Toxic Advice: Why Recommending Liver as a Health Food Is Reckless

The Independent published an article titled “Revealed: The vitamins you actually need and where to get them.” It pretends to be a helpful nutritional overview. It’s not. It’s a subtle commercial for animal use disguised as health advice. From its headline to its final recommendation — that we all tuck into liver once a week — the article quietly promotes speciesism, reinforces outdated nutrition myths, and ignores both modern dietetics and basic safety.

Let’s unpack it.

Leading With Liver

Before you even reach the end, the article gives away its bias. It crowns liver the top food source for a range of vitamins — despite acknowledging that it can cause vitamin A toxicity, especially during pregnancy. It literally says not to eat it if you're pregnant. Then recommends it anyway.

This isn’t just irresponsible. It’s revealing. The author could have named any number of safe, plant-based foods or supplements. Instead, they pick one of the few that comes with a built-in poison warning.

Why? Because the entire article is framed to centre animal bodies as default nutrient sources, regardless of risk.

Retinol vs Carotenoids

The section on vitamin A starts strong if you’re a dairy lobbyist. It lists “eggs, oily fish and dairy” as retinol sources, before briefly mentioning that your body can also convert beta-carotene (from plants) into vitamin A. That’s your carotenoid-rich vegetables like carrots, pumpkins, peppers, and spinach.

But instead of clarifying that preformed retinol is unnecessary and potentially toxic, while beta-carotene is safe, abundant, and efficiently converted by the body, the article reverses the logic. It suggests that eating animals is the gold standard — and plants an afterthought.

The science says otherwise.

Your body regulates how much vitamin A it converts from carotenoids. It doesn't regulate preformed retinol from animal products, which is how toxicity happens. In other words, the safer form is the one from plants.

B Vitamins: The Slippery Equivalence Trick

When discussing B vitamins, the article claims they’re found “in everything from beans and legumes to meat, fish and dairy,” as if all sources are nutritionally equivalent.

They’re not.

It fails to explain that many B vitamins — including B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9 — are all plentiful in plant-based foods. Only B12 needs supplementation or fortified intake on a fully plant-based diet, something easily achievable without using animals. The article doesn’t explain that — or that animals raised for food are often supplemented with B12 themselves. Humans can just skip the middleman.

But this context is missing, because it undermines the agenda: to keep animal use looking “essential.”

Vitamin D

For a moment, the article acknowledges that your body produces vitamin D from sunlight. It even notes that supplements are often necessary in winter. But just before the reader can relax, it reasserts that oily fish, eggs, and meat are “dietary sources.”

It never tells you:

▫️That most people in the UK don’t get enough from food, regardless of diet

▫️That vitamin D2 is plant-based

▫️That vegan D3 is available and effective

▫️That supplementation is already standard government advice

Instead of reinforcing practical, animal-free solutions, it leans back into animal bodies — because the article isn’t trying to empower people. It’s trying to preserve the illusion that animals are resources.

Crowning the Carcass

Let’s revisit this logic bomb:

> “So rich in vitamin A, in fact, that it’s advised to eat it only once a week to avoid vitamin A toxicity, and not at all if you’re pregnant. Sometimes, you just can’t win.”

Actually, you can win. You just don’t need to eat liver. Or any other organ, for that matter. A plant-based diet — with supplementation where needed — is both nutritionally adequate and safe. The irony here is that plant foods are safer, more consistent, and don’t carry the same risks of toxicity, foodborne pathogens, or saturated fat overload.

But the article doesn’t want to say that. Because this isn’t about nutrition. It’s about normalising the use of animals.

What the Article Ignores Entirely

The omissions are just as revealing as the content:

▫️No mention of fortified plant milks, cereals, or spreads.

▫️No mention of supplements, which are widely accessible and recommended by the NHS.

▫️No mention of the environmental, ethical, or public health costs of relying on animals for nutrients.

▫️No mention of the risks associated with eating eggs, processed meats, or fish (including cholesterol, microplastics, heavy metals, and antibiotic residues).

▫️No mention of safe, evidence-based plant-based nutrition — or the growing global consensus that plant-based diets are better for human health and the planet.

Instead, the article wraps its animal promotion in faux health concern, treating nutritional toxicology like a quirky side note.

Let’s Be Honest

This article isn’t about vitamins.

It’s about keeping animals on the menu by framing them as biologically necessary — even when they’re not. It’s about sidelining plant-based nutrition to maintain the illusion that using animals is natural, inevitable, and even desirable.

It’s not. It’s a choice. And it’s a bad one — for animals, for the planet, and increasingly, for human health.

If you want to know where to get your vitamins, start with the truth: you don’t need to kill someone else to meet your needs.