The importance of your Liver

The liver is the largest internal organ in your body and it is something you cannot live without. Your liver has important jobs to do and one of these is to help remove toxins and harmful substances. However, when it comes to the liver it can be very difficult to tell how well it is working. The reason for this is it doesn’t have the capabilities to skip beats like your heart or produce a cough to let you know that it is not working properly until it falls to around 10% capacity of its normal working abilities.

Roles your liver plays

Your liver is made up of two main lobes which are located beneath your diaphragm and on top of your stomach, your right kidney, and your intestines. When your liver is healthy it produces bile which helps remove waste and break down fats. It helps to regulate the levels of protein, sugar, and fat entering your bloodstream and it cleans drugs and alcohol from your blood. The liver also processes the nutrients absorbed by your intestines during digestion, helps to ensure your blood clots when you hurt yourself by producing proteins, cholesterol and clotting factors. It also regulates a lot of your hormones and neutralises free radicals.

The impact of being overweight on your liver

There is new research that suggests that the liver may age faster than the rest of your body if there is excess weight around your waist. This research showed that for a 10-unit increase in BMI the physiological age of the liver increased by 3.3 years. They also found that this increase in years on your liver cannot be reversed by losing weight. Alcohol is also harmful to your liver but there is something that can cause more damage and that is fructose, the most damaging form of sugar when it comes to your liver. This is found in some form in nearly every processed food in your supermarket. Your liver needs to 100% break down the fructose unlike glucose which only needs to be partially broken down before the body uses it. Fructose is metabolised straight into fat which then gets stored in your liver and other internal organs and tissues as body fat. This can lead to mitochondrial malfunction. Fructose produces toxins and free radicals when it is metabolised which can lead to liver inflammation.

Fructose isn’t the only thing that harm your liver though. There are toxins in your home, water, and the air. These are the chemicals in plastics like phthalates and BPA/BPS, flame-retardants, and formaldehyde. These could be in your furniture, carpeting and vinyl floor coverings, building materials, paint, mattresses, vinyl shower curtains, children’s toys, plastic water bottles and containers and scented beauty products.

Time to detox

The good thing is that you can detox your liver from all these harmful substances. There are many

great ways to detox the liver however you need to talk to a naturopath or nutritionist before you do this because if you do it the wrong way you will actually increase the toxins in your body. To ensure your liver detoxes you need to make sure your bowel is functioning properly and you are going to the toilet on a regular basis. If not then the detox, whatever you use, will only go into your bowel and then cycle back into your liver making your body even more toxic. This is a very simplistic explanation of how it works but you need to be aware of this. So don’t rush off to the shop to buy a detox that could be wrong for you. Speak to a trained professional about it. Here at our clinic we carefully investigate your digestive processes before we find a detox that is right for you. Give us a call or email us today to book either an online or face to face session so we can get things moving for you in the right direction.