Top 10 Foods That DESTROY Your LIVER

Hello, Health Champions! Today, we're going to  talk about the top 10 foods that destroy your liver, and these are in no particular order. So,  we're going to start with refined carbohydrates, and these are things like white rice and white  flour used to make white bread.

Refined means that we have taken something away from  them, and when they take something away, they often add something a little bit back and  call that "enriching the food. " Just to give you the right perspective on how "rich" you get,  they take away a dollar, and they put back a penny. That's what enriched foods are, and that's  why refined foods and refined carbs are something you want to reduce or stay away from.

But it can  also be things like fruit juice because the whole fruit is a whole food, even though I don't  think you should eat it completely unlimited. Once you turn it into fruit juice, you've  taken away a lot of the beneficial things, and you have refined it to where the sugar  is completely available for fast absorption. A couple of more examples are things like  crackers and rice cakes.

Even if they use whole grain to make the rice cakes, they've  still changed them—they fluffed it up so that the surface area is different, and you have  faster access to the sugar in those carbohydrates. The reason this matters for liver disease is that  the vast majority of liver disease is caused by metabolic problems such as blood sugar problems,  insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. So, we have to understand what a carbohydrate is.

Why  are we even talking about this? This is a glucose molecule, the most basic form of carbohydrates,  and this is the exact molecule that ends up in the bloodstream as blood glucose, so every cell  in your body can use glucose, and every animal on the planet can use glucose. When we talk about  carbohydrates, some people call rice and wheat and grains "complex carbohydrates," and they say  these are good things, and you should eat a lot of them.

But all it means is that we string these  glucose molecules together in hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of molecules branched  together, and this is called starch. But it's not really that complex because it only takes a few  seconds to start breaking these connections, and now we have free individual glucose molecules that  can get into the bloodstream very, very quickly. Now, what happens when we raise blood sugar is  we also raise insulin, and if we eat these foods on a regular basis, we get chronically elevated  insulin.

High insulin promotes lipogenesis, the formation of fat, turning the excess carbohydrate  into fat because that's the only way we can get rid of it and store it. And, of course, when we  turn things into fat, some of this is going to happen in the liver and contribute to that fatty  liver, called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. But there's one more way that refining food  damages food and the body, and that is we deplete them—we take something away that was  valuable, nutrients that the body needed.

When we process this food, when we break it down and  turn it into energy, we need vitamins and minerals that were originally in the food. But when we  take those away, now the body is suffering, and the liver especially. We'll come back  and talk a little bit more about that.

Number two on the list is sugar, and this is a  particular type of carbohydrate that is worse than just starch made up of glucose. Sometimes  they call this white sugar or brown sugar; sometimes they call it sucrose, high fructose  corn syrup, or agave, but it's still basically the same thing. What's different from just starch  is that in addition to this glucose molecule, now we have a fructose molecule, and this is a  different chemical configuration.

So the glucose can be used by every cell in your body, but the  fructose can only be processed by the liver. With sugar, because there are two types of molecules  in that sugar, now we have two mechanisms that are damaging. The first is the same: we raise  blood sugar, we raise insulin, we create insulin resistance and fat storage, some of which is in  the liver.

But now we have this second mechanism from the fructose, because the fructose can only  be processed in the liver, and therefore we tend to overwhelm the liver very, very quickly.  If we just had a teaspoon now and then, we'd be fine. But when we start eating massive amounts  of sugar that contain approximately 50% fructose, now there is way, way, way more fat-building  lipogenesis in the liver, and therefore we're going to overwhelm and create a fatty liver much,  much faster with sugar than just with starch.

These two factors are really the driving  force behind metabolic syndrome or Syndrome X, which causes metabolic disease. With that,  we see things like cardiovascular disease, increased blood pressure associated with  a high risk of stroke, visceral fat, and the progressed form of insulin resistance  called type 2 diabetes. The reason we talk so much about this in connection with  the liver is that the vast majority—55 to 70%—of people with type 2 diabetes  are also going to have a fatty liver.

Now, I also want to mention saturated fat and  clarify a few things because it's usually brought up as a positive factor with fatty liver  disease. But when you really look into it, it's not a positive factor—it's associated  with it. That's because the people who often have diabetes are not the people who take good  care of themselves, so they tend to eat a lot of saturated fat as well.

