with free shipping, it’s a lousy price. But on subscription, the cost is much friendlier:

(These are normal prices. At the time of this writing, an extended sale has reduced the costs to $39 and $78 for one- and three- month supplies, respectively.)

The subscription discount amounts to around 30%, which is 5% larger than that of Heart & Soil and among the highest we’ve seen among all supplements.

Sweetening the deal is that your most recent order is protected by a 365-day money-back guarantee (the customer is responsible for return shipping). That Primal Queen offers a risk-free product for up to a year is part of why it’s our recommendation for most women.

Best for peri-/postmenopause

Heart & Soil Beef Organs isn’t marketed toward women, but that doesn’t matter. According to the nutrient analysis the company provided us, it provides significant amounts of several nutrients that women need, especially as they pass middle age:

• Vitamin B2: 0.15mg (9–14% RDA)32
• Vitamin B6: 0.186mg (9–14% RDA)35
• Vitamin B12: 11.58mcg (482.4% RDA)33
• Iron: 4.42mg (16–55% RDA)34
• Copper: 241.77mcg (19–27% RDA)37
• Phosphorus: 33.32mg (4% RDA)38
• Selenium: 4.07mcg (5–7% RDA)39
• CoQ10: 14mcg

But we have a few problems with Heart & Soil’s nutrient analysis. One is that it’s incomplete (how much vitamin A, for instance?), and thus so is its safety profile. The other is that the data isn’t verified: the information came to us as standard email text, not a PDF of an official report. While we appreciate that Heart & Soil offered us the data at all, it doesn’t fully satisfy our requirements. Hence why it isn’t our recommendation for most women.

Still, if the nutrient analysis is anywhere close to accurate, then Heart & Soil Beef Organs boasts a robust-enough formulation to meet the needs of women during and after menopause. And at least the certificate of analysis is readily available through the company’s website.

Pricing and returns

Heart & Soil Beef Organs costs $52.00 as a one-time purchase. A subscription nets a discount, but a descending one:

• First subscription order (25% discount): $39.00
• Subsequent subscription orders (10% discount): $46.80

Shipping inflates the cost, even on subscriptions, unless you cross a $100 threshold. The shipping charge isn’t exactly cheap, either. On an order to Kansas, for instance, it was approximately $10. So, realistically, Heart & Soil Beef Organs may cost around $49–$52 per order. Codeage and Primal Queen (on subscription) are significantly more cost-effective.

Heart & Soil’s money-back guarantee window is quite good, however. You have a 60-day window to request a refund, and returns are free. The duration is ten months shorter than that of Primal Queen, but at least you don’t have to pay to send back the product.

Budget pick

The budget pick often represents some sort of compromise. In this case, it’s that Codeage doesn’t provide nutritional information about its beef liver capsules, not even by request. (“We do not run nutrient assay [sic] on our glandular line,” said the customer support rep we chatted with. The same goes for third-party testing results.) But we can make an educated guess based on what we know: that fresh beef liver consists of around 70% moisture,43 of which freeze-drying removes 98–99%.44

Codeage is indeed freeze-dried, and it contains 1,500mg of desiccated product per three-cap serving. So, some math. A standard serving of fresh beef liver is 113g. After freeze-drying, its weight would reduce to around 36g, or 24 times that of Codeage Grass-Fed Beef Liver. Dividing the standard fresh serving weight by 24, we can surmise that one serving of Codeage equals around 4.7g of fresh liver. And if we make the appropriate conversions from data published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), we get:36

• 6.25cal
• 0.96g protein
• 0.23mg iron
• 792IU vitamin A (retinol)
• 12.9mg cholesterol

Only the vitamin A content is remarkable. At 792IU, it provides around 237mcg, or around one-third the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for most adult women. Seeing as the average woman consumes 616mcg vitamin A from dietary sources, we’d say Codeage Grass-Fed Beef Liver is a fine supplemental source of at least that, without endangering the average user with oversupplementation. And since vitamin A is important for reproduction, that ought to be happy news for any woman in want of an affordable beef organ supplement to support pregnancy efforts.29

Codeage is also NSF certified, which means the company’s manufacturing facilities are subjected to regular on-site inspections and the product itself to regular retesting. With that in mind, you can be assured that the Grass-Fed Beef Liver supplement satisfies a high safety and quality standard, which may help make up partially for Codeage’s nontransparency about the product’s nutrient breakdown.

Pricing and returns

Codeage Grass-Fed Beef Liver costs just $29.99 for a 180-capsule bottle. A serving size is three capsules per day, so a single purchase amounts to a two-month supply. The resulting cost-effectiveness is unmatched by either competitor detailed in this guide.

The one cost-adjacent area in which Codeage suffers is its guarantee period. Its 30-day window may be standard, and its policy may be no-questions-asked, but the duration is only half that of Heart & Soil and 12 times shorter than that of Primal Queen.

The most parallel alternative to a beef organ supplement would be incorporating beef organs into your diet. That’s a potentially delicious approach (beef scrapple? tacos de tripa o lengua?), but not one that jibes with everyone’s tastes or comfort level — not to mention the negative health implications of eating foods high in saturated fat.42 More sustainable would be eating a balanced diet, ideally under a dietitian’s guidance, but that isn’t always feasible.

So the closest supplemental alternative to beef organ supplements would be some other kind of whole-food-based nutrition product, such as IM8 or a greens powder. Delivered in powder drink form, they ordinarily provide a wide range of nutrients in high enough amounts to help you meet thresholds without the risk of oversupplementation.