Liver

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFWkgI58_GI&list=PLVOspl3tsfnqUlgn8_98-ALIB4NXxWpEF&index=3

1. If you look at the first four letters in the word liver, it spells out live.
2. This really is an organ that you want to pay attention to and take good care of if you want to live.
3. And liver disease and acute liver failure causes a number of fatalities every year; In the United United States it’s 50,000 people a year die from acute liver failure and around the world it’s 2 million people.

Body burden

1. So all in all the liver performs all of this.
2. And there’s a total of over 500 different chemical reactions that the liver is responsible for.
3. And here’s the key thing that we need to understand about that.
4. So often in medicine and in science, we try to isolate things and we look at one specific thing at a time; one process; one pathway; as if it happened in isolation.
5. But that is the key to understand that the liver does all of this; but it doesn’t do one at a time; it does all of this all the time.
6. So I want to show you one of the most helpful concept that I have seen.
7. i didn’t come up with this but I’ve used it for years and years in explaining health.
8. And it is called body burden.
9. When you have different things going on, they accumulate they pile on top of each other.
10. As these things accumulate and the liver only has so much capacity, only so much resources, only so many cells, only so much ATP or cellular energy available, we eventually get to a threshold, and the liver can work up to this point; but if we exceed that, now we’re in trouble. Now the liver falls behind and some of the cells can actually get damaged and now we can have liver failure.
11. We also have to realize that not everyone is the same. This could be a 30-year-old young person. What if we’re a little older? what if we have other comorbidities? what if we have a less favorable genetic makeup? Then maybe our 100% would fall a lot lower. Now we see these pieces. It doesn’t take nearly as many pieces to reach that threshold. And then if we start adding more, now we’re going to reach that liver failure or that liver disease or compromise much sooner.

because everything here contributes and I’m not claiming that these would be to scale that they would be proportional to their size or anything like that they’re purely examples of different things that the body have to deal with, to give you an idea.

Metabolic waste

1. So we have down at the bottom is the metabolic waste.
2. That’s unavoidable.
3. Once you metabolize food and things from the environment you put things in on one end different things come out on the other end, you make tissues etc..
4. That produces waste so there’s no way around that.
5. And the liver has to do do that.

Endo-Harmones

1. Then on top of that we have the hormones that the body produces that have to be broken down.
2. I call them Endo hormones for endogenous hormones coming from the inside.

Exo-Harmones

1. But then now we have to add to that EXO hormones or exogenous; things that are added from the outside; in animal feed and we get it through drinking water etc.

Environmental toxins

1. And then the body has to break down all the Environmental toxins whether it’s industrial pollution and heavy metals or something that we spray on Foods or household cleaners.
2. It is all foreign chemicals that the body has to get rid of and the liver is the one who does it.

Alcohol

1. alcohol of course is a burden.
2. it is something relatively natural in very small amounts.
3. but large amounts frequently now become a huge burden on the liver.

Fructose

1. Fructose, the component of sugar that only the liver can metabolize becomes a huge burden.

Medication

1. Now, if we ADD medication if we take something on top now that could push us over the threshold over the limit.
2. The reason that medication is at the top is not that it’s the only cause.

Causes that destroy the liver

Diseases

There are some diseases that can cause or contribute to liver failure.

1. Some of these, you’re sort of mostly unlucky, if you get exposed to it, if you’re in a unfortunate circumstances where you get some viral hepatitis or some autoimmune disease.
2. These may not go away but you will manage them much much better.
3. Viral hepatitis - it’s an viral infection of the liver that causes a chronic inflammation
   1. That’s what the word itis means - inflammation.
   2. This is a huge stress huge burden on the liver
4. Scarring of the bile ducts
5. Autoimmune hepatitis
   1. An autoimmune disease that attacks the liver and causes inflammation
6. Parasites
   1. Besides viral infections you could also have parasitic infections.
7. Cardiovascular Disease and Type 2 Diabetes
   1. No list is complete without cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes
   2. Cardiovascular Disease
      1. It’s a metabolic disease that clogs up the liver that causes inflammation and contributes to most kinds of diseases
   3. Type 2 diabetes
      1. This is almost entirely up to you - that you can do a lot about this.
      2. It is entirely about lifestyle.
   4. With Cardiovascular disease, there are some genetic factors that predispose you; for a small percentage of people; For most people, it is entirely about lifestyle.

Lifestyle choices

You can do a lot in terms of lifestyle, just eating good food, reducing stress, taking the best care of yourself.

These are something that you can do a lot about.

Alcohol abuse

1. Used to be almost the only thing that caused cirrhosis of the liver and liver failure.
2. Today it is just one among many.

Sugar

1. In sugar, there is the fructose component.
2. When we’re talking about white crystal sugar, table sugar, or any of the derivatives of syrup or agave or corn syrup etc. 50% of that is fructose, which is very different from rice or bread, not that those are great but the really devastating component is the fructose.

Drug abuse

1. Heavy drug use is tremendously stressful on the liver because anything foreign that you put into the body has to be biotransformed; it has to be changed and processed and detoxified by the liver.

Processed omega-6 seed oils

1. Another one that is getting more and more attention is processed omega-6 seed oils
2. The things we eat and consume as vegetable oils, like corn oil and soybean oil and safflower oil etc.
3. When we have a very large amount of oil, like soybean oil, we consume over 40 liters per year per person in the United States, that’s an enormous amount.
4. When we eat a lot of these, and they’re highly processed, and they’re high in omega-6, now we unbalance the ratio of fatty acids in the body; we put the body in inflammatory state.
5. And this affects the liver

CVT/T2D - Cardiovascular Disease and Type 2 Diabetes

1. These are here again under lifestyle choices even though we often consider them as diseases, disease states.
2. We want to understand how much control we have over these.
3. They’re almost purely lifestyle choices.

