Is Eating Bear Liver Deadly?

You’d probably never eat bear liver. You may be grossed out by the idea of liver at all. But, should you find yourself with nothing to eat but the liver of a bear, should you be worried? According to internet rumors, eating bear liver is deadly toxic! Like many such rumors, there is a grain of truth to this. While bear liver, in general, is not reported in any literature to be poisonous, polar bear liver, in particular, is potentially quite toxic. Inuit peoples avoid it scrupulously. The effects can be mild to very unpleasant (reportedly), but I’ve found no reports of actual deaths.

First of all, polar bear is eaten by people in the Arctic. They do not consume the liver, believing it to be poisonous. There are many stories, however, of arctic explorers, not being aware of this prohibition, who have eaten polar bear liver and fallen ill. Generally, the effects have been vomiting, headaches, aching joints, severe sleepiness, and other general symptoms. Sometimes, when poisoning is particularly bad, a much worse effect occurs, called desquamation. These stories date as far back as the 1500s, but better documented stories are from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s.

What’s desquamation? Well, it’s often defined as “your skin falling off” but really it’s skin peeling or flaking. When you get a bad sunburn and the outer layer of your skin peels, this is desquamation. The worst cases of toxicity from polar bear liver consumption, according to the stories, have been peeling around the mouth or of the face, progressing to peeling all over the body in even more dire cases. There are stories of the skin peeling “from head to foot” after eating polar bear liver.

What’s the cause of this horrific-sounding effect? It’s toxic amounts of Vitamin A. The symptoms reported in the various stories of illness caused by polar bear liver are consistent with acute vitamin A toxicity:

Gastrointestinal symptoms: nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, loss of appetite
Neurological symptoms: irritability, dizziness, headache, drowsiness, increased intracranial pressure (not reported….I doubt they would have known about it)
Dermatological: rash, desquamation (skin peeling)
Coma and death

The Inuit Prohibition Against Eating Bear Liver

The Inuit people have, for centuries, abstained from eating polar bear liver, although they eat other parts of the animal. Arctic explorers were often warned against consuming it by Arctic natives, who told them that anyone who ate the liver would become ill. It was later understood that among the Inuits, eating bear liver was taboo. They didn’t have a concept of the liver being poisonous, but they did believe that eating it would bring misfortune upon the consumer, usually in the form of illness. A clue to this taboo nature of bear liver is that the Inuits told explorers that a person who at the liver would sometimes die, and within a year, some of his relatives would also die. They also believed that a common result of eating liver was whitening of the skin, or leukoderma.

The chief problem with these tales is that, as a result of this taboo, nobody ever came across an Inuit who had actually eaten polar bear liver. There were stories of the liver being fed to dogs, resulting in the dogs becoming ill and even losing their hair. Inuits would not even eat food if it had been cooked in the same vessel that contained bear liver. They also believed that all kinds of bear liver, not just polar bear, was similarly taboo. When a bear was hunted and killed, they would quickly dispose of the liver, even throwing it into the sea so that nobody, including the dogs, could get hold of it. Stories abound of animals becoming ill or dying after being given liver; they are too numerous to recount here.

As a result of the inexperience of the Inuits with actual bear liver consumption, some arctic explorers did not take the warnings seriously and tried varying amounts for themselves, perhaps believing the native’s avoidance as being a silly superstition. Taboos are often rooted in reality; a lesson better learned early.

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Stories of Polar Bear Liver Poisoning

Here are brief summaries of some of the stories of polar bear liver toxicity among arctic explorers, taken from a 1942 paper by K. Rodahl and T. Moore, called The Vitamin A Content and Toxicity of Bear and Seal Liver. ¹

According to Richardson (1896), during a 1596 expedition by Barentzoon to Nova Zembla (aka Novaya Zemlya, Arctic island), explorers ate polar bear liver and all became sick. In three cases, severe desquamation occurred, with loss of skin from head to foot.

