Fatty Goose Liver: Not What the Doctor Ordered

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a column for Science News about the apparent link between fast-food diets and fatty liver disease, a serious and potentially lethal condition in people. In this week's column for that magazine, I cover what might be considered its counterpoise—how eating fatty-liver products can induce a serious and potentially lethal condition, at least in the mice being tested. Presumably, humans could face a similar risk.

The fatty-liver comestible at issue: foie gras.

One somewhat reassuring aspect, at least in the United States, people don't tend to consume much foie gras. It's the excessively fatty liver of ducks or geese—often served pureed into a mousse or pâté and then doctored with any of various spices. I say doctored because I'm not a liver aficianado by any means and it would take a lot of doctoring to make it go down.

I used to take 2 hours to eat about 4 ounces of liver as a child, and I only bothered to try because in our household, the only alternative to finishing it was to leave the dinner table and go straight to bed—at 4:30 p.m. Those episodes left a bad taste in my mouth for anything linked to liver.

As I matured, I lost much of the genetically ingrained taste for fatty foods. So, as you might imagine, fatty liver is one of the last foods that would appeal to me.
However, it appeals to plenty of others, especially many who consider themselves gourmands.

A new study by researchers in the United States and Sweden now finds that the process of overfeeding waterfowl to make their livers especially fatty really stresses those livers. And that stress can lead to the development of protein abnormalities—a misfolding of the proteins into hair-like shapes known as amyloids.

In the June 26 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those researchers now show that when amyloid-rich foie gras is fed to mice, it can seed tissues in the rodents to begin making even more amyloid. The researchers describe this as the fatty-liver-based food "infecting" the animals with a propensity for amyloidosis: life-threatening disease where the affected tissues—which can be liver, heart, or gastrointestinal tract—don't work properly because their proteins' shape is all wrong.

There are plenty of caveats associated with the findings. And I would direct you to read the longer article in Science News to learn more about them. They explain why there is probably little immediate cause for panic, even among most foie gras lovers.

Among the biggest of these: Affected animals were all at high risk for amyloidosis to start with. Among human populations that would match that condition—individuals with tuberculosis and leprosy. When you think about it, the people in the United States most likely to suffer from either of those diseases are indigents. Such individuals are hardly likely to eat, much less overindulge, in foie gras, which typically goes for $6 or more per ounce.