Smoking

1. Another thing you want to avoid obviously is smoking.
2. It robs the body of oxygen.
3. It blocks the red blood cells that carry oxygen to all the cells.
4. And in doing that, it reduces the utilization of oxygen in every cell of the body and therefore it interferes with the function of every cell in the body.

Medication

1. I want to bring a lot of attention to medication as causes of liver failure.
2. A lot of people think that the only ones you have to be careful with are the prescription medication; that they are more safeguarded because they have more side effects.
3. And they think that the over the counter medication that there’s nothing really to worry about.
4. If they sell them everywhere how bad can it be?
5. And that’s something that we really need to watch for.

Liver functions

To really understand what causes liver failure, we need to also understand what does the liver do? What’s its daily job?

Digestion

1. It participates in digestion with making bile to emulsify and break down fats.

Biotransformation (Detox)

1. The main thing that people think about is biotransformation or detox.
2. It takes some really harmful compounds and it attaches things to them in several different steps to make them water soluble and less harmful so we can flush them out.
3. And this bio transformation is super important.
4. You would not live many hours or many days if this didn’t happen.

• Internal and External toxins

  1. There’s internal and there are external toxins.
  2. Some of them are part just of a natural form of metabolism.
  3. But then we have to add to that all of the pesticides and the environmental pollutants that we’ve added in the least last several decades.

• Cholesterol

  1. It also breaks down cholesterol.
  2. It regulates cholesterol.
  3. It gets rid of old bad cholesterol and it makes new cholesterol.

• Harmones

  1. Any hormone that your body produces, the liver has to break that down and get rid of it, because everything is supposed to exist exist and do its thing for a specific time.

• Metabolic Waste and Drugs

  1. It also has to break down all the metabolic waste that we generate through our chemical processes in the body, as well as, from all the drugs and other chemicals that we add.

Metabolize Fat, Protein and Carbohydrates

1. The liver is also the main organ that breaks down and processes and metabolizes all the macronutrients that you eat; the fat the protein and the carbohydrates.
2. It also serves as a reservoir are for glycogen to replenish blood sugar between meals.

Balance Fuel and Energy

And in doing that it helps to balance out our fuel and energy levels.

Acetaminophen and other types of medication

1. Now lets look at the number one way that you destroy your liver every day.
2. If we’re going to talk about the number one cause of liver failure then it is very very often quoted as being acetaminophen
3. And that is of course the ingredient in Tylenol
4. So we know that acetaminophen is a problem for the liver
5. And we know that Tylenol is often called out to be the number one cause of liver failure
6. So a lot of people would avoid that
7. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s many many things that contain acetaminophen like NyQuil, DayQuil are some examples, Excedrin, Alka Seltzer plus and Mucinex as well as Robitussin
8. And these are just some examples
9. So you may be very cautious about Tylenol
10. You might try to take just when it’s absolutely necessary but then you may not think about the others
11. Or you might take one of them and not realize that when you combine it with something else, now you’re adding it. It acumulates.
12. Now what about the others if they don’t contain acetaminophen?

Ibuprofen (Advil)

well there is ibuprofen is another active ingredient which we find in Advil and in dozens of other things

Naproxen (Aleve)

we have a Naproxen which we find in Aleve

Aspirin

And then there’s good old aspirin

1. and all of these are very much associated with stomach distress; causing leaky gut, stomach inflammation, all sorts of upset intestinal tract
2. but just because they’re Associated mostly with stomach doesn’t mean that they’re not harmful to the liver
3. they are less harmful than acetaminophen but they also are very stressful
4. they put a severe burden significant burden on the liver as well
5. and this is especially if you use them in combination with something
6. so if you’re using ibuprofen along with something else from that other list, now that combination is always a bigger burden than one thing by itself
7. and this is especially true if you already have some kind of compromise
8. if you’re already getting closer to that 100% line then you need to be very careful with these as well
9. so here’s a couple of facts for you if they’re too shocking to believe then just go look them up and verify them for yourself
   1. acetaminophen is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States
   2. and number two is an overdose of acetaminophen can destroy half of a person’s liver cells in less than a week
10. so we need to understand that even though they’re over-the-counter drugs, even though they’re so sold to anybody for a few dollars without a prescription, it doesn’t mean that they’re harmless.
11. these are things that we need to take very seriously
12. and if you use them at all you use them when they’re absolutely necessary
13. now on the bright side, the liver is probably the organ in the body that has the best regenerative capacity of any organ
14. so even if you kill off half of the liver cells the liver can regenerate
15. so as long as we don’t have a bunch of those other conditions, other stressors present, and the person is generally fairly healthy, then in about a month’s time the liver can regenerate itself and after that if there no other complications we may not see any damage at all
16. but I want to bring you back to this graph really quickly and help you understand the number one way to destroy your liver and to destroy your health overall, is to not understand that out of all of these things that I have listed, and this is just for the liver they’re slightly different for your overall health, but not really very much, that the first two here the metabolic waste and the endogenous hormones, those are the only ones that our ancestors had; those are the only ones that are supposed to be in the body; every everything else in this red rectangle are things that we have added; these are man-made; they are the result of civilization, of industrialization, of the willingness or incentive to use chemicals and artificial things and put them in our bodies
17. and our ancestors didn’t have any of these;
18. because the world has changed more in the last 50 years than it has in the previous 50,000
19. and if we don’t understand that and if we don’t start cleaning up our lifestyle and eliminating some of these man-made things, that is the number one way that we hurt ourselves