The liver is the second largest organ next to the skin and performs over 500 functions in our bodies. The ancient doctors of India said the liver is the most important organ in the body, since it keeps the blood clean for the brain.
The functions are too numerous to mention here, but we do know that just about any health problem that you can think of can be traced back to the liver as its original source. Which is why treating the liver is the starting point for most of the patients I see in my practice.
And yet, the liver is often overlooked by modern medicine in treating your ailments. This is partly for two reasons: first, modern medicine isn’t used to tracing health problems back to their origins and second, there is no medicine that is actually good for healing the liver since all the pharmaceuticals are synthetic chemicals and are therefore toxic to the liver.
Our livers are always crying out for help. We just have to listen to them and then act on it. Here are some warning signs that your liver needs help:
Your cholesterol begins going up: the liver makes bile which lowers the cholesterol, so if it begins to go up then you better start giving your liver some attention. Taking a stain drug or red yeast rice may lower your cholesterol, but in the process they are very damaging to the liver. So don’t be tempted to blindly take any remedies, whether natural or pharmaceutical to just lower your cholesterol.The real answer is to fix your liver so it can process the cholesterol the way it’s supposed to.
Your blood sugar begins going up: if you have been told you are pre diabetic, this is the time to start seriously fixing your liver since the early stages of diabetes stem from improper liver function since the liver controls the blood sugar. If you let it go too long, then and only then the pancreas gets involved. Then it becomes much harder to fix. So as soon as your blood sugar shows the slightest increase, it’s time to start focusing on the liver.
You start forming glandular growths, such as uterine polyps, fibroids, cysts on the breasts and ovaries. The liver manufactures the bile which is responsible for processing out the estrogen every day so you don’t develop these glandular growths. If the liver function becomes impaired it may put out poor quality bile which doesn’t do its job of getting rid of the estrogen everyday.
You have developed food allergies or sensitivities. The liver is considered the seat of digestion and it has to process all the food you eat. If the liver is holding onto too many toxins it actually overheats and then when the food comes in it has a “temper tantrum” on it and oxidizes the food, turning it into poison, which we then register as a food allergy. Just avoiding the offending food, while it may give you some relief, isn’t the total answer. What really needs to be done is to address the liver — cool it down and clean it out, so it stops attacking the food in this way. By doing so most if not all of your food allergies and sensitivities will go away. Especially if you fix the gut micro biome at the same time.
The liver stores excess sugars as triglycerides. If your triglyceride levels keep going up it is a sign to give the liver a break by avoiding the white refined table sugar which acts like a poison to the liver.
If you have a skin rash such as eczema, psoriasis, dermatitis, acne or any other skin condition, begin your healing process by focusing on the liver, since the liver keeps the blood clean, and any skin rashes are a signal that your liver is very hot, congested and toxic.
Hemorrhoids are also a signal that your liver is very toxic, congested and overheated, creating a back pressure on all the veins which are bringing blood into it to be cleaned out. If the liver is congested the pressure on the veins causes the hemorrhoids — so you can take whatever measures you might need to fix the hemorrhoids, but don’t forget to include the liver as part of your healing protocol.
Autoimmune diseases have their origins in a toxic liver. Once the liver overheats from the toxins it is holding onto, it pushes the immune system into overdrive, causing the immune system to lose its intelligence and start attacking the body
If you get a diagnosis of cancer, immediately start out by fixing your liver, since it is the main organ which filters toxins from the blood. If it gets too toxic it will allow the toxins to roam freely in the blood which could overwhelm the lymphatic system triggering the growth of cancer anywhere in the body.
These are just a few examples of how malfunction of the liver can cause almost any health problem you can think of.
So how do we take care of the liver?
Well, the best place to start is by watching the foods and beverages you take into the body, since they all have to be processed by the liver. This means avoiding white sugar, fructose corn syrup, agave and artificial sweeteners — all are toxic to the liver and can damage it over time. Instead use the natural sweeteners and sugars such as organic cane sugar, coconut sugar, Florida crystals, raw honey, jaggery, brown sugar, rice syrup, maple syrup, molasses and stevia. But don’t heat raw honey as it damages the enzymes in the honey and forms a compound that is quite channel-clogging.
Of course drinking alcohol will damage the liver, so please try to quit while you’re ahead, before too much damage occurs. Don’t be fooled when you hear the fact that wine contains resveratrol which comes from the grapes, which is good for our health. The real truth is that the wines in this country are loaded with chemicals which can damage the liver. And the wine itself contains alcohol which also damages the liver. It’s best to get your resveratrol from fruits such as grapes, pomegranates and berries.
