All About the Liver, and How to Support Your Favorite Detoxification Organ

The liver is incredible. Most people think of it as a filter, but filters are physical barriers that accumulate junk and have to be cleaned. The liver isn’t a filter. It’s a chemical processing plant. Rather than sit there, passively receiving, filtering out, and storing undesirable compounds, the liver encounters toxic chemicals and attempts to metabolize them into less-toxic metabolites that we can handle.

• It oxidizes the toxins, preparing them for further modification
• It converts the toxins to a less-toxic, water-soluble version that’s easier to excrete
• It excretes the toxins through feces or urine

Bam. It’s an elegant process, provided everything is working well back there. And it’s not the only process it controls.

The liver is the primary site of cholesterol synthesis and disposal. It creates cholesterol as needed and converts excess into bile salts for removal via the bile duct. The liver also plays a huge role in the burning of fat for energy, the storage of vitamin A, the metabolism of hormones, and the regulation of blood sugar. If you enjoy burning ketones, you can thank the liver because that’s where they’re produced.

The liver supports full-body health, in other words. If it isn’t working correctly, nothing is. Everything starts to fall apart.

How do we support the liver?

It’s not one thing we do. It’s many things. It’s nutrition, supplementation, lifestyle, sleep — everything. It’s also the things we don’t do. The stakes are high, you see. Whenever there’s a grand overarching orchestrator regulating dozens of different processes in the body, you must protect it from multiple angles. A lot can go wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it.

Since the liver is “hidden away” and you can’t really “feel” it, you may not give it too much thought. When you’re overweight, you know it. When your fitness is suffering, you consciously experience it. When your liver is overburdened or suffering, you don’t necessarily know it. That’s where doing the right things for the sake of doing them comes in handy.

So, what should you do to maintain pristine liver health?

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11 Ways to Maintain a Healthy Liver

Liver health depends on steps you take toward a healthy lifestyle, and equally as important, the things you refrain from doing. Here are some things you can to to contribute to lifelong liver health:

• Reduce linoleic acid intake
• Reduce refined carb intake
• Reduce alcohol intake
• Stop overeating, and lose weight
• Practice time-restricted eating
• Eat fatty fish and get omega-3s
• Eat egg yolks and other choline sources
• Take NAC
• Take whey protein
• Regularly deplete your liver glycogen
• Get good, regular sleep

Reduce Linoleic Acid Intake

When a patient can’t eat, they get something called parenteral nutrition — a direct infusion of nutrients into the gut. The classic parenteral nutrition consists of an emulsion of olive oil and soybean oil. It’s very rich in linoleic acid and typically leads to elevated liver enzymes and fatty liver. That’s right: the medical establishment for whatever reason just accepts that people receiving parenteral nutrition have a high chance of developing fatty liver disease.

Okay, but what’s happening here? Is it really causal? Yes. The more linoleic acid you eat, the more oxidized metabolites of linoleic acid show up in your body. The more oxidized metabolites of linoleic acid you have, the higher your risk of fatty liver. These toxic metabolites of LA are actually full-fledged biomarkers of liver injury.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4405421/#:~:text=This%20study%20suggests%20that%20human,patients%20with%20obesity%20(48).‘>² which affects how efficiently your liver works.

Of course, the combo of high linoleic acid and high refined carbohydrate is just about the worst thing possible.

Reduce Alcohol Intake

To detox alcohol, the liver converts it into the metabolite acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is far more toxic than ethanol itself, so the body then releases acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione to break down the acetaldehyde. If you stick to just a few drinks and space them out accordingly, your body’s natural antioxidant enzyme production can keep up. If you start binging, though, glutathione stores become overwhelmed and the liver must produce more. Meanwhile, acetaldehyde, which is between 10-30 times more toxic than ethanol, accrues in your body.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413112001891‘>⁴

Eat Fatty Fish and Get Omega-3s

If you offset some of that olive oil and soybean oil with a blend of medium triglycerides and fish oil, liver enzymes may drop and overall integrity of the liver may improve.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22308119/‘>⁶ Taking it with vitamin C may be even more effective.

NAC is well-known for boosting levels of glutathione, the primary antioxidant used by the liver to metabolize toxins and protect itself.

Take Whey Protein

Obese women with fatty liver who took 60 grams of whey protein per day reduced their liver fat by almost 21%.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24316260/‘>⁸ When liver glycogen is full, it becomes far more likely that your liver will turn any subsequent carbohydrate it encounters into fat for storage. If you keep liver glycogen low, or regularly deplete it, you can avoid de novo lipogenesis because there’s usually a place to store the glucose.

Furthermore, keeping liver glycogen low increases fat utilization from all over the body, including the liver.https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/uops-mwt030311.php‘>¹⁰ If you don’t get to sleep at a normal, consistent time, your rhythm is disrupted and the molecules can’t do their jobs.

If you hadn’t already noticed, these are good health practices in general. We keep running into this phenomenon, don’t we?

What’s good for the liver is good for the brain is good for the cardiovascular system is good for your performance in the gym is good for the mirror.

It makes things easier and harder.

You know what to do.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Do you have any other recommendations for liver health? Which of these do you follow?

The post All About the Liver, and How to Support Your Favorite Detoxification Organ appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.