A clinician explains why fatty liver disease is rising, especially in women. The liver handles hormone metabolism, toxin clearance, and converting thyroid hormones. Most cases are asymptomatic and found by accident on imaging, driven by excess sugar and simple carbs rather than dietary fat.
I am seeing more and more patients every day diagnosed with fatty liver disease. And their doctors are telling them, we don't know why you have it, we'll just keep an eye on it and pretty much good luck. That's not okay. The liver is responsible for over 500 processes in the body. It's super important to be functioning well. You know, for us women, it's metabolizes our hormones, it gets rid of xenoestrogens and all kinds of toxins in the body, it metabolizes all the medications you take, it produces some of your much needed proteins and enzymes and clotting factors for your blood. It helps make vitamins. I could go on and on all day. So. So it's really important what the liver is doing. The other big thing is it converts T4 into T3, your thyroid hormone, or if you're taking it, your thyroid medication. And you need that active T3 to have good functioning metabolism. So the liver is super important for women. Yet more and more women are being told they have fatty liver. Oftentimes this has found accidentally during a CT scan or an MRI or an ultrasound of the gallbladder. Some women will present with right upper quadrant pain, little discomfort with eating, but most of the time there are no symptoms. And what's happening is you're storing excess fat in your liver. And so, unfortunately, for a long time, we thought eating fat made us fat. And we've come to understand and learn that that is absolutely not the case when we are storing fat in our liver or in our adipose tissue or around our other major organs. It's from sugar. So when we eat simple carbohydrates, we eat straight up sugar. We drink sugar, you know, just having the standard American diet of bread, pastas, crackers, cookies, baked goods, bagels, pop sodas, alcohol, all of those things, all of those sugars have to get stored somewhere because we don't typically go run a marathon and burn it all off. And what your body does is it takes those sugars and it converts it into fat and stores it in your liver, hoping that you will use it right away the next time you go out to do something, the next time you're going to run or fight or do whatever that your archaic self thinks you're going to do. But most of the time, we live in this comfortable society where we don't move our bodies, we don't do a lot of physical activity, we don't run from tigers, we don't run long distances, we don't hunt and forage for food. And so that fat stays there and it just. We add more and more. And so we now have this phenomenon that's very common throughout the world called non alcoholic fatty liver disease.