With very high insulin  levels and metabolic problems, now saturated fat is not a good thing in combination. But it's not  the causative factor. Some of you may have seen a couple of videos I did where I ate 100 eggs in  seven days, or I ate 100 hamburgers in 10 days, I think it was.

That's not to show you that  saturated fat is so great; it was just to kind of get some attention to the fact that we're  focusing on the wrong thing. I did blood work before and after, and I showed that the blood  work did not get worse. I did not drive myself toward metabolic problems in any way, whereas with  other videos, I ate a normal American diet with a lot of processed foods, and my blood work got  dramatically worse in a very short period of time, about 7 to 10 days.

But that's not me trying  to say that this is an optimal diet—eating one-sided is never a good idea. If you eat that  much saturated fat for a long period of time, you're going to unbalance something because you're  just not eating enough of the other kinds of food. What we want to do is eat a diet with balance,  and that does not mean you follow the balance of the dietary guideline with lots and lots of  grains, 10% of your calories from added sugar, and 65% of your calories from carbohydrates.

To  me, that's not balanced. You eat real, whole food, which can include a fair amount of grass-fed beef  and grass-fed butter, which are good sources, meaning the saturated fat in there is very  healthy. The animals were raised in a healthy way.

You can also eat plenty of extra virgin  olive oil and some coconut oil, especially for cooking. Then, you want to eat other forms  of fat like nuts and seeds and avocado, where the fat is still in there. Saturated fats and  monounsaturated fats, like extra virgin olive oil, are very healthy—they're very stable; they don't  get damaged easily by light and oxygen.

And then, of course, you also want to eat a wide variety  of non-starchy vegetables. If you eat a diet like this, you don't have to worry about saturated  fat because you're not driving insulin, and the quality of the fats that  you're eating is overall very good. Number three on the list is popular drinks.

Most  people know that soft drinks or soda have a lot of sugar in them, so in just a one-can serving,  you get about 40 grams. But a lot of servings in restaurants or other bottle sizes can get  up to 70 grams in a single bottle. There are other drinks where people don't associate  them with being as bad as soft drinks.

Coffee drinks, for example—very popular drinks  now—can have 50 to 70 grams of sugar, and most people going in to buy coffee splurge a little  bit and get something that's more like candy, but they don't think it's as bad as a soft drink.  Then, there are things marketed as energy drinks that have just as much sugar. Iced tea—people  think they're just drinking tea with a little sweetener.

Well, this could have every bit as  much sugar as the other drinks. Even drinks like Vitamin Water—some of those are unsweetened  or maybe sweetened with stevia or, worse, some artificial sweetener. But others still  have sugar, and you could get 20 to 30 grams of sugar in a serving of Vitamin Water, which, of  course, kind of defeats the purpose of trying to get vitamins.

Then, you have milkshakes—people  think, "Oh, well, that's just milk. That's just a little sweetened milk. " Well, you could  get 50 to 90 grams of sugar in a milkshake.

Even very healthy, supposedly alternative  drinks like coconut water—some of them could be unsweetened, and they still  would have 8 to 10 grams in a glass or in a serving. But some of them are  actually sweetened, and depending on the size, you could get 50 grams of sugar in something that  you believed was healthy for you. I'm bringing these up because a lot of people drink these and  don't really reflect on or realize how much sugar is in there.

The U. S. guidelines suggest that  you can have 10% of calories from added sugar, which would be 50 grams, and I think that is  already too much.

Even so, most of these drinks, especially a larger size, would put you over that  limit already. I believe that your daily intake should be 0 to 20 grams, which is four teaspoons.  That means you have a little honey in your coffee, or you have just that little bit of  sweetener in your beverage or whatever, but it doesn't mean you add massive  amounts of sugar into your drinks or foods.

Most people know that the United States kind  of wrote the book on obesity and diabetes back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. However, the rest of  the world is catching up so quickly. I want to show you some of the stats for diabetes  because, again, type 2 diabetes is the number one driving factor for liver disease and  fatty liver that can progress into inflammatory liver disease and cirrhosis and even worse.

