#1 Absolute Worst Way You Destroy Your Liver (It's Not Food Or Alcohol)

Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to  talk about the number one way that you destroy your liver every day and a lot of people don't  know that they're doing it and if you look at the first four letters in the word liver it spells  out live so this really is an organ that you want to pay attention to and take good care of if you  want to live. And liver disease and acute liver failure causes a number of fatalities every year  in the United United States it's 50,000 people a year die from acute liver failure and around  the world it's 2 million people now when we talk about the causes there are some diseases  that can cause or contribute to liver failure so viral hepatitis for example it's an viral  infection of the liver that causes a chronic inflammation that's what the word itis means  inflammation and this is a huge stress huge burden on the liver other diseases that can cause  this are scarring of the bile ducts you could have autoimmune hepatitis again an autoimmune disease  that attacks the liver and causes inflammation and besides viral infections you could also  have parasitic infections and of course no list is complete without cardiovascular disease  and type 2 diabetes it's a metabolic disease that clogs up the liver that causes inflammation and  contributes to most kinds of disease actually now some of these you're sort of mostly unlucky if  you get exposed to it if you're in a unfortunate circumstances where you get some viral hepatitis  or some autoimmune disease now you can do a lot in terms of Lifestyle just eating good food reducing  stress taking the best care of yourself and these may not go away but you will manage them much  much better but then there are others and we'll talk a little bit more later about cardiovascular  disease and type 2 diabetes where this is almost entirely up to you that you can do a lot about  this whereas with cardiovascular disease there are some genetic factors that predispose you for a  small percentage of people for most people people it is entirely about lifestyle and type 2 diabetes  is entirely about lifestyle so the other factors we want to talk about obviously our lifestyle  choices so these are further causes but these are something that you can do a lot about alcohol  abuse used to be by far it used to be almost the only thing that caused cirrhosis of the liver and  liver failure today it is just one among many so we have sugar for example and in the sugar there  is the fructose component when we're talking about uh white crystal sugar table sugar or any of the  derivatives of syrup or agave or corn syrup etc.

50% of that is fructose which is very different  from rice or bread not that those are great but the really devastating component is the fructose  another big factor is drug abuse heavy drug use is tremendously stressful on the liver because  anything foreign that you put into the body has to be biotransformed it has to be changed and  processed and detoxified by the liver another one that is getting more and more attention is  processed omega-6 seed oils the things we eat and consume as vegetable oils like corn oil and  soybean oil and safflower oil etc. when we have a very large amount of oil which soybean oil we  consume over 40 liters per year per person in the United States that's an enormous amount when we  eat a lot of these and they're highly processed and they're high in omega-6 now we unbalance the  ratio of fatty acids in the body we put the body in inflammatory State and again this affects the  liver and I want to put cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes on here again under lifestyle  choices even though we often consider them as diseases disease States we want to understand  how much control we have over these that they're almost purely lifestyle choices another thing you  want to avoid obviously is smoking because it robs the body of oxygen it blocks the red blood cells  that carry oxygen to all the cells and in doing that it reduces the utilization of oxygen in every  cell of the body and therefore it interferes with the function of every cell in the body and then I  want to bring a lot of attention to medication as causes of liver failure because a lot of people  think that the only ones you have to be careful with are the prescription medication that they  are more safeguarded because they have more side effects and therefore they think that the over  the counter the OTC that there's nothing really to worry about if they sell them everywhere how  bad can it be and that's something that we really need to watch for now to really understand what  causes liver failure we need to also understand what does the liver do what's its daily job so  it participates in digestion with making bile to emulsify and break down fats and then the main  thing that people think about is biotransformation or detox it takes some really harmful compounds  and it attaches things to them in several different steps to make them water soluble and  less harmful so we can flush them out and this bio transformation is super important you would not  live many hours or many days if this didn't happen and there's internal and there are external toxins  so some of them are part just of a natural form of metabolism but then we have to add to that all of  the pesticides and the environmental pollutants that we've added in the least last several decades  it also breaks down cholesterol it regulates cholesterol it gets rid of old bad cholesterol  and it makes new cholesterol any hormone that your body produces the liver has to break that down and  get rid of it because everything is supposed to exist exist and do its thing for a specific time  it also has to break down all the metabolic waste that we generate through our chemical processes  in the body as well as from all the drugs and other chemicals that we add Del liver is also  the main organ that breaks down and processes and metabolizes all the macronutrients that you  eat the fat the protein and the carbohydrates it also serves as a reservoir are for glycogen to  replenish blood sugar between meals and in doing that it helps to balance out our fuel and energy  levels so all in all the liver performs all of this and there's a total of over 500 different  chemical reactions that the liver is responsible for and here's the key thing that we need to  understand about that so often in medicine and in science we try to isolate things and we look  at one specific thing at a time one process one pathway as if it happened in isolation but that  is the key to understand that the liver does all of this but it doesn't do one at a time it  does all of this all the time so I want to show you one of the most helpful concept that I have  seen I didn't come up with this but I've used it for years and years in explaining health and is  called body burden that when you have different things going on they accumulate they pile on top  of each other so we have down at the bottom is the metabolic waste that's unavoidable once you  metabolize food and things from the environment you put things in on one end different things come  out on the other end you make tissues etc. that produces waste so there's no way around that and  the liver has to do do that then on top of that we have the hormones that the body produces that  have to be broken down I call them Endo hormones for endogenous hormones coming from the inside but  then now we have to add to that EXO hormones or exogenous things that are added from the outside  in animal feed and we get it through drinking water etc.