According to Kane (1856), he experimented with eating polar bear liver and found that poisoning was inconsistent, with his whole company becoming ill on one occasion and during another journey, no ill effects at all.

According to Koettlitz (1897), some of the members of an English expedition to Franz Josef Land during the 1890s ate polar bear liver and became ill.

According to Lindhard (1913), an expedition that had already eaten polar bear liver to no ill effect shot a thin bear and made a stew from the liver. Nineteen of the men who ate the stew became sick. In this case, symptoms were described, including severe drowsiness, sluggishness, irritability, severe headache, and vomiting, all within two to four hours. During the next 24 hours, ten of the mean experienced peeling of the skin around the mouth and then gradually spreading desquamation to a larger area of the body (in spots). Lindhard also told other stories of worse desquamation “from head to foot.”

According to Nansen (1924), a Norwegian explorer, he ate small amounts of polar bear liver and had no problems.

There are also various reports of dogs refusing to eat polar bear liver unless they were very hungry, and then only small amounts.

There is another, more colorful tale of an attempt to balloon to the North Pole by a Swedish explorer named Salomon Andree and two other companions. This balloon expedition vanished, and their last camp was not found until thirty years later, northwest of Franz Josef on White Island. Their skeletons were intac,t and plenty of supplies were found, including food. There was also a camera, from which a photo was found of the men standing over a dead polar bear. Andree’s diary was also found, in which he bragged of the kill. The idea that these men died from eating polar bear liver is popular but is pure, wild, conjecture.

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Vitamin A in Liver

All animals, including we humans, store Vitamin A in the liver to be used as needed. We need it for eyesight, skin health, immune system functioning, reproduction, antioxidant activity, growth and development, and a host of other processes too numerous to list. This is why liver has long been known as a good source of vitamin A.

Polar bears also store vitamin A in their liver, but in massive amounts. They get all this vitamin A, or retinol, from eating seals. Vitamin A builds up in blubber, which are the fat cells that keep seals warm. Seals get all this vitamin A from eating fish, squid, krill, and sea animals, which themselves feed on carotenoid-containing plants like seaweed or algae. Carotenoids are vitamin A precurors, which become vitamin A in seals. Since it’s fat-soluble, it builds up in fat.

When polar bears eat seals, they ingest massive amounts of vitamin A from seal blubber and, in turn, store it in huge concentrations in their own liver. These concentrations are 10 to 20 times higher than other arctic animals. Since these high levels are a consequence of their need for a very high-fat diet, they have evolved to be able to tolerate these high levels. Other animals, including humans, cannot.

Evidence of Toxic Levels of Vitamin A in Polar Bear Liver

While the evidence of toxic levels of Vitamin A in Polar Bear liver is quite old, it is certainly compelling enough to warrant complete avoidance. Rodahl and Moore (1942) and later Rodahl (1949) analyzed polar bear liver specimens for the presence of vitamin A. It has been postulated that large amounts of the vitamin could be toxic, but these liver tests were the first concrete link between the vitamin and toxic effects. The amounts of retinol found in the studies were gargantuan. In some specimens, obtained from Greenland, 13,000 to 18,000 I.U. per gram were found. When liver from the specimens were given to rats, the types of toxicity effects expected were observed. ¹,²,³

With these amounts, several grams of bear liver may be enough to cause hypervitaminosis A, acute illness, skin peeling, and even death, depending upon the amount eaten. If bear liver were eaten in small amounts over several days, toxicity could also occur.

What About Other Bear Liver?

Some internet sources report that bear liver is toxic. This might lead readers to assume that any bear liver contains toxic amounts of vitamin A. These sources, however, are referring to polar bear liver but, for whatever reason, neglect to say so. Most bears are opportunistic omnivores and eat a variety of different foods, depending on the season. While it is possible that some bears could build up high levels of vitamin A in their livers, there is no reason to believe that the liver of other bears besides polar bears poses any toxicity risk. Seals and walruses pose a risk similar to polar bears, however.