Liver: Your Most Important Organ

By Dr. Al Sears

With all the hand-wringing today about health, you could be afraid to drink anything.

Here’s at least one place you don’t need to worry – the occasional glass of wine does more good for your heart than damage to your liver. In fact, the famous Copenhagen City Heart Study looked at more than 13,000 men and women for 12 years and found people who drank wine had half the risk of dying from coronary heart disease or stroke as those who never drank wine. 1

Extreme overindulgence of alcohol leads to only 6 percent of liver damage. Meanwhile, obesity contributes to 52 percent of liver disease. 2 In fact, nearly half of all people today suffer from fatty livers. It’s especially common in those over 50.

The liver plays a vital role in your body’s metabolic processes – particularly detoxification.

If you’re like most people, you probably take your liver for granted. It’s often the most overlooked and ignored organ in your body, but arguably the most important. Your liver:

• Detoxifies all the harmful substances it encounters, converting fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble substances you can get rid of. The waste may also be converted into bile, which is useful in digestion.

• Detoxifies environmental pollutants. If your liver didn’t continually remove metabolic waste and toxins from your bloodstream, you’d be dead in a matter of hours.

• Filters harmful toxins and substances out of nearly 100 gallons of blood every day and allows nutrients to reach your cells.

• Produces more than 13,000 crucial chemicals and hormones including cholesterol, testosterone and estrogen. It also manages more than 50,000 enzymes to maintain a healthy body.

• Regulates blood-sugar levels and prevents dangerous spikes and lows.

• Stores essential vitamins and minerals – including vitamins A, D, K and B12 – that help keep your bones strong.

When you’re overloaded with toxins such as alcohol, prescription drugs, household chemicals, processed foods and more, your liver finds another way to get rid of waste. It creates balls of fat that collect in the liver itself. Those fats also spill into your bloodstream in the form of triglycerides, which increase your risk of heart disease.

Your liver also moves those toxins to other areas of your body, including your skin. In fact, skin conditions like dandruff and psoriasis are tell-tale signs that your liver isn’t functioning like it should.

What this amounts to is a systematic poisoning of your body that robs you of your strength, vitality and even your sex drive. Chronic fatigue, high blood pressure and autoimmune disorders often stem from a sick liver.

The good news, however, is that there are practical steps you can take to maintain a healthy liver.

• Eat foods in their natural forms. Fried, spicy and starchy foods contain too many toxins and harmful chemicals in the form of color and flavoring agents, chemicals and preservatives.

• Drink plenty of water. This helps your liver flush out toxins because water acts as a lubricating agent.

• Exercise. All you need is 10 minutes of variable intensity exercise each day. Even if you don’t drop weight, clinical studies show you’ll still improve your liver enzymes. 3

Sources

1 Szmitko, Paul E., BSc, Verma, Subodh, MD, PhD, "Red Wine and Your Heart," Circulation 2005;111:e10-e11
2 Zoler, Mitchel L., “Obesity is the Cause of Most U.S. Liver Damage: Risk of Disease Fourfold Higher in Obese,” Family Practice News July 1, 2004
3 St. George, Alexis, et al, "The Independent Effects of Physical Activity..." Hepatology July 2009