Hello Health Champions. Is your liver dying? And if so how could you tell? The first sign might just be something as common as a big belly whereas some of the other signs we're going to talk about may seem a little weird but once you understand what causes them then it just goes to show how incredibly common they are and how far-reaching liver damage could be and sign number one is dry eyes or dry mouth I mean this has happened to everyone at some point but when is it serious well this could be due to a
hormonal imbalance and there's two hormones that can be get out of balance from a liver damage and that's cortisol and insulin and they can affect fluid balance in the body you can get dehydrated and lose fluid that way it could also be the thyroid because the liver is responsible for converting and activating most of the thyroid hormones you can't really have good good thyroid function without a healthy liver and the thyroid will stimulate the salivary glands that produce tears and saliva but it could also be a metabolic imbalance and there's something called hepatic encephalopathy which
means the liver is supposed to neutralize toxins and if the liver isn't so healthy now toxins build up and if they build up enough at a certain point the whole brain chemistry gets affected and the Brain can't carry out all its function and all its regulation appropriately and one of the most important things it does is to regulate your autonomic or your automatic function in the body so you don't think about breathing or making saliva and all this and whenever you have a stress you're going to turn off your relaxing or your parasympathetic part of
the nervous system and this part is responsible for all secretions so again if the brain is stressed and it can't relax properly now you can't regulate secretions so obviously the liver can cause this but it could also be something as simple as stress and it's important that you start understanding some of these mechanisms so that you can tell when it's really serious and when it's just something temporary and one example that you've probably all experienced is if you're having to do a speech like a public performance and you get really really nervous and your mouth
dries up that's the perfect example some people call it cotton mouth and you can hear this on people when they get nervous and they speak into a microphone and all of a sudden you hear that smacking dry sound in the mouth so that's just the stress turning off the salivary function and perhaps the most important reason that we understand some of these things is because of how common this is this is what a healthy liver looks like it's kind of pinkish reddish but then as the liver starts to get damaged it changes color and it
goes pale and yellow and that's because of fatty infiltration it's called a fatty liver and it used to be that this mostly happened to alcoholics but today the vast majority are just caused by poor diet and today we have as much as 40% of the population has fatty infiltration in their liver and this is the first time this isn't necessarily A unhealthy liver but this is where it starts becoming unhealthy This Is Where It Starts developing some low-grade inflammation and taking on some damage in the next stage called liver fibrosis the this is where the
inflammation progresses and some of the healthy tissue turns fibrous it hardens and now it's much much harder to reverse the damage and this could be as many as 12% so if we look at these numbers and realize that in the us alone there's probably a 100 million people with fatty liver and maybe even more with a small degree of fatty liver and there's tens of Millions with fibrosis with progressing damage then the next step is where this fibrosis gets very very severe and now they call it liver cirrhosis and this can affect as many as
5% of the population so we're still talking tens of millions in the United States now the good news is that the liver is the most amazing organ in terms of regenerating you can cut off a huge portion of the liver and and it rebuilds itself in weeks and months the problem is that you need to do that you need to start taking care of the liver in the early stages while there's just some fatty infiltration you can probably reverse that 100% or near 100% but once there is more and more healthy tissue turning fibrous then
it becomes harder and harder to reverse and repair that liver and by the time you're in cirrhosis and significant portion or most of the liver is turned into fibrous tissue now there's probably not much that you can do about it and there's several things that can cause liver damage one would be the hepatitis virus another one traditionally people think about is alcohol excess alcohol that liver has to metabolize that all that alcohol and the alcohol turns into fat and just like we talked about creates damage you can also Al have autoimmune hepatitis where your immune
system gets confused and starts attacking the tissue and breaking it down causing inflammation and then there is acute liver failure and this is where you're basically feeling good one day and then the next day you are feeling terrible and you rush to the emergency room so a lot of these processes develop over a long time but this acute failure Could Happen very very quickly and now the number one cause is going to be medication and some of this would be prescription medication that's controlled and restricted but most of it is actually over the counter medication
