By Bob Livingston
A dirty little secret that the food manufacturers would like you to ignore is what their products are doing to your liver.
Thanks to their formulations, about 30 million people now have fatty livers, and many more have it and don’t know. This can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which can cause the liver to swell and scar (a condition known as cirrhosis) and can lead to hepatitis and liver cancer.
Eventually, you need a liver transplant if you want to live.
The signs of liver problems include weakness, tiredness, itching, fluid buildup, swelling of your legs and mental confusion.
In other words, if you’re tired and have brain fog, it’s probably not Alzheimer’s, it’s your diet.
It starts with all the sugar — particularly high-fructose corn syrup — that is hidden in our food. As we gain weight on these over-sweetened items, the liver begins to accumulate extra fat. That leads to a fatty liver and the symptoms we just mentioned.
A big villain in this development is the marketing of sweetened drinks. A study at Tufts’ Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging shows that all you have to do is imbibe one of these a day to significantly up your risk of extra fat being created in your liver.
If you think diet drinks are better, you should know that they disrupt the way the body produces and sheds fat. A University of Texas Health Center study found that the more diet sodas a person drank, the greater chance he had of becoming overweight. Artificial sweeteners disrupt the body’s ability to regulate calorie intake based on the sweetness of foods, according to an animal study by researchers at Purdue University.
Did you think drinking alcohol was the only danger to your liver? This would not surprise me. The sophistication with which the medical cartel misdirects and misinforms is almost beyond belief.
After all, they tell you to eat plenty of “healthy” whole grains, even though these products usually have liver-destroying sugar — so much so that many slices of so-called “healthy” bread are higher on the glycemic index than sugar itself!
Almost everything you can purchase from Big Agriculture is some form of processed carbohydrate that they tell you is good for you because it’s “low-fat” or some other nonsense that almost sounds reasonable. Yet, to put even more stress on the liver, they’ve removed sensible and natural liver-detoxifying nutrients from almost all these ultra-processed foods.
Is it any wonder that Scientific American put forth these ultra-processed foods as the ultimate culprit causing obesity in America? Thank heavens it only took four decades of people like me and those of us researching alternative health writing about it for a mainstream publication to “come across” this fact.
Of course the article makes no mention of the liver. Mainstream medicine does not want you to detoxify your liver. They will tell you it does the job of processing everything just fine. You might ask the question, “Then why are so many people still sick, tired, overweight and diseased?” A legitimate question.
The answer is, your liver does indeed need assistance.
First, ditch foods containing high-fructose corn syrup, and exercise and keep your weight down. These are on the front lines of liver health, as well as overall health. But there are further steps you can take to give your liver new life at any age, and most of our health problems will improve or go away.
That includes something almost no one is taught to think of: detoxifying your liver with nutrition.
- Use coconut oil in your cooking and salad dressings. Coconut oil contains fats known as medium chain triglycerides that have been shown to keep fat from being deposited in the liver.
- Beet juice contains betaine, which is very important in stimulating liver function. It helps detoxify the liver. Arthritics have sluggish livers full of toxins.
- We also know that cruciferous vegetables, which includes broccoli, have powerful compounds that aid the liver in its detoxification processes and alkalinize the urine, purifying your body from toxemia.
Pump the poisons out of your body
Standard doctors like to play down any possible effects of antioxidants, but the evidence is not in their favor. Any serious researcher of health knows that antioxidant foods and nutrients are good medicine to prevent toxic liver damage, especially a nutrient called N-acetyl cysteine (NAC). It’s an amino acid that boosts immunity and your detoxification pathway protecting against diseases ranging from diabetes to the flu.
N-acetyl cysteine (at least 1,800 mg a day) also helps your body make more glutathione, the main antioxidant your body uses to flush metals and other toxins from the body. To make your liver detoxification from our modern diet work even better, make sure you add at least 200 micrograms of selenium a day. Brazil nuts are a good source, but if you want a powerful nutritional aid that protects your liver and includes both of these effective nutrients, please go here.
Also, consider this warning:
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) the widely used over-the-counter pain relief drug, quickly becomes toxic to the liver when too much is taken, or when combined with other drugs or simply alcohol.
