Back to the Bone Broth
Jaakko Halmetoja — Nutrition Expert, Co-Author @ Biohacker's Handbook, Product Development Manager @ Foodin
Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition expert, author and professional speaker. Jaakko has managed multiple special caféterias in Tampere and works as a product developer for food growth companies. Halmetoja has been popularizing health benefits and unique uses of e.g. chaga mushroom, chocolate, wild foods, various berries and medicinal herbs. Halmetoja maintains a non-profit website loydalahde.com, a database for finding local springs around Finland and hosts weekly talk show – InspiRadio Podcast. He has also written a book on chaga mushroom as well as co-authored the Biohacker’s Handbook. Halmetoja is a popular lecturer with over 500 public lectures and performances.
Jaakko Halmetoja explores bone broth as a powerful tool for gut
You are not what you eat, but what you digest. To actually absorb nutrients, it is crucial to focus on the whole system—not just the microbiome and the bacteria living inside of you, but also the health of your intestines.
Summary
- Bone broth is a vital tool for repairing the intestinal lining and healing "leaky gut," which ensures nutrients are properly absorbed and reduces systemic inflammation.
- High-quality bones should be boiled for 12 to 24 hours to maximize mineral extraction, while adding vinegar further enhances the bioavailability of these nutrients.
- Utilizing the whole animal, specifically bones, provides a holistic range of synergistic nutrients and protein structures like collagen that are often missing from a diet of only muscle meat.
- Using a Chaga mushroom decoction as a broth base adds alkaline minerals and prebiotic color pigments that lower gut inflammation and support the immune system.
- Enhancing broth with anti-inflammatory spices and iodine-rich seaweed provides essential nutrients and sugars that are often lacking in modern diets.
Article
Back To The Bone Broth
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Jaakko Halmetoja Made An Old Food Feel Urgently Modern
In a conference hall filled with the language of performance, systems, and self-optimization, Jaakko Halmetoja chose a humbler instrument. At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, on Friday 13 October in Helsinki, Finland, the nutrition expert and Biohacker’s Handbook co-author turned to a pot that had simmered across generations: bone broth.
His presentation, **Back to the Bone Broth**, did not frame broth as a lifestyle accessory or a passing wellness obsession. Instead, Halmetoja presented it as something more grounded and more radical: a practical way to repair the gut lining, improve nutrient absorption, and restore a more holistic relationship with food.
“You are not what you eat, but what you digest,” he said, drawing the room’s attention away from nutrients in isolation and toward the body’s ability to receive them.
The Case For Healing Before Supplementing
Halmetoja’s argument was built on a simple but often neglected premise. Health did not begin merely with the right ingredients on the plate. It began with the integrity of the intestinal lining itself.
Bone broth, he argued, remained one of the most accessible tools for people dealing with gut inflammation and so-called leaky gut. In his telling, the issue was not simply discomfort or poor digestion. A compromised gut lining could allow problematic protein structures into the bloodstream, fuelling wider inflammation that might show up in the skin, mood, immunity, and the body’s response to foods such as dairy or wheat.
“When you lower the inflammation in your gut, your immune system starts to work properly,” Halmetoja said. “Healing your gut lining is the underlying key to ensuring your system can handle the proteins and structures it encounters.”
It was a striking reframing in a field often crowded with exotic compounds and expensive protocols. Before optimising, Halmetoja suggested, one had to restore.
A Holistic Food, Not Just A Trend
Bone broth has lately been marketed as a mineral tonic, but Halmetoja was careful not to exaggerate its role. He suggested its real strength lay less in headline levels of calcium or magnesium than in the synergistic structures it carried: collagen-rich compounds and other elements that support joints, connective tissue, and the gut barrier.
His deeper point was cultural as much as nutritional. Modern diets, he said, often strip the animal down to its most marketable part: muscle meat. Traditional foodways did the opposite.
“Traditionally, the whole animal is used,” he said. “It is a holistic approach to get all the nutrients that animals concentrate from the ground, rather than just eating the flesh.”
That line captured the spirit of the session. Halmetoja was not merely advocating broth as a recipe. He was arguing for a restoration of food logic, one in which nourishment came from respecting the whole system rather than cherry-picking its most convenient fragments.
Quality Mattered More The Higher One Climbed The Food Chain
If there was one warning threaded through the presentation, it concerned quality. Animals higher in the food chain, Halmetoja noted, concentrate not only beneficial minerals but also environmental toxins. That made the provenance of bones crucial.
