How much you actually get from desiccated liver tablets

How much you get from desiccated liver tablets is stated on the Supplement Facts panel per serving, not on the front of the tub. The whole-food benchmark is striking: 3 oz of cooked liver delivers 7,744 mcg RAE of vitamin A. Freeze-drying concentrates those compounds, so tablet weight and micronutrient amount are different figures.

How much desiccated liver tablets actually deliver

A label that says 600 mg of desiccated liver is quoting the weight of the dried tissue, organ and all. The row underneath it is where the maker states vitamin A in micrograms RAE, B12 in micrograms, and iron in milligrams. Those are the figures that compare against the daily value percentages printed on the right of every panel.

The distinction isn't pedantry. Two products can both claim 600 mg of the same dried organ and deliver different amounts, because the starting tissue, the drying process and the standardisation all vary. The compound weight tells you how much powder you swallow. The line underneath tells you what it's for.

There's also a units trap worth naming once. RAE, retinol activity equivalents, exists because preformed A and plant carotenoids convert at different rates, so a label quoting IU is speaking an older dialect. If a panel mixes the two, convert or ignore, and don't add them together. This is the same category of mistake as comparing mg with mcg, just wearing a different coat.

What the USDA comparison looks like

For scale, USDA figures for a 3 oz pan-fried portion: 83.1 mcg of B12, or 3,464% of the daily value. 7,744 mcg RAE of A, about 860% DV. 6.2 mg of iron and 418 mg of choline. A tablet serving is a small fraction of that portion, which is exactly why the per-serving line matters more than any impression of equivalence.

Our own gummies, made from grass fed desiccated cattle tissue, state their serving as 2 a day, a 30 day bottle at $21.99, with the figures printed rather than blended into a mystery total. I'd apply the same standard to any brand's tablets, including ones we don't make.

How to compare two brands in two minutes

Serving size first, then the vitamin rows, then the price divided by days of supply. A tub claiming a big compound weight with no vitamin row isn't stronger, it's vaguer, and vagueness usually costs the same as specificity. That's the entire comparison, and it fits on the back of a receipt.

Run it between brands, not just against the whole food. Two tubs at 600 mg each can differ by double on B12 depending on the source tissue, and only the panel reveals it. Fronts are written to look identical. Backs are where brands confess.

If the panel lists percentages but no absolute figures, you can still work with it, since the daily value for B12 is 2.4 mcg for adults. A row saying 200% DV means roughly 4.8 mcg. It's arithmetic any label can survive.

Where I'd stop trusting a label

No vitamin row at all, only a proprietary blend. Numbers per tub instead of per serving. Claims about what the product fixes rather than what it contains. Each of those is a small flag, and three together are a decision.

None of this makes tablets a bad format. Desiccated tissue is a legitimate way to take a food you won't cook, and the freeze-dried version keeps the profile largely intact. The format isn't the issue. Vague labelling is, and it's avoidable with two minutes of reading.

A habit worth stealing

Write the per-serving figures on the tub lid in marker the day it arrives. Thirty seconds, and every future comparison happens without reopening the fine print. My cupboard looks slightly unhinged and functions perfectly.

The marker habit also catches the quiet failure mode of supplements, which is the bottle you bought twice because the first one ran out and you forgot whether it was worth it. A lid with numbers on it answers that question in the shop, before the second tub joins the first.

Offal is a food, and a good one, but its A density is exactly why the per-serving figure deserves a read before you stack it on a multivitamin. Read the row, compare it once, and the tub can go back to doing its quiet job in the cupboard. That's the whole method, and it compounds across every bottle you ever buy.