Time to Reset: Cleanse Your Liver

Researchers estimate that most people are potentially exposed to over 100,000 chemicals in their lifetime. Every year, about 1,000 new chemicals are added to that list. They are everywhere: In our food, water, personal products, packaging, prescription drugs, and household and products.¹ 

When toxins accumulate, they can sabotage the gut, immune system, hormone balance, and overall health. But let's focus on your “ground zero” organ of detoxification — your liver.  

You may not realize the symptoms you are experiencing are signs of an overloaded detox system, because you might chalk them up to aging. 

You wake up feeling tired and foggy-headed, don’t feel fully awake until that first cup of coffee, and you also need an espresso to make it through the afternoon. 

It takes every ounce of energy to make those 4pm calls and answer those last few emails. Every night, you have a glass of wine to “destress,” and you can’t hold back when dessert is put in front of you. 

You don’t sleep well, either, so you take CBD oil to help you relax enough to fall asleep and start the cycle back up again the next day. 

Your body is literally crying out for a detox, but you don’t realize the power of detoxification or the role it plays in feeling your best self. 

Pretty much everything that goes through your body –– the food you eat, water you drink, medications you take, and cosmetics you use –– must be filtered through the liver. Detoxification is the liver’s superpower, but it does a lot of other things, too.

For such a small organ that’s about the size of a football and only weighs about three pounds, the liver is a true workhorse. Among its duties, it: 

• Produces proteins that play a role in blood clotting
• Breaks down old or damaged blood cells
• Ensures that your blood sugar level stays consistent
• Converts the amino acids from protein into energy
• Converts ammonia from protein to a much less toxic substance called urea
• Helps fight infections

I can’t talk about liver health without also mentioning the gut. The gut and liver are intricately connected in ways that you might not consider: 

• After the gut breaks down and absorbs what you eat, the liver converts food into energy and nutrients.² 
• Blood carries nutrients, medications, and toxins from the digestive organs to the liver. This critical organ processes and eventually detoxifies these things, after which the liver releases them back into the blood or to the colon for elimination.³  
• The liver gets 70 percent of its blood supply from the intestine via the portal vein, the blood vessel that carries blood from the gut and other organs to the liver. Studies have shown a link between the health of your good gut flora and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).⁴ More on that in a minute.
• The liver produces bile, a fluid made and released in the liver that the gallbladder stores. Bile breaks down dietary fat and helps eliminate the toxins that are fat-soluble. 

Calling the liver a true workhorse organ is an understatement! The daily onslaught of chemicals that can bombard the liver might come from sources you might not think about.

The Daily Challenges Your Liver Faces

Think about a major highway during rush hour. That’s the liver every day, juggling all of its other roles while helping the body manage the toxins we are exposed to through food, beverages, plastics and so much more. 

Let’s start with what you eat and drink. Many foods, food additives, and beverages we consume are either the most difficult for our bodies to break down or are the most likely to bog down your liver as it works to detoxify them. Sugary, processed foods, which are high in fructose, are one of the biggest stressors for the liver.

Even things you might consider healthy or safe can create problems for the liver. Most medications pass through the liver, the primary site for drug metabolism. Enzymes in the liver convert prodrugs –– inactive or weakly active substances that have an active metabolite  –– to their active metabolites. This is actually how many medications work in the body to exert their desired effect. The liver also converts active drugs to inactive forms.⁵ If you are on any medications that get processed through the liver, talk to your practitioner about safer medication alternatives for the liver, but never discontinue or modify prescription medications without his or her consent. 

Over-the-counter (OTC) medications are often overused, which take their toll on the liver. These medications include antibiotics as well as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories or NSAIDs such as Advil, Aleve, ibuprofen, and aspirin.  Every year, about 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations, and 458 deaths occur because of acetaminophen-associated overdoses alone.⁶ We assume that if something is a medicine, it will help us feel better or get well without untoward side effects, but even OTC medications can have serious potential secondary effects. 

The liver helps manage all these chemicals that you ingest every day from the food you eat, water you drink, medications you use. This organ also balances the hormones that your body produces. Whenever the numerous things you are exposed to everyday bog down the liver and create stress on this hardworking organ, these hormones can continue to circulate throughout the body and create problems in hormonal balance, including:

• Eliminating excess hormones
• Regulating hormones
• Metabolizing some hormones, such as estrogen
• Creating proteins such as albumin that can act as hormone carriers

When the liver can’t effectively remove these excess hormones, disruption in the body’s delicate hormone balance can occur. One example of this is cortisol, the body’s stress hormone. While cortisol can serve the body in the short term, when this hormone accumulates it can create problems such as blood sugar imbalances. I’ve talked about this too in regards to oxytocin, your bonding or love hormone, in this blog.

Overall, the liver faces an onslaught of chemicals that it must detoxify. It never gets a break! In my last blog, I talked about how sweat is an often-overlooked way to detoxify, particularly through science-backed infrared heat. However, your liver is without question your body’s main pathway for eliminating unwanted chemicals and substances. For the body to remove those toxins, the liver needs to detoxify properly.

The liver detoxifies in two phases, appropriately called Phase I and Phase II detoxification. Both are critical to completely remove the chemicals and other toxins the body encounters daily. Most toxins are fat soluble, and often congregate in fatty tissues such as the brain and other organs. They can’t dissolve in water, which makes them difficult for the body to eliminate. Generally, they travel in the bloodstream attached to carrier proteins. That’s where the liver steps in, to convert fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble components that can then be eliminated.

Liver detoxification is a complex process, but essentially occurs like this: 

• PHASE I. The goal for the liver in this phase is to convert a toxin into a reactive intermediate, which can be potentially more harmful than the original toxin. Phase I enzymes prepare substances to be excreted from the body. Think of it this way. Phase I converts a toxin into what I call a “tagged metabolite.” It’s like collecting trash together and tagging it for removal. If this trash spills out of the trash bags, this is going to create problems. During this process, the liver produces free radicals. If the body doesn’t have an adequate antioxidant defense system, toxins can potentially become more
• PHASE II. In this phase, the liver will attach a molecule to that toxin, such as a sulfur-containing compound, which makes the toxin water-soluble so that the body can then excrete it with the bile or in the urine.  Phase II pathways excrete carcinogens, toxins, drugs and steroid hormones. Phase II takes the reactive tagged metabolites I talked about in Phase I that can damage your body – the “trash” – and sorts them (to use the trash analogy) into organized bins for removal. It basically neutralizes those metabolites, which can then go to the kidneys or gallbladder for removal. But if those metabolites aren’t neutralized by Phase II enzymes, they can become more toxic, damaging your DNA in the process.

Think of it this way. Phase I sets the countdown timer on an intracellular bomb, and phase II deactivates that timer so the bomb doesn’t explode. 

The Problem…

Phase I is like an Olympic sprinter — it can go super fast.

Phase II enzymes are like a sloth — super slow.

…Phase II enzymes do their best to keep up with Phase I, but if you’re nutrient-depleted, they simply can’t.