In a recent study French researchers showed that drinking wine caused just as much cirrhosis of the liver as hard liquor. Here are some of the ingredients that are used in wine-making to stabilize the wines so they last longer: sulfur, yeast (which turns the sugar into alcohol), and sugar (which increases the alcohol level). Then there are the chemicals added after the wine has been freshly fermented to help stabilize it. Chemicals such as copper sulfate, a well known poison, is added to remove free sulfur in the wine. De-acidifers are used adding calcium carbonate to the wine to reduce the high acid levels and acidifiers are then used if there’s not enough acidity, such as tartaric acid, malic acid and citric acid. Then there are the stabilizers such as acetaldehyde to stabilize the color and dimethyl bicarbonate (known as DMDC). DMDC is poisonous within the hour it’s added, usually at bottling, but it hydrolyzes (or breaks down) in about a half hour. Sounds pretty scary to me, even if they claim it hydrolyzes.
Most people I see in my practice have some liver damage, known as a fatty liver, due to eating processed refined vegetable oils, such as canola oil, sunflower, safflower, peanut oil, mustard oil and the cheaper olive oils which are bleached and processed with heat and chemicals. It’s best to cook with a very good quality extra virgin cold-pressed organic olive oil and ghee, especially cultured ghee if you can find it. (We actually carry it in my office). See my video on ghee for more information on the difference between regular ghee and cultured ghee.
Avoid taking too much Tylenol as it is also famous for causing lots of liver damage.
The best foods for the liver are those that are bitter in nature, as the bitter taste can not only reduce the heat (or pitta) in the liver, but can help the liver to detoxify. The best vegetables are bitter melon, dandelion greens, cooked beets, cooked bitter greens, which help it to detoxify. Loki squash, peeled and chopped and cooked with turmeric in its own juices is cooling to the liver. Limes are good for the liver — they are a little better than lemons since they turn alkaline quickly upon entering the body and are good for stimulating bile flow due to their slightly bitter taste. Grapes, grapefruit and berries, such as blueberries and cranberries are also healing to the liver. The drumstick and the leaves, both from the Moringa tree are very good at detoxifying the liver as well. And so are artichokes.
We have very special and rare herbs for treating the liver. Some of the herbs, such as bhumi amalaki cool down the heat in the liver and help it to heal, while others, such as mankand regenerate liver cells. Then there is guduchi which can clean the liver and katuki which supports healthy liver enzyme levels for efficient liver function.
However, when the liver is very weak, even these wonderful liver herbs are too much for the liver to digest. Don’t forget — everything you swallow has to be processed by the liver. Sometimes we need to give the liver a little break. So in these cases we use the vibrational versions of these herbs, which means that there is no crude herb for the liver to have to digest — only the vibration or memory of the herb is left, much like a homeopathic version of the herb. By giving the herbs in this way the intelligence of what that herb does goes into the gaps in between the cells and gives the same response as if the original herb was taken in. This allows the liver to heal more quickly. We can sometimes even give the herbs transdermally through the skin which also bypasses the liver and goes directly into the blood.
This is why it is important to know the person you are trying to heal — you have to assess how weak their liver is and decide if you want to avoid stressing the liver more by giving the crude herbs, such as those found in herbal tablets and teas or if you need to use the vibrational versions. In my practice I end up using the vibrational herbs the majority of the time.
Turmeric is considered the best friend to the liver, helping it to detoxify and make bile and aiding it in many of its other functions. But if you take it incorrectly it can do more harm than good. Listen to my video on turmeric where I highlight the best type of turmeric to take and how to use it in the correct way.
Let me add this as a final note: many many of the new patients I see are hurting their liver by taking way too many synthetically made vitamin supplements. When we read all the benefits of taking these remedies, we just keep taking more and more of them, without any consideration to the fact that a) these remedies were synthetically made and are toxic to the liver and b) how many of these can the liver process? So in the end I end up taking most of our patients off most of the nutraceuticals they are taking which makes it easier to restore the liver back to its normal function.
So hopefully by following these guidelines you can take very good care of your liver. And by doing so you can prevent most, if not all of the diseases that are currently plaguing mankind.
I hope you find the information in this video useful as you strive to achieve perfect health.
Thank you