5 SURPRISING Ways to Boost Your Liver Health Naturally

Liver support. What's going on with that? My doctor said it's a bunch of bunk. Let's get into it. I'm Dr. A. I use this YouTube channel to answer questions. I've been involved in researching and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical community for 30+ years. Been seeing patients with chronic illness for a very long time. And I want to get into the subtleties of this idea of liver support, detox support, et cetera. But I want to start out with addressing why most doctors will say this is a bunch of bunk. This doesn't do anything, your liver naturally detoxifies. Okay, that is a true statement. You'd be dead if your liver was not naturally detoxifying. So that's a true statement. And it's not just your liver. Your skin detoxifies, your lungs detoxify, kidneys detoxify. It's all there. Everything does, but your liver does a lot of the work. And so your liver does it through a number of means. One is that your liver is the first major organ to see all of the things you've digested and absorbed in your digestive tract. So that's one way to present it with toxins. It also has all of the blood flow through it continuously through the day from the rest of your body. So maybe your cells are dumping a toxin or you, you know, ingested something or whatever. It's all going to go through there. So then your liver has these multiple steps in detoxification. So if it is a lipid-like or lipophilic substance, it goes through phase 1 detox, which are generally your cytochrome system. There's a bunch of different ones there. And the job of cytochrome Activity is to make the lipid molecule or lipophilic molecule more water soluble so it can be eliminated, especially through the kidneys. So phase 1 is for lipophilic substances. That would be something— a lot of hormones are that way. Obviously lipophilic toxins, a lot of things that they call xenohormones or xenobiotics, toxins go through there. But then let's say, okay, it's into phase 2. That's for water soluble stuff. What if I just ingested a water soluble toxin? It's going to mostly miss phase Phase 1 and go to phase 2. Phase 2 is a conjugation step. And what that means chemically, to simplify it, is I've got my more water-soluble toxin. If I conjugate it, I put something on it. And I would tell students like an anchor so that when it leaves phase 2 and goes into phase 3, it can be eliminated from the body because it's marked to be eliminated. Now, phase 2 has lots of subparts that help in the conjugation apparatus. So that could be things like acetylation. That could be— Glycation. An oxidase system that's separate from phase 1. It could be things like glutathione or glycine or other things that help you through phase 2. So that's how it works. So when the doctor says, well, liver support is bunk because your liver is naturally doing this. Yes, it's naturally doing this. But here's the thing, for however many eons humans and other mammals have been here on the earth, the liver has evolved to do this detoxification stuff. But if you look at the chemicals, toxins that were available to be presented to the human liver greater than 100 years ago versus the last 100 years. There are tens and tens and tens of thousands more chemicals in the environment now than were 100, 150 years ago. We have not evolved that much in the last 150 years to have our livers jacked up by 10,000 times. So there are times where it works to help support liver function. And yes, if it wasn't working, you'd be dead. But could you do things that would help your liver to deal with all this new toxic material going on. That's really what liver support is about. And that very much is not bunk. That's just supporting what your body does already. So what can we do to support it? That's what I want to break down here. Now, quick plug here. If you're a healthcare practitioner working with patients with these issues, I have a CE website and I do webinars on this topic and others. So we're going to put a link in the description below to the CE website link and the particular webinar of interest. Thank you. I'm going to go through 5 ways to do this, and there's There's going to be subparts and all of that, but 5 big ways. The first thing is stop adding toxins to your body. Now, you can't stop totally adding it. We live in a world full of toxins. You can get the best filtered water, the best organic food, but you still have to breathe the air, which is full of toxins. So do the best you can. Don't add, right? Subtract. So get the cleanest food you can. Nothing's totally clean. Drink the cleanest water you can. Cook in the cleanest water you can. Put air filters in if you to all of that stuff. So decrease the toxins coming in to the degree you can. Now, this also includes personal care products, soaps, other stuff, because that stuff will go through your skin and can add to the burden. So look into that. The next thing, something your grandma would've told you, is hydrate enough, drink enough water. This actually in cell biology now is all, all the big rage, even though grandma told you to anyway, because one of the ways that, that toxic material builds up in and around the way the cells are manufactured and, and architected is If you don't have enough water moving through your body, the extra and intracellular matrix, which is full of water, will slow down in getting rid of toxic junk from the cell. So your natural cell detoxification, which then goes to the liver, slows down and your cells back up full of toxins. So hydrate. There's actually research showing what grandma said is true. It's helpful to keep the toxins moving. Number 3, we're still not taking anything new. Move your body. One of the biggest things that can happen when you're sedentary is your capacitance blood vessels. So all of the veins In your body, in your upper and lower extremities, they sort of swell up and the blood moves very slowly through your veins. One way to force turnover of blood into your venous return and then to your liver, so get the old static blood out, is simply to move around. Now, if you're an able-bodied person, move around, do whatever you do to exercise. Walk, walking is fine. It'll do that. If you're bedbound and you do have legs and they do work to some degree, you can do bedbound type exercises, move the big muscles. Muscles in your legs. If you have legs that do not work, they will often use other means to help you with that. If you can move your upper extremity, just moving your upper, you know, shoulder girdle muscles, arm muscles, is still helpful to move those things around. The next would be now cofactors for those liver pathways— phase 1, phase 2— and then phase 3 is going to be getting rid of stuff. So phase 1 and 2 can be supported by stuff in your diet, and these are generally going to be minerals. Phase 1 is very mineral dependent. Phase 2 is going to be supported by amino acids and peptides like glutathione. Certain B vitamins support in there. B5 is a big one. B3 and B6 are supportive. Most of the B vitamins are supportive in phase 2. And then the other things you can get in your diet are colorful plants, high polyphenol dense plants and other nutrient dense foods. Your diet should always be first, but supplements on top. And what we usually recommend there would be your basics like B complex, A B complex is very helpful. A multi-mineral is very helpful. And then things that would support phase 2 beyond the B vitamins and minerals, such as N-acetylcysteine and glutathione and glycine, those are all intermediates there for especially phase 2 detox. Number 5 then is going to be liver supportive supplements. Now, again, if you're adding more polyphenol colorful plant material, that's good too. But in liver support supplements, you can use plant medicines, herbs like milk thistle, curcumin, dandelion root, and a million others. There's all sorts of herbs you can look up that are helpful for your liver. And again, if you can incorporate some of these, such as using turmeric in your cooking, other stuff like that, great, even better. Then there's other supportive supplements, fat-soluble things like coenzyme Q10, alpha-lipoic acid, both very supportive to liver. And then phospholipids, like in the olden days we give people lecithin, it's mixed phospholipids, but you can take, you know, phosphatidylcholine, choline or a phospholipid mix. Those are highly used by the liver as well. All right. So those are breaking down liver support and why beyond what our liver normally does to keep us alive every day, we can do supportive things, some of which are diet and lifestyle, some of which might be supplemental, but all of them can improve our liver's chances of processing the modern level of toxicity that we all deal with. I'm Dr. A. Thank you guys. Please do subscribe, like, share. Thank you to all the subscribers. in the community. It's really grown. It's wonderful. And we'll put some other videos up here for you to check out as well. See you on the next video.