Here  are just a few examples of the largest countries with the highest rates of diabetes. These are  for adults over 18 years. Brazil has 8.

8%, India 9. 6%, the United States 10. 2%.

Even though  the United States used to be the example of the absolute worst in terms of diabetes, now we  have other countries that are basically at the same level, or as you'll see, much, much worse.  We have Indonesia at about the same as the U. S.

, China about the same, and then with Mexico,  we're taking a huge jump—15. 9%. The United Arab Emirates is at 16%, Egypt 17.

7%, Saudi Arabia 18%,  and then Pakistan over 30% diabetes among adults. I'm bringing this up to show you that this is  a worldwide problem today. Some of the largest countries in the world have countries represented  on virtually every continent.

So, this is not a United States problem or a Western problem—this is  a global problem, and it is growing exponentially. Number four on the list is alcohol. There are two  things that only the liver can break down—there are no other cells in the body that can break  down a significant amount—and that is alcohol and fructose, which we talked about earlier. 

Most people know that alcohol is bad for you, and it used to be that virtually all liver  problems were related to alcohol. Today, the vast majority of liver problems are associated  with metabolic problems, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. Alcohol is not a great  thing for you, but in moderation, it's not necessarily so bad.

But there are some things that  are worse than others. If you have a mixed drink, that means they mix it with sugar—very  large amounts of sugar. Not only that, but now it's very easy to drink several because  they don't put a whole lot of alcohol in them.

They want you to go and get multiples of the  daiquiris and the margaritas and so forth, and they're loaded with sugar, so  you tend to drink a lot of them. Next, we have things like liqueurs—these are  for dessert. You take a tiny little glass, and it's extremely sweet.

They have as  much as 30 to 40% sugar in them. Again, you're not drinking all that much, but the  alcohol and the sugar now are combining the two things that are going to overload the  liver—the alcohol and the fructose. Then, we have things like sweet wine.

That's a wine  where they've added sugar, so that might be a port wine or some other sweet wine that contains  both alcohol and sugar. Then we have beer, which, of course, has alcohol, and it doesn't have sugar,  but it's pretty high in other carbohydrates. So, it's not as bad as these others, and the  carbohydrate is more of a starch.

The better alternatives, or the "less bad" ones, are things  like dry wine—dry red wine, dry white wine—and the ones that don't have any sugar at all would  be distilled liquor like vodka, gin, whiskey, bourbon, etc. I bring this up because I know  some people are going to drink no matter what, so as long as you're going to drink, you  might as well know which ones are a little better or a little less bad for you. But of  course, make sure you keep it in moderation.

Number five on the list is vegetable  oil. We all know how good vegetables are, right? We should eat as much as possible,  so if we can make oil from these vegetables, that has to be a good thing.

But when you go to  the store, you're going to see labels like this: pure vegetable oil and all these different kinds  of vegetable oil. So, I was curious—what sort of vegetables do they use to make these oils?  I went to read the label, and I had my hopes up that maybe I could find some made from Romaine  lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower.

We all know how healthy those vegetables are, but imagine  my surprise when it was none of those! In fact, virtually all of them had one of three  things: it was either soybean oil, which is not a vegetable—it's a legume, like  peanuts or peas or beans—or they had canola oil in it, which is another word for rapeseed, which is a  type of seed. Another kind of seed they often use is safflower seed, sunflower seed, or cottonseed,  and they make oil from that, but those are not vegetables either.

Or they use corn, which is not  a vegetable, even though a lot of people think it's a vegetable—it's a grain. When they extract  oil from a legume, a seed, or a grain, what they get is an unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3.  If we have a 1:1 ratio, we're allowing the body to regulate inflammation properly, but with these  oils, we often get as much as a 20:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.

Now, we're pushing the body towards  a pro-inflammatory state. That's bad in itself, but the biggest problem with these oils is that  they need very high heat, very high pressure, and even chemicals to extract the oil from these  resources. As a result, now you have an oil that tastes bad, smells bad, and has molecules  that have been damaged from all the harsh processing.