that you can go and buy anywhere But even with all these different causes the number one cause today of fatty liver is fructose and that's what we get in added sugar so table sugar Agave molasses high fructose corn syrup they're going to be 50% on average fructose and 50% glucose so if you eat a 100 grams of sugar which most people do based on the average then you're getting 50 grams of fructose that is almost as bad as alcohol in turning the liver fatty and therefore fructose is also the driving factor between obesity and cardiovascular
disease and type 2 diabetes and a day goes by that we don't hear about how obesity causes different diseases but it's not how it works and it's super important if we want to try to address some of these things we need to understand the difference between a cause and an association so if they tell us for example that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is caused by obesity then they don't understand really how things work because a non-alcoholic fatty liver is going to be caused by insulin resistance and this insulin resistance which is when we eat too
much sugar and too much processed foods and too many processed carbohydrates this insulin resistance is what leads to obesity and then this insulin resistance also leads to type two to diabetes so there's no causal relationship between fatty liver and obesity they just occur together the cause is insulin resistance and just like we what we said is the cause of insulin resistance is primarily fructose it's not the only cause excess carbohydrates processed carbohydrates even seed oils and inflammation have a role in this but fructose tends to be the thing that tips the scale so rather than
blaming type 2 diabetes and obesity for the problem we need to understand that the cause is fructose causing insulin resistance causing these other problems sign number two is increased thirst which could also be part of the metabolic imbalance so if that's not working now we could have a buildup of a waste product called ammonia and if that builds high enough now it can start affecting the brain's ability to regulate fluid balance and also the kidney's ability to regulate fluid and there's more players than that there's also something called the adrenal gland that makes a hormone
that tells the kidney how much sodium and water to reabsorb so I'm only showing you this for the relationship to understand that the brain talks to the kidney and the kidney and the adrenals talk to each other and the Brain talks to the adrenal and then a bunch of things that the liver does affects the adrenal so everything is interrelated so it's kind of like tumbling dominoes that if the liver is compromised now it starts affecting all kinds of other things but it works the other way around as well that once you start improving one
aspect now you get a domino the other way where it starts improving a bunch of other things which is what holistic healthcare the holistic Viewpoint is that you look at the whole picture and once you start improving one thing it starts affecting all kinds of things sign number three is spider veins and this is a circulatory imbalance that can also be caused by an unhealthy liver and spider veins are spider like looking veins that are very close to the surface very superficial and very small and the cause is something called portal hypertension so that is
when the blood pressure increases in the portal vein and what is that well whenever you eat food and that gets digested and absorbed the blood vessels in the gut takes that blood and comes together into the portal vein which is one big blood vessels that takes it into the liver so the liver gets first shot at everything that you eat it needs to process and detoxify and figure out if it's good or bad stuff that's coming in but now if the liver is compromised if it starts getting fatty infiltration and fibrous tissue now that blood
can't flow from the portal vein and through the liver so it kind of backs up and now that blood pressure increases because the liver is backed up and that's where we could get things like these spider veins when that back pressure increases and bursts some of these fine blood vessels but there other blood vessels that can also be affected such as in sign number four you could get hemorrhoids from this same mechanism because that's also expanded blood vessels that are affected by the portal vein and sign number five is difficult breathing which could also be
due to the portal veins so here if the pressure if the blood backs up and the pressure increases now some of that water could be squeezed out of the blood vessels and into the surrounding tissue so you get water in the abdominal cavity and this is called AES it could result in a big belly in some cases and the way you could tell from other big bellies is that it would be like water if you push it it would kind of be like a wave floating around in the stomach and then some of this water
in the abdominal cavity could actually get into the plural space called plural fusion and this is the space around the lungs there's like a double layer with vacuum around the lungs and if we have water leaking in here and if that goes far enough now we could actually compromise the lungs ability to absorb oxygen and sign number six is very low cholesterol so most people are taught that cholesterol is a bad thing and the lower the better well that's not true because cholesterol is super important and the body makes the vast majority of all the
