The liver plays a vital role in your body’s metabolic processes – particularly detoxification. The liver is often the most overlooked and ignored organ in the human body, as though it has a lot of very important functions.
Your liver:
• Detoxifies all the harmful substances it encounters, converting fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble substances you can get rid of. The waste may also be converted into bile, which is useful in digestion.
• Detoxifies environmental pollutants. If your liver didn’t continually remove metabolic waste and toxins from your bloodstream, you’d be dead in a matter of hours.
• Filters harmful toxins and substances out of your blood every day and allows nutrients to reach your cells.
• Produces more than thousands of crucial chemicals and hormones including cholesterol, testosterone and estrogen. It also manages more than 50.000 enzymes to maintain a healthy body.
• Regulates blood-sugar levels and prevents dangerous spikes and lows.
• Stores essential vitamins and minerals – including vitamins A, D, K and B12 – that help keep your bones strong.
Fat
When you’re overloaded with toxins such as alcohol, prescription drugs, household chemicals, processed foods and more, your liver finds another way to get rid of waste. It creates balls of fat that collect in the liver itself. Those fats also spill into your bloodstream in the form of triglycerides, which can increase your risk of heart disease.
Symptoms
Your liver also moves those toxins to other areas of your body, including your skin. In fact, skin conditions like dandruff and psoriasis are tell-tale signs that your liver isn’t functioning like it should.
Chronic fatigue, high blood pressure and auto-immune disorders often stem from a liver that doesn’t function as it should.
Good news
The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to maintain a healthy liver.
• Eat foods in their natural forms. Fried, spicy and starchy foods contain too many toxins and harmful chemicals in the form of color and flavoring agents, chemicals and preservatives.
• Drink plenty of water. This helps your liver flush out toxins because water acts as a lubricating agent.
• Exercise. All you need is 10 minutes of variable intensity exercise each day. Even if you don’t drop weight, clinical studies show you’ll still improve your liver enzymes.
Detoxify
Another thing you could do is give your liver some help and detoxify it once in a while. Ask a medical trained person (doctor in natural healing, homeopathic doctor, etc.) for help.
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
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