So, in the end, you end up with  something that's about as nutritional as plastic. Number six is fried food, and we've all heard how  bad fried food is, but the main reason they tell you is that it has too many calories. That's not  the reason.

The reason is that you start off with the same vegetable oils we just talked about.  But in addition to that, we reuse these oils. They're not going to pour a nice batch and make  some French fries or some shrimp and then toss the oil and start over—no, they're going to  use that all day long.

Each time they use it, now this oil gets more oxidized with the extended  high heat. Now we get more damaged molecules, more rancid fats. But you can also imagine  how some of the food you're frying is going to leave residues in there.

There are  going to be little traces of proteins, for example, and food particles that now get  burned because they sit in that oil all day, and that oil gets more and more toxic.  All these toxins, of course, are things that the liver has to detoxify and clean out  because that's what the liver essentially does. Number seven is margarine and shortening.

Again,  we continue using these vegetable oils that were bad enough by themselves, but now we process  them further. Now we add additional pressure and heat and hydrogen. We bombard them with  hydrogen, and now what we're doing is we're changing the molecular structure.

With the  making of vegetable oil and with frying, we do it sort of accidentally, but here they do it  on purpose. They want to change these molecules, and the reason is they want to turn the liquid  into something solid. In doing that, it changes the properties—it makes it more shelf-stable, and  they can also bake things differently.

That's why they use shortening for baking because it makes  things a little more crispy and crunchy. But the cost of that is, of course, that they started  with something reasonably healthy like a legume or a seed, but then they end up with something  that is a very, very unnatural product. They change the molecular structure on purpose  and end up with something called trans fat, and that's a molecule that is very unnatural.

It  doesn't occur in nature, and therefore we don't have the enzymes to break it down. Once it gets  in the body, it's very difficult for the body to get rid of it, unlike natural fats that we get  in real food. The way you can tell on a label, even if it says it has zero trans fats, is if  it has something called partially hydrogenated soybean oil, corn oil, or safflower oil. 

Partially hydrogenated is the really bad stuff. What they've started doing is they've  gotten better—they've started fully hydrogenating, which means they fully saturate it, and then  they supposedly don't get the trans fats. But this is not an exact science, so it's not like  they can guarantee that they fully hydrogenate 100% of the molecules.

There's always going to  be some that are still partially hydrogenated, and other products still have the partially  hydrogenated in there. But when there are such delicious natural things as the other  foods we've talked about—the butter, the extra virgin olive oil, and so forth—why  would you want to go to a Frankenfood that they've changed the molecular structure of on  purpose? It just does not make any sense to me.

Number eight is processed food. When you  go into the supermarket or your food store, typically you're going to find the real food,  the fresh food, around the perimeter. In the middle is where you're going to find all of  the processed foods.

There are several hundred, maybe a couple of thousand natural foods,  more or less, but there are up to 50,000 of these processed foods. These are the  packaged, shelf-stable foods that can sit there and last forever. The problem is that  they have made them shelf-stable on purpose, but in doing that, they're using virtually all  of these negative, bad ingredients that we've talked about so far in the video.

So, things like  white flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and the so-called vegetable oils. Now you know  why all these ingredients are terrible for you, but then you combine them all in one product, and  now it just gets that much worse. You have the hydrogenated or partially or fully hydrogenated  oils, which give you some amount of trans fats.

Of course, they still have to add some  preservatives, which are chemicals that make the food unattractive to mold, bacteria, and  yeast. Because they've removed anything that has any flavor except sugar, they have to add back  flavors with artificial flavors, and they make it look attractive with artificial colors. This food  is highly processed and highly depleted, meaning nutrient-deficient—they removed everything that  can spoil, which is usually what the nutrients do.

That's an additional problem for the liver  because what the liver does—its purpose—is very, very highly metabolically active. It's a very  active organ that uses a lot of energy and resources in doing detox, which is another  word for biotransformation. The liver has to transform all the leftover foreign toxins  and metabolic waste so we can get rid of them.

This uses up a lot of resources. In Phase  One biotransformation, the body uses enzymes, which are little keys or catalysts, to neutralize  some of these toxins, making them less harsh. These enzymes depend on several  different things to make them work, to activate them.

