Why You Should Care About Your Liver
Your liver has many, many functions, all of them crucial: coordinating your metabolism, detoxifying your body, creating most proteins in your blood including the ones responsible for stopping bleeding, ensuring an optimal environment to digest fat… But we will focus on the first two, coordinating metabolism and cleaning up your body.
Coordinating Metabolism
The liver is responsible for converting sugar to fat and fat to sugar.
It recovers the fat circulating in the blood using HDL, good cholesterol. This nice molecule goes around your bloodstream collecting fat and delivers it to your liver. Once there, fat is stored inside liver cells and converted to sugar which is released into the blood again for other organs to use. Part of this fat is also used to make cholesterol and bilis to aid fat and vitamin absorption in the gut.
In the opposite path, liver recovers excess sugar from the blood (blood rich in sugar coming from the intestines first passes through the liver before going back to the heart and the rest of the body). That sugar is then converted to fat which is piled in LDL, bad cholesterol. LDL is released into the bloodstream and clogs arteries and feeds fat cells causing atherosclerosis and obesity.
Detoxing the Body
The liver takes up toxic waste from the blood and converts it into neutral substances. These substances are then cleared by several organs, the most important of which are the kidneys and the liver itself.
Toxic waste can reach your blood from one of two paths: by ingesting it, or by creating it within your own body.
Even natural products have toxic material (remember, every living being produces harmful substances in it’s cells, which is why they are loaded with anti-toxics like anti-oxidants). Other dangerous toxics may come from pesticides, hormones, synthetic additives, etc. In order to prevent a toxic build up the blood coming from the intestines first goes through the liver so it can filter out these substances and only then is it send to the heart.
Consequences of a Damaged Liver
When the liver is damaged all the functions are compromised. However, the coordination of metabolism and detoxifying of the body are the first to be affected, which is why we are focusing on them. Because all the functions are performed by the same cells, when one function is affected the other is also.
A damaged liver leads to greater exposure to toxic damage. Remember that toxic substances come from all over the place – your body, your food, drugs, the air, water…
Liver damage also leads to an impaired metabolism. Neither is the liver capable of clearing fat from the blood, nor burn fat stored in fat cells. This leads to hard to hit obesity (the majority of people who try to lose weight and can’t have liver problems), atherosclerosis and, ultimately, brain and heart damage.
Damage occurs because the fat cell is overloaded. Slowly there is more fat inside it than it can handle and the liver cells accumulate fat – this is known as fatty liver or liver steatosis. As the damage progresses these cells die and are replaced by scar tissue, cirrhosis, a very hard to reverse condition that causes, malabsorption, bleeding, brain damage, liver cancer, and death.
If you suffer from cirrhosis don’t despair. Using the information on this guide and following your doctor’s recommendations it is possible to cure cirrhosis. There are several reports of this being done and the reason most doctors still believe it is not possible to treat cirrhosis is that most patients never bother to completely follow the necessary steps. Prove your doctors wrong and work hard on reversing cirrhosis.