“Quality is even more important as we move up the food chain,” he said. “Higher-level organisms concentrate minerals, but they also concentrate toxins, making the source of your bones incredibly important.”
This was not a romantic endorsement of broth at any cost. It was an argument for discernment. In Finland, he pointed to reindeer bones as a favoured option, and he repeatedly returned to the importance of good water, good sourcing, and the wisdom of using ingredients that reflected ecological integrity rather than industrial convenience.
How To Build A Better Broth
For Halmetoja, preparation was not incidental. It was where nutritional philosophy became lived practice.
He recommended roasting bones first for flavour, then boiling them for far longer than many home cooks do. Four hours, he suggested, was often insufficient if the aim was serious extraction.
“For mineral extraction, it is a good idea to boil bone broth for twelve to twenty-four hours,” he said. “This ensures you extract as many nutrients out of the broth as possible.”
Vinegar, he added, could help enhance mineral bioavailability. The process was neither glamorous nor complicated. That, in fact, was part of the appeal. Bone broth was valuable because it was repeatable.
“Bone broth is a manageable user interface that people can actually do,” Halmetoja said. “It is simple to make, easy to keep on the stove, and provides a synergistic ratio of nutrients that are incredibly healing for your gut.”
In a wellness culture often defined by friction, that line landed with force. The best intervention, he implied, is often the one a person can sustain.
Chaga As The Dark, Unlikely Upgrade
The presentation became especially distinctive when Halmetoja moved beyond broth’s familiar base and introduced chaga decoction as a foundation for it. Chaga, the intensely pigmented growth found on birch trees, has long occupied a place in northern herbal traditions, and Halmetoja, who has written a book on the subject, treated it not as folklore but as an underused functional ingredient.
By using chaga tea as the liquid base for broth, he said, one could introduce alkaline minerals, particularly potassium, alongside melanin-rich compounds that act as prebiotics. Those pigments, he suggested, help feed the beneficial organisms in the gut while also supporting a less inflammatory internal environment.
The image was memorable: a black, coffee-like decoction forming the base of a broth meant to restore the body from the inside out.
He also connected chaga to older Finnish habits. During wartime, it had served as a coffee substitute. In his modern reinterpretation, it became something more medicinal than makeshift, a daily-use ingredient that could sit on the stove, stay stable, and fold easily into routine.
Seaweed, Spices, And The Missing Pieces Of The Modern Plate
Halmetoja’s broth did not stop at bones and chaga. He urged the audience to think more expansively about what a restorative broth might carry.
Seaweeds, he said, offered iodine and glyconutrients, including sugar compounds that modern diets often neglect. Spices, especially thermogenic and anti-inflammatory ones such as turmeric, helped further calm the gut.
Here again, the message was less about culinary novelty than nutritional density. A broth could become a delivery system for compounds that industrial food had steadily edited out of everyday life.
He contrasted this with the relative sparseness of Finnish spice use, noting how small the quantities often were compared with cuisines in places such as Sri Lanka. The implication was clear: many people season for taste alone when they might also be seasoning for resilience.
The Morning Ritual As Medicine
Among the most practical suggestions Halmetoja offered was one of timing. He recommended drinking warm, spiced broth first thing in the morning, before coffee, as a way to coat the gut lining and reduce inflammation at the start of the day.
It was a small ritual, but the logic behind it was large. What mattered was not merely consuming a healthy food, but building a rhythm in which the digestive system was supported before it was challenged.
This, ultimately, was Halmetoja’s gift as a speaker at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki. He translated an abstract concern, gut permeability, immune dysregulation, inflammatory load, into a domestic act that could actually be done. A pot on the stove. Bones roasted and boiled. Chaga steeped dark. Seaweed, vinegar, turmeric, salt. A practice instead of a slogan.
A Return To Depth
By the end of **Back to the Bone Broth**, Halmetoja had done something rare in the world of health talks. He made an old preparation feel not quaint, but corrective. Bone broth was presented not as nostalgia and not as hype, but as a return to depth: deeper extraction, deeper nourishment, deeper respect for the whole animal, the whole ecosystem, and the whole digestive process.
In a culture eager for shortcuts, his message was almost countercultural in its patience. Healing, he suggested, might still begin with the things that simmer slowly.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki