House Call: Do You Have a Fatty Liver?

Hello, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. So this week's question is, I have a fatty liver. What do I do about it? What's causing it? And do I have to take drugs or can I exercise or change my diet or take supplements to help fix my fatty liver? So many of you are probably wondering, what is a fatty liver? Now for those of you who've ever been to a fine French restaurant, you might have heard of foie gras, which is French for fatty liver. It sounds way better in French than in English. And essentially it's a liver that is full of fat. So how do we have a country where fatty liver is the single most common disease in America? that you've probably never heard of. 70 to 90 million Americans have a fatty liver and almost none of them know they have it. In fact, you might have it as well and not know it. What causes it? Well, in order to get a fatty liver and get the foie gras, which is basically duck or goose liver, they take the ducks and they force feed them corn, starch. They feed them sugar in the form of starch. and the sugar turns on a fat production factory in the liver. We call that lipogenesis. This is a very normal common thing that happens when you have sugar. Fructose actually even makes it worse. So high fructose corn syrup, fructose in our processed foods is the single biggest cause of fatty liver. In fact, sodas is the biggest single cause of fatty liver. In fact, sodas are the number one source of calories, high fructose corn syrup, the number one source of calories in the American diet. It's pretty scary. So when you have this fatty liver, you get this fat production and you get literally a fat liver. And why is that a problem? Well, it creates a whole cascade of issues. It creates inflammation in your body. The inflammation creates insulin resistance and prediabetes. and that makes you deposit belly fat, not just in your liver, but also all around your organs, all in your belly. So that dangerous belly fat is caused by the sugar and starch in your diet. And then it creates even more problems. It causes you to have high triglycerides and low HDL, the good cholesterol. It has caused you to have small LDL, dangerous cholesterol particles that cause heart attacks. In fact, having a fatty liver is a huge risk for having heart attacks. and most people don't know it. It's common in prediabetes and diabetes. Certain populations like Latin Americans, or Latinos, are much a higher risk for having fatty liver. And we now even see 12-year-old boys who've been living on soda for years needing liver transplants from a fatty liver. That's pretty scary. And we need to think a little bit about what we're doing to our children in terms of feeding them these toxic substances. When you have a fatty liver, you need to think about the damage it's causing you. You don't want to end up with a liver transplant. You don't want to end up needing to be on medications to fix the complications of a fatty liver, like high blood pressure and diabetes and heart disease and abnormal cholesterol. You want to get to the root of the problem. And it's simple. It's what you're eating. So the first thing you can do is simply cut out all high fructose corn syrup from your diet. Any label, any product, whether it's a salad dressing, ketchup, or tomato sauce, I mean, think about it. Most servings of tomato sauce that you buy in a jar have more sugar than a serving of Oreo cookies. So we want to get rid of all that high fructose corn syrup in our diet. Number one. Number two, reduce the amount or eliminate the amount of starch depending on how bad your liver is. so you want to get rid of processed flour, white flour, processed flour, even whole grain flours can be a problem. Too much rice, white rice, starch, all those things that we eat in our diet that are the American classic diet or we call the SAD diet, the standard American diet, all those things will promote a fatty liver. It's not actually fat that makes you fat. It's not fat that causes a fatty liver. It's hard for people to get this. It's actually sugar that causes this. and I've written a lot about this in my book, the Blood Sugar Solution. I encourage you to take a look at it and learn more about this. You can also, besides actually just cutting out the flour and sugar in your diet, you can begin to add good things to your diet. You can add lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. You can add lean animal protein, chicken, fish. You can add good oils, olive oil, macadamia nut oil, from macadamia nuts. Coconut butter, great fat. The actual good fats in your diet are anti-inflammatory and they help heal and repair your liver. The omega-3 fats from fish also really great and you can take fish oil supplements. There are also other things you can take and it's important to know that you might not actually even see abnormal liver function tests if you have a fatty liver. You might see your liver test if you go to your doctor, they might say, oh, your liver tests are abnormal. That's not a great sign. You don't want to get to that point. But even if you don't have the abnormal test, you can still have fatty liver and you can pick it up on an ultrasound. But the fact is, if you're eating a lot of sugar and flour, if you have a little bit of belly fat, if you crave belly fat, you want a belly flat actually, if you crave carbs and you crave starch and you crave sugar, you probably have this. So how do you fix it besides getting rid of flour and sugar? Exercise, fabulous way to improve insulin resistance, to reduce fatty liver by improving your metabolism. And then of course there are many other things we use as supplements. And I do a lot of this with my patients and I find it very effective. We give them herbs like milk thistle. We use things like lipoic acid, powerful antioxidant, and acetyl cysteine. These things help boost something in your liver called glutathione. I encourage you to read my blog, which we've linked to here in the blog, on glutathione talking about how this wonderful substance, that's a detox substance in your liver, can be regenerated by certain supplements. And we use other things like B vitamins and magnesium. All these things will help your liver repair and heal. And then we use superfoods that are detox foods. Things like broccoli family. I love this family. And I try to have at least a cup or two every day. Kale, collards, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, arugula, kohlrabi, all wonderful foods to help repair and heal your liver. Garlic and onions also full of sulfur, great detoxifiers. So there's some really simple things you can do diet wise, exercise wise, supplement wise to help heal your fatty liver. You don't want a fatty liver, I promise you. You want to have a healthy liver because we have a lot of junk in our environment to deal with a lot of chemicals. And when you have a healthy liver, your body stays healthy, you don't get sick, and you can feel good, which is what I want for everybody to feel good. So sign up for our weekly house call and join me every week for a wonderful Q&A session. Join me on Facebook and Twitter and submit your questions so next week maybe I'll answer your question on our house call.