Hello Health Champions. Did you know that fatty liver is a condition that affects over 2 billion people today and if they don't make any changes to improve on it, it can lead to scarring of the liver and even death. Most people who have a fatty liver don't even know it but to make things worse if they were to find out and wanted to do something about it most of what they would be told would be the exact opposite of what they needed to do to fix it and for most people when they try to fix it they go about it the wrong way they think in terms of superfoods what can I take for this so what foods help cure a fatty liver then people ask what fruit is the best is apple good is milk good what about curd almond turmeric yogurt what about honey or banana they're looking for something to fix it rather than asking what caused this problem so is there an amazing herb is there a magic potion is there some supernatural root that we can take I'm not saying that there aren't things that can help but we don't want to start looking there but almost all of the blogs and videos and articles are about that because it gets the views and it sells products but the problem is we're still stuck in a medical mindset which is about treating something what we need to realize is that the body can fix this there was an imbalance that created it and we don't need to treat it we need to reverse the imbalance the number one thing to understand is the order of things so if you're fighting a fire and you're doing pretty well with a water hose what if someone's standing next to you with a gasoline hose now that water hose is going to have no effect whatsoever and it's the same thing with the body that most the vast majority of the results are going to come from stopping the cause we have to stop adding the thing that is causing the problem and then we have to provide some resources to the organ in question so if the liver has an important job that requires certain raw materials then we have to provide those raw materials and then maybe we can add the last few percent maybe five percent would be these so-called magic potions that i call them sort of tongue-in-cheek that could be garlic turmeric coffee green tea milk thistle and I'm not saying that these are good or bad what I'm saying is don't start there because just like the fire not having any success with the water hose until you remove the gasoline hose you're also not going to have any success until you stop the insult the thing that is causing the problem but what is that root cause then if we look a little further they tell us that one root cause is to be obese or overweight and is that a problem is that a cause no that's a correlation because you can have excess weight without being metabolically unhealthy or having a fatty liver so it's not a cause it's a correlation next we have type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance and there I absolutely agree insulin is a storage hormone high levels of insulin over a long period of time creates insulin resistance and then the body will be in a state of congestion we are storing too much and that is a whole problem when we store too much a little bit everywhere it's going to affect the liver as well and then there's something called metabolic syndrome which is just like a diagnostic group term for the same thing which includes insulin resistance high blood pressure high cholesterol and high triglyceride levels one more criteria is a large waist circumference and the only thing I don't agree with there is the high cholesterol because it depends on the type of cholesterol just because we measure a high total cholesterol or a high LDL that does not mean that we have an unhealthy situation we need to look at the size and health of the particles which would indicate the state of inflammation and oxidative stress in the body so everyone pretty much agrees that it's about metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance this congestive state but then what causes that which foods create this metabolic problem and which foods make the fatty liver worse well they tell us then to avoid poultry except for lean white meat they tell us to avoid full fat cheese and yogurt except for low-fat yogurt we should avoid red meat and any goods including palm oil or coconut oil so what do these all have in common well obviously they're high in fat especially saturated fat and even after decades of research turning the picture around then we still get these recommendations as if saturated fat was something bad the reason fat got a bad wrap was that for decades we ate trans fats and margarine and those fats are horrendously bad for us but they sort of grouped all the fats together and they didn't realize that the real culprit was actually next on the list which is sugary items candy soda and any added sugars including high fructose corn syrup so interesting is they spend most of their time on the fat but then they throw in the sugar as causing fatty liver even though it's fat free because sugar is the real problem sugar turns into fat but also we'll talk about some more sugar is a toxin to the liver next step of course is to look up how to fix the fatty liver and these four steps are the standard medical treatment this is how they would address it in a standard medical model so first they want to avoid alcohol and is that a good idea absolutely yes because there's no doubt alcohol is a toxin to the liver especially in large doses but what I would want to know is why is sugar not on that list as well because there's way way way more people especially children who use sugar that don't use alcohol next on the list we have losing weight is that a good idea maybe but it's not the problem in this case like we talked about number three taking medications to control the diabetes so they know that diabetes is a problem and associated and a cause with fatty liver but when they say to control diabetes with medication they're talking about blood sugar and if you treat blood sugar with insulin or something that will force down the blood sugar now you're making the body more insulin resistant so unfortunately there is a trade-off here and most of the medications that they use to control diabetes actually makes insulin resistance worse and if it does then those medications basically just shove more stuff into the cell including the liver so those meds are going to make the fatty liver worse and number four is to take some vitamin e which may be a good idea and also to take some thiazolidine diodes and I had to practice that word for quite some time to get that right and how then do these thiazolidine diodes work well they could theoretically be sort of a good idea but not really addressing the root cause however when you have insulin resistance then the cells are resisting both sugar and fat because insulin pushes sugar into the cell and then that sugar turns to fat so now the cell has too much sugar and fat if we can reduce the fat in the bloodstream then there is less overall pressure on the cell so what these drugs do is they take the fat from the bloodstream and they kind of shove it into the subcutaneous fat cells so it's basically just redistributing which can help the metabolic situation but you guessed it the side effect of that is that it causes weight gain so on the one hand we're trying to reduce weight by lessening insulin resistance but then they give us more medication that causes weight gain so the standard medication that acts like insulin that's going to make weight gain and insulin resistance worse but these thiazolidine thiazolidinediones are going to cause weight gain but in a different way and possibly reduce pressure the insulin resistance a little bit but then again why don't we just eat fewer things that stimulate insulin a lot of people will ask if fatty liver is reversible or what stages of fatty liver are reversible so a normal liver looks something like this the next stage would be that it's infiltrated with fat this is an NAFLD non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or alcoholic fatty liver disease now the thing to understand is classically alcohol in alcoholics was what created a fatty liver but today probably 99 or more of all fatty liver in the world is not caused by alcohol but rather by sugar and so far this liver is not too terribly unhealthy those cells are not really pathological yet the cells are filled up with fat but it's just sort of a container the container isn't damaged yet it can still do most of its job but if we let it go any further that's where we get some real problems if we let it go one more step now we get something called NASH or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis and the "itis" gives us a clue there.
"Itis" means inflammation so normally a fatty liver is associated with insulin resistance which is a low-grade chronic inflammation but this is a much higher level this is a more intense pathological inflammation where the cells of the liver are breaking down to a much higher degree if you look at your blood work they'll typically include two enzymes called ALT and AST where ALT is the most specific for the liver and if you have an inflammation and the cells break down now these enzymes start spilling out into the bloodstream and we can measure elevated levels now in the second level with just a fatty liver you will probably not see an elevation of these enzymes so for a milder form of fatty liver there's really nothing on the blood work that's going to tell you directly that the liver is in trouble but once we get to number three here with inflammation we're gonna see significantly elevated levels so if you see higher numbers it's probably a sign that you're slipping from stage two to stage three and finally number four is where we get scarring of the liver also known as cirrhosis and now it is probably not reversible to any significant degree but what we want to keep in mind is the vast majority people are still going to be at the second level the fatty liver without significant inflammation and this is just as reversible as insulin resistance we just have to stop putting in the offensive compounds the sugar and the carbs and the toxins and the alcohol and so on and if we get into number three and the longer it stays in number three it's probably still reversible but it can be more difficult and it's going to take a lot longer now let's get into the solutions so if we understand that the metabolic syndrome the insulin resistance is at the root of this how is that affecting the liver what are the mechanisms and the first is overload the liver is getting more work than it's equipped to handle basically number two would be inflammation and like I said hepatitis is a stronger form of inflammation but when we're talking this general inflammation it's a low-grade chronic inflammation that's associated with metabolic syndrome and number three is lack of resources the liver is very hard working and if we wanted to do work we have to provide some fuel and some resources for it to do that so let's look at these in a little bit more detail overload is basically three things that we give too much one is sugar two is alcohol and three is toxins so with sugar what we need to understand is that things like bread which has glucose in it that raises blood glucose that's not nearly as hazardous for the liver because the glucose can be processed by every cell in the body but these three the sugar which contains 50 fructose 50 glucose the fructose portion can only be processed in the liver the alcohol and the toxins can only be processed in the liver so all the other stuff gets spread out over all the cells in the body but these three we overload the liver because it's the only thing that can handle those and the toxins that only the liver can handle are things like medications and pesticides and heavy metals and so forth and even though very small amounts don't hurt us the liver is equipped to handle that if the liver is overwhelmed with other things then these small amounts of toxins can also start building up and hurting us the low-grade chronic inflammation that causes a lot of these problems is associated with the congestion that results from high levels of insulin and this metabolic syndrome number two is vegetable oils and I want to clarify a little bit because a lot of people aren't clear on what they are I get a lot of questions sometimes they're called seed oils but they could be made from seeds grain or legumes the seeds usually used would be things like rapeseed also called canola it could be safflower or sunflower seed the grain they use is corn and the legume is typically soybean oil and why are they so bad well they're not really easy to get the oil out of the seed or the grain or the legume if you take something like an avocado or an olive those oils are typically very healthy because you can cold press it you just apply a little bit of pressure to the olive and you get oil whereas these you have to apply extreme pressure combined with extreme high temperature and sometimes even solvents like petrochemicals to extract the oil and that makes this a very oxidized very damaged very toxic product so before it ends up on the shelf and they have deodorized it and cleaned up the flavor so it has absolutely no flavor it's gone through so much that it is very very unhealthy at that point another reason they're bad is that plant oils typically are very high in omega-6s relative to omega-3s and that pushes everything into a pro-inflammatory state also number three is food allergies if you're sensitive to something then it creates an immune reaction and it creates inflammation so this does not apply to everybody but if we want to avoid certain foods we want to try to avoid the ones that affect the largest percentage of people and those are wheat dairy corn and soy and number four item causing inflammation is stress so stress you're going to see on virtually every list and we'll come back to that a little more and if we want to heal a fatty liver we have to make sure there is no lack of resources what are the resources well certain amino acids like methionine and cysteine they're used to make glutathione and that's the body's primary antioxidant it's like a cleanup molecule basically and here's the interesting thing some of the richest sources are going to be beef chicken pork and eggs the things high in saturated fats that we're told not to eat next we have choline the choline is a b vitamin it's very important for energy production it basically helps the liver dissolve that fat that has been built up if the body needs to burn through that fat it's going to need lots of choline so if we're low in these then the liver can't do its job some of the sources again egg liver and dairy and here is where the cruciferous greens come in that if you want to take care of your liver you basically eat meat and vegetables animal products and lots of vegetables lots of cruciferous greens one more thing we need is plenty of bile so here's how that works bile is a fat emulsifier the liver makes bile and then it puts the bile into a little pouch called the gallbladder and along with the bile the liver also dumps a lot of the toxins that it is processed so the way for the liver to get rid of them get them out of the body is to put them in the gallbladder and then when the gallbladder empties this ends up in the bowel for elimination but if the liver isn't making enough bowel because it's not healthy or if we're eating a low-fat diet if there's no fat in the digestive tract there is no signal for the gallbladder to empty the bile and then the toxins are going to stay in the gallbladder and if the gallbladder can't empty out the toxins then the liver can't put new ones in there so the whole system backs up so a low-fat diet is just not a great idea for so many reasons and number four is stress and here i want you to really pay attention because anyone can give you a list of foods but here is where you really start understanding more about how the body works so what does stress have to do with the liver not recovering well basically it's about blood flow there are many other things as well but stress increased stress is going to reduce blood flow and why does that matter well the blood if you think about it everything the liver needs and everything the liver gets rid of like nutrients and toxins has to be in the bloodstream and all the fuel and all the resources for the liver also has to be in the bloodstream so if we have less blood flow then it's like we're turning off the faucets of the supply faucet to the liver and this goes so much further than just the liver you have something called the autonomic nervous system and that's the part of your nervous system that handles everything that you don't have to think about so your heartbeat and your breathing your digestion and your blood flow and growing fingernails and making enzymes all of that is handled for you by your autonomic nervous system and this system is basically a resource allocator it decides where do we have to put the resources in this moment based on this situation and then we have two branches called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system and they're basically responsible for defense or repair sympathetic is your stress response anytime that you have a stress response you're going to put your body in a defense state and then what's going to happen is you're going to increase this side at the expense of that side so any time that you have a stress response you're going to decrease repair so basically you can defend yourself or you can repair stuff but you can't do both at the same time and the thing about stress is that it's not about how you feel or how you think you feel it's about how your nervous system has been programmed and conditioned to respond to your everyday environment and most of that conditioning is in place by age five so that is why relaxation and meditation and exercise is so important because doing those things regularly will help your body balance these two things but if you get stuck in the sympathetic in the stress response which the vast majority of people are then you are defending yourself you're sending most of your resources to heart and muscles at the expense of sending resources to liver and vital organs so anytime you stress it's basically like you're shutting off the faucet the supply line to your vital organs and to your liver so essentially you can worry or you can heal your liver but you can't do both at the same time. 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