Sign up for CNN's Eat, But Better: Mediterranean Style. Our eight-part guide shows you a delicious expert-backed eating lifestyle that will boost your health for life.
(CNN)After everyone at your table has devoured the juiciest pieces of a roast chicken and you've treated your canine to the edible rejects, hold off on sliding that picked-over carcass into the trash. Your bird has another gift for you: broth.
Making homemade broth requires only a few minutes of your time, and the benefits extend far beyond sensory pleasure: to your health, wealth, and even the world around you.
For centuries, humans have been simmering otherwise inedible animal parts in water, sometimes for days, extracting maximum flavor and nutrients from those bones for nourishing meals to come. Thrifty grandmas and chefs the world over have refined that technique, adding vegetables and seasonings reflecting their cultures and customs. Traditional recipes earned reputations for purported healing powers.
Over the last few decades, followers of the Paleo diet have incorporated 24-hour broth-making into their everyday kitchen routines, often sipping on their extra-strength broth as a gluten-free pick-me-up in place of coffee and tea — both of which are off-limits on their regimen.
New York City chef and Food Network personality Marco Canora turned to bone broth — which was regularly available to him at his popular restaurant, Hearth — to help him combat the effects of years of poor lifestyle habits. In 2014, he opened a takeout window called Brodo (Italian for broth) to sell to-go cups of his chef-crafted potions as beverages. He went on to write a book about it and sell it prepackaged and frozen nationwide.
Chef Marco Canora offers to-go cups of his broths at Brodo, which he opened in New York in 2014.
Breathless testimonies from celebrity influencers of bone broth's purported magical powers — from easing joint pain to reducing wrinkles to improving gut health — flooded the internet. Products labeled "bone broth" popped up on supermarket shelves. The trend shows no sign of abating. When last checked, dTikTok videos with the hashtag #bonebroth had received more than 158 million views.
Some dietitians and medical professionals agree that bone broth can be a worthy addition to a balanced diet — supplying collagen and other important nutrients. But given that every bone broth recipe and human body are different, specific health claims linked to bone broth should be taken with a grain of salt.
