FATTY LIVER: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Treatment

The more inappropriate the biome is, the more it will feed off of the maldigested food we send in. And sometimes that will then have a downstream effect of actually putting poisons out into the bloodstream, which will then give the liver more trouble. Welcome to the YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I've been doing research, teaching, and other things in the integrative and naturopathic medical communities for over 30 years. Been practicing a long time, seeing patients. And I use this channel to answer your questions. Today's question: Can you go over because you've gone over some things around liver function and liver disease, etc.? Can you get into the causes of fatty liver disease and what we might do for prevention? The first thing would be overweight or obesity, especially central obesity, and so that would be abdominal obesity. But also, if you're just generally overweight all over your body, the more overweight you are, the more likely you are to put stress. Stress on the liver for a number of metabolic reasons and to kind of force more development of fatty liver disease. So fatty liver is a dysfunctional liver. So the prevention side of that, of course, would be the obvious, which would be to lose weight or keep your weight maintained. And that largely can be very, very useful. The next is related actually, and that's insulin resistance spectrum over to type 2 diabetes. Now we know that there's a high correlation of increased fatty liver disease in people with diabetes and insulin resistance, et cetera. That also ties into what we just talked about, especially central obesity, et cetera. So the prevention side of that would be if you don't have type 2 diabetes, but you have family genetics of insulin resistance, or you know that your doctor has said you're pre-diabetic, you got insulin resistant, you can do a number of things to help that. Basically, you're attacking the blood sugar problem here. The first thing would be to dietarily moderate the amount of carbohydrate you're taking in. Increasing the amount of fiber, watching your protein macros, etc. So dietarily looking at that. The next thing would be to physically exercise, which can help all of the above problems because you improve insulin resistance with exercise. So that, and of course it helps a number of other things. The next thing that you could do would be things to, you're handling the diet best you can, you're moving your body more and exercise. Next thing you could do to help out would be to increase things that might improve your insulin function. Your insulin efficiency. Now, sometimes people have found that increase in certain dietary spices, like we've all read about cinnamon improving blood sugar and that stuff, it's one way to go. The herb berberine is often used for this purpose, and there's other, you know, things from plants, whether they're spices or herbs, etc., that can be used. Now, if you're already type 2 diabetic and you're on medication, doing the diet things is still helpful. Moving your body, exercising, still helpful. And then also making sure that working with your doctor, your medications are managed in a way where you're not overmedicated, but also you're on enough medication to manage the insulin-resistant part of your problem. The next is tendency towards high blood cholesterol, high triglycerides, which are on your cholesterol panel. And that would be for a number of reasons. When we see cholesterol on your blood panel, that is largely the cholesterol your liver made for you. Now, depending on your genetics, feeding yourself more fat cholesterol. In some people can create more cholesterol, some people it doesn't because the liver is in the middle. But the bottom line is, just like insulin resistance, when you have high cholesterol, your liver is either overproducing or imbalanced producing the cholesterol and triglycerides that are floating around in your bloodstream. And so it's extra stress on the liver. So whatever you need to do for that, and based on the type and your genetics, you might do different things. The more you can, just like keeping your blood sugar under control, the more you keep your fats under control, the better long-term. 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. Now, toxicity is a big trigger for fatty liver, but the most common toxin beyond drug overdoses, et cetera, that is very readily available and And is legal in most places in the world is excessive alcohol consumption. So obviously alcohol is an exogenous toxin that has to be metabolized and detoxified in the liver partly. And so if I'm constantly putting more toxin in on the front end and I'm stressing the liver, I'm going to have more stress to the liver over time. So obviously alcohol would fit in as a potentially either mitigatable or removable toxin to your body. Now there are genetic predispositions, and these could be either directly Through liver genetics, liver there are some genetics that might predispose one to making the wrong kind of receptor types, etc. There's some genetics that might predispose you to some of the other problems, such as insulin resistance or poor lipid levels, things like that. And then there's some other genetics that can do it as well. And again, even though they're genetic, the epigenetic portion of it is if I have genetics that would say I'm going to have trouble with insulin resistance, then I want to do everything I can on. The mitigatable side of the equation. So with my diet and low toxin intake and exercise and all that to take the stress off the genetics, doesn't change your genetics to make them not a problem, but it takes the stress off. So maybe they're less of a problem. The next is really fuel to the fire if we want to talk about epigenetic triggers to many of the other things. And that would be the intake of high amounts of sugars and then toxins in foods like processed foods, et cetera. Why Would those 2 things really trigger fatty liver? Well, next to alcohol, other things that are legal for us to ingest that are hard on our system, high sugar, especially in modern diets, is a big problem. And that's going to trigger downstream inflammation. It's going to trigger insulin resistance and all the other stuff we talked about. But also processed food is going to wind up having a whole bunch of chemicals in it that the liver also has to detoxify or process or change. And so it's going to just put more stress on your liver. So if you had one version of a food that has no processing, no chemicals added, and then you have another version of the food that is processed with, you know, shelf stabilizers and other toxins and stuff, if you eat the one that doesn't have all that junk in it, it's less of a stress on your body. So lowering the amount of simple sugars and decreasing the amount of processed foods decreases stress on the liver. Low physical activity. Yes, unfortunately moving your body is important. Exercise is important and there's a whole bunch of Why exercise does direct things like moves your blood reserve around so the liver can process the junk out of your body. It also— exercise of your muscles sends out signals that are actually pro-healing, pro a number of good things. So higher physical activity is the antidote for low physical activity. And then the last part, which could be a whole topic unto itself, are digestive problems. So digestive problems really get into the realm of, number one, if I am having trouble Digesting the food that I eat. A lot of times, a couple of negative things go on with maldigestion, but a big one is that the biome, the bacteria, viruses, and things that live in our digestive tract that help us to digest and absorb food, the more inappropriate the biome is, the more it will feed off of the maldigested food we send in. And sometimes that will then have a downstream effect of actually putting poisons out into the bloodstream, which will then give the liver more trouble and give it more to work on. And there's other things like that, but poor digestion is not good for any part of your body, but especially not good for the liver. All right, we will get into more of this as we go along. Thank you for liking, sharing, subscribing. We really appreciate the whole membership group, all of you who listen, and I'll see you guys on the next video.