cholesterol that you have and that you use is manufactured because we need it so if you have very very low cholesterol it could be that you're not able to make it so what could be the mechanism behind that well if you have an impaired liver that can't neutralize toxins some of those toxins are going to be heavy metals so now you get a heavy metal toxicity and these heavy metals can interfere with key enzymes involved in the man manufacturer of cholesterol Metals aren't the only thing but it is one example of what could happen and
now the mechanism the problem is impaired synthesis so I hope you can start seeing how many different functions the liver performs and how far-reaching it can be and in addition to cholesterol of course the liver makes all kinds of things primarily proteins and it makes tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of different proteins some of these are blood proteins that help regulate the thickness and viscosity of the blood some are enzymes that perform various metabolic functions in the body some proteins are hormones others regulate inflammation and then we also have proteins that are involved
with immune regulation and there are transport proteins and this brings us to sign number seven which is muscle wasting also due to impaired synthesis because some of these proteins that the liver make are necessary for maintenance and support of muscles they don't actually make the muscle proteins because that's made in the muscle but they make other proteins that support and enable the muscles to function and if you start seeing muscle wasting it's going to be most obvious in the large muscle groups first in areas like your thigh the quadriceps and your hamstrings but also of
course the butt the Gluteus Maximus so now you're seeing things like really skinny legs and a big belly and a flat butt and a bad liver is not the only thing that can cause this it can also be caused by stress and high cortisol levels and insulin resistance but liver is just one more way that this can happen so if you start putting the signs and symptoms together now maybe you can start seeing a bigger picture sign number eight is taste per and this is kind of a weird one to most people and they're not
really sure of the exact mechanism but they know with liver damage that it's common enough that there's a clear association between liver damage and a change in taste and it could be that you get a metallic taste it could be a bitter taste or even a lack of taste and some of the suggested mechanisms would be a change in B composition or it could be a deficiency in nutrients like B12 or zinc and it could also be that the liver damage causes inflammation that affects how The Taste receptors process or when the taste receptors send
the signal to the brain there could also be a change in neural processing from that inflammation so I think you can see why it's appropriate that the first four letters of the world liver is live and why it's such a bad thing if your liver is dying but you can also see that the signs that we're going through could have multiple different causes not just liver failure and this is why it's so important that we understand some of the mechanisms and see the bigger picture why it's not enough to just memorize a list it's not
enough just to get a quick idea we have to become students of Health today we have to start understanding our bodies and why is that because the world has changed the world has changed more in 50 years than the previous 50,000 and most of the thousands or tens of thousands of different chemicals and factors that affect us today your ancestors never had your DNA was never exposed to these factors before so we need to start understanding how they affect us and a rather sad illustration of that is the fact that we today they have a
sick care system where we treat symptoms and disease and emergencies and this is costing us $4.9 trillion this year when I started talking about this 10, 15 years ago it was three trillion and now we're in a few years we'll be double that and that doesn't mean as I'm sure you've seen that people are getting healthier. No, the rates of diabetes and obesity and cancer it's all going up because the sick care system is not addressing root causes it's only trying to cover things up and the reason we get so sick is that we don't
understand how the world has changed or what to do about it how to make ourselves fit in to this new world and that's why I do the videos the way that I do they're a little bit longer than most but once you invest that time now you can start understanding the mechanisms and you can truly be empowered and start taking charge of your health number nine is restlessness anxiety and agitation and again this is when the liver is pretty far gone in terms of damage and we have something called hepatic encephalopathy liver is failing causing
brain damage or even if it's not damaged brain it's interfering with the proper function of the brain so now we have neurological compromise and we have toxicity in the bloodstream to the point where the brain just isn't able to carry out its normal function with the precision that we're looking for and this could lead to sign number 10 which is mood swings which could have to do also with irritability or even behavioral changes and I'm not going to go into depth on solutions in this video because I made several other videos that talk about that
so if you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to master Health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video