You have most of  the B vitamins—the B2, B3, B6, B9, and B12—all involved in activating these enzymes  in the liver. You also need antioxidants because a lot of these toxins and waste are going to be free  radicals, so we need antioxidants like vitamins A, C, and E, in their most natural form, which we  get from food. Selenium is another antioxidant, and these enzymes are also assisted  by cruciferous vegetables—cruciferous greens—and those little phytonutrients, those  chemical compounds you find in those vegetables.

In Phase One, we neutralize a lot of the toxins,  but they're still not water-soluble, so the body can't get rid of them. They're still  mostly fat-soluble. In Phase Two detox, the liver does what's called conjugation,  meaning it hooks the toxins together with something that is water-soluble, so the  whole complex becomes water-soluble, and we can flush it out.

These are things like  amino acids, especially sulfur-containing amino acids like methionine and cysteine. The body  also uses those two sulfur-containing amino acids to make glutathione, the body's number  one intracellular antioxidant. A lot of whole, rich, natural foods also contain other  things like polyphenols, fiber, vitamins, and minerals that assist the liver  in its biotransformation process.

By eating all the junky foods we're talking about, not only are you clogging up the liver with  fat, but you're also eating depleted foods. You're depriving the liver of the nutrients  it needs to clean itself out and to clean out all the other junk for the rest  of the body, which is really its job. Number nine on the list is fast food. 

As attractive as the idea of eating fast food may be, what allows it to be fast  and cheap is, of course, that it uses a lot of the same things we just talked about with  processed food. It has a lot of white flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and  is usually cooked in vegetable oils. The dressings they use are these so-called  vegetable oils.

Again, most of the flavor that doesn't come from sugar is now added  through artificial flavors and colorings. Now that you know most of the things that will  destroy the liver, I want to bring your attention back to this graphic just to really put this in  perspective. We want to understand that type 2 diabetes, which is the strongest association  with fatty liver, is a disease or condition that’s not supposed to exist at all.

Hundreds  of years ago, it was almost unknown—it would be extremely rare. Basically, it's eating all the  food I've talked about in this video that creates this epidemic. It's not even really a disease—it's  an adaptation.

By pushing the body out of balance, by feeding it junk and things it's not supposed  to have for years and years and years—decades, in most cases—the body adapts, and finally, we  break it through this constant abuse. Again, this is not something limited to a few countries—this  is happening all over the world. Just to give this some perspective: for something that's not  supposed to exist, in Brazil, one in 11 adults has type 2 diabetes; in India and the U.

S. , it's one  in 10; in Indonesia and China, it's one in nine adults. In Mexico, the United Arab Emirates,  and Egypt, it's one in six.

In Saudi Arabia, it's one in five adults that have this condition  that is going to lead them to a premature death and possible liver failure. It is completely  self-acquired. In Pakistan, there is now one in three adults that have type 2 diabetes.

But we're  doing this to ourselves by adopting a lifestyle that is very, very unnatural—it is sedentary,  and we're feeding our bodies these non-foods. Number 10 is baked goods or pastries. Here, we  have things like donuts, muffins, cinnamon rolls, cookies, Pop-Tarts, cupcakes—the list goes on  and on.

These foods that are the most addictive and that people love the most have really  nothing redeeming about them because they contain virtually nothing but the things we're  supposed to avoid, like white flour, sugar, and the oils we've talked about. They contain  chemicals, artificial flavors, artificial colors, and preservatives. When I grew up, we still had  these things—we usually made them ourselves; they were baked at home.

But it was not an  everyday thing like it is becoming now. That's the problem—these things that were supposed  to be treats are becoming staples, and it's not just happening in some places, it's happening  all around the world, and that's what's driving these epidemics. I had no idea until I looked  it up how common this is.

I picked Pop-Tarts, for example. I've never had one—I just looked at  it and knew that's not food. But when I looked it up, I found out that 140 million people in  the United States—way more than a third of the population—eat these things on a regular basis,  not just Pop-Tarts but related toaster products.

We have to start understanding that nothing we've  talked about in this video is actually food, and yet this is becoming the staple that we're eating,  and this is what's driving these epidemics. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love  that one. If you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works,  make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so  you never miss a life-saving video.