Everyone knows the story of the little engine that could. Fewer people know the story of the rats that refused to quit, which is a shame, because it explains something the engine never did: what fuel it was running on.
In 1951, a nutrition researcher named Benjamin Ershoff gave rats every vitamin science knew about and then put them in cold water. They gave up in thirteen minutes. A third group of rats, fed the same diet with a little dried liver mixed in, was still swimming two hours later when he stopped the clock. That experiment is the reason I don’t use synthetic vitamins, in my own cabinet or in my patients’ plans.
The experiment
Ershoff raised three groups of rats from weaning. Group one ate a purified diet containing all eleven vitamins known at the time. Group two ate the same diet with the entire B-complex added on top. Group three ate the same diet with 10 percent of it replaced by desiccated liver.
In warm water, every rat swam the full two hours. In 20°C water, the groups came apart. The vitamin rats lasted 13.3 minutes. The extra-B-vitamin rats lasted 13.4 minutes, so every B vitamin then known bought them six seconds. The liver rats swam 63, 83 and 87 minutes on average, and nine of the twelve were still going at the two-hour cutoff.
Ershoff called it the “anti-fatigue factor.” Seventy-five years later, no one has isolated it.
It isn’t a factor. It’s synergy.
The standard objection is that the purified diet was low in iron and liver simply fixed that. Maybe iron was part of it. But nobody ever reproduced the result by adding iron to the vitamin list, and I think that is because the missing ingredient is not a single ingredient. It is iron with the copper that lets you use it, B12 and folate in the forms the body recognizes, CoQ10, heme, and cofactors that still don’t have names, all arriving together in the ratios nature settled on long before we started counting.
The best science of 1951 built a “complete” diet and left out what it didn’t understand. We are still doing that. A synthetic vitamin, dosed by the milligram, is a guess about which nutrient you need, how much, and what it needs beside it to work. When the guess is wrong, you also get the excess. I wrote recently about what excess niacin and NAD boosters leave behind in the artery wall: a metabolite called 4PY that inflames the vessel lining and roughly doubles three-year heart-attack and stroke risk in the people with the highest levels. Isolate a nutrient and you get the nutrient plus whatever the body does with the leftovers. Eat the organ and the body decides.
We know the copper-to-zinc ratio. We don’t know copper to boron. We are still copying nature and we have not finished reading the manual.
What I use instead
This is why the only supplements in my protocols are whole-food based, and why they are the ones they are.
Kickstart My Heart is the 1951 experiment in a capsule: freeze-dried New Zealand elk liver, heart and kidney. Liver is what those rats got. Heart adds CoQ10 and the mitochondrial cofactors the heart muscle itself runs on. It replaces a B-complex, an iron pill and a CoQ10 capsule with the organs those nutrients come from, in the proportions they come in.
Wild Salmon Roe is where the methylated B vitamins, the omega-3s and the choline come from in my plans, in their natural forms and ratios rather than three separate bottles of methylfolate, fish oil and choline.
Shilajit resin covers the trace minerals and fulvic acid that no label has ever managed to itemize. It is the mineral version of the same idea: the whole thing, not the parts we’ve named.
Three things. Fewer bottles. All of what the 1951 rats were missing, including the parts nobody has named yet. It was one piece of the plan for the 82-year-old patient whose persistent atrial fibrillation converted to normal rhythm without an ablation: we replaced his shelf of synthetic supplements with these three. Fewer pills, not more.
The engine and the rats
The little engine made it up the hill on attitude. The rats made it on liver. If you are still taking a synthetic multivitamin or a B-complex, this is a good week to ask which one you are counting on.
The longer version of this piece, with both citations, is on BestHeartBeat.com. If you would like a second opinion on your own supplement list and heart risk, I offer telehealth second-opinion consults through Natural Heart Doctor.
Source: Ershoff BH. Beneficial effects of liver feeding on swimming capacity of rats in cold water. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 1951;77:488–491.