Why an Ancestral Diet, Nose-to-Tail Diet Supports Better Cell Regeneration

I’m Todd Garrett, accountant by trade, cattle rancher at heart, and health nut by necessity. Driven by a commitment to better health and better food, I co-founded Born & Raised, a grass-fed, pasture-raised meat producer based in East Texas, where our animals are never raised with added hormones or antibiotics.

In my previous blog, we explored how the body is in a constant state of regeneration, with the average cell in the human body turning over roughly every seven years. That reality forces an important question: what mindset should we have when fueling the body for optimal regeneration?

My answer is rooted in what many would now call an ancestral diet, one based on whole, animal-based foods that humans have relied on for generations. Personally, I follow a nose-to-tail and like-for-like approach to nutrition, borrowing principles often associated with a carnivore diet or animal-based way of eating. The goal is simple: give the body the most efficient, biologically appropriate building blocks possible for high performance, whether that’s a four-mile walk with a 50-pound vest or a hard session at my local boxing gym.

Let me explain with an analogy.

Imagine you’re cooking a dish that requires chopped onions. You could buy whole onions and chop them yourself, but instead you choose pre-chopped onions. They’re already in the form you need—efficient, specific, and requiring the least extra work to become part of the meal.

Now imagine that instead of chopped onions, your grocery delivery includes onion seeds, soil, and water. Technically, all the potential to make onions is there, but it would take time, energy, and multiple extra steps before those ingredients could serve your immediate purpose. And if you were sent something completely unrelated, like a bag of trash, it would be useless altogether.

Your body works much the same way. It is constantly building and repairing tissues, and it relies entirely on the raw materials you provide through food. Some foods arrive already close to the form your body needs, while others require extensive conversion, or worse, provide little usable nutrition at all.

That’s where like-for-like nutrition comes in. When you eat a specific part of an animal, you’re supplying raw materials that closely resemble the tissues your body is trying to maintain or strengthen. If the goal is a strong heart, eating animal heart provides highly relevant inputs for that job. This is the same logic that underpins traditional diets, ancestral eating patterns, and modern interpretations of the carnivore and animal-based diets.

This naturally leads to a nose-to-tail approach, using all parts of the animal because each part delivers unique, purpose-built nutrients. Organs, connective tissue, fat, and muscle all play distinct roles in supporting human biology. 

Because the body is in a constant state of cell turnover, I try to regularly eat a balanced range of animal proteins from across the whole animal. The goal is consistency: continually supplying the best possible materials so the body can repair, rebuild, and adapt efficiently.

Of course, I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I introduce what is effectively a bag of trash, or even mild poison, in the form of highly processed, refined, or artificial foods that are far removed from anything our ancestors would have recognized as food.

When that happens, I imagine my body shifting away from an efficient regeneration mode and into a defensive, survival-oriented state. Instead of focusing on building strong, resilient cells, it has to divert resources toward detoxification, inflammation control, and damage repair.

In that context, the materials available for regeneration are suboptimal. Over time, this inefficiency can contribute to oxidative stress, an imbalance between damage and repair, which is widely believed to play a role in many modern chronic diseases.

Major disease categories linked to oxidative stress include:

• Neurodegenerative disorders: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease
  

• Cardiovascular diseases: Atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, heart attack, hypertension
  

• Cancer: DNA damage from free radicals increases cancer risk and promotes metastasis
  

• Metabolic disorders: Diabetes, obesity, diabetic nephropathy
  

• Respiratory diseases: Asthma, COPD
  

• Inflammatory and autoimmune conditions: Rheumatoid arthritis and other immune dysfunctions
  

• Eye diseases: Glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration
  

• High-altitude illnesses: Pulmonary hypertension and HAPE
  

At Born & Raised, this way of thinking isn’t theoretical, it’s how we raise our cattle. Honoring the entire animal through a nose-to-tail, ancestral approach allows us to provide food that more closely aligns with human biology and supports optimal regeneration, resilience, and performance.

Organ meats are one of the most powerful expressions of this philosophy. They deliver nutrient-dense, like-for-like nutrition that modern diets, even many high-protein diets, often miss. And if jumping straight into organ meats feels like a stretch, we’ve made it easier to start.

Our Ancestral Ground Beef blends grass-fed beef with carefully selected organs, offering a simple, approachable way to eat nose-to-tail without changing how you cook. It’s ancestral nutrition made practical.

Fuel your body with intention, and take the next step toward better regeneration.
Start here: bornraisedtx.com