Twice this last week patients asked me about how to
cleanse their livers. This is not a common question, but a very important one. Nearly 80% of the detoxification, the removal of poisons from our body, is handled by our liver. The rest is handled by our lungs, kidneys, and skin. The bowels serve as a passageway for the poisons excreted by the liver to leave the body.
Removable toxins come in three forms or types: those that dissolve in water, those that dissolve in oil, and those that dissolve in the air. The water-soluble toxins are generally simply filtered out of the blood by the kidneys into the urine. This happens even with non-toxic substances if they are in too high a concentration. We see this when we consume a high potency B vitamin. Shortly after taking vitamin B, our pee turns bright yellow. This is the B vitamin thiamine being peed out.
The oil-soluble toxins are harder to get rid of, and this is where the liver comes into play. The liver first breaks these poisons into two pieces (phase 1 detox) and then combines the pieces with different tiny chemicals that decrease the toxicity and make the substance water-soluble (phase 2 detox). These substances are then mixed into the bile fluid the liver produces to be excreted into the intestines for removal from the body (phase 3).
Air-soluble toxins (mainly carbon dioxide) are excreted through our breath. Toxins that are not soluble in anything end up getting stored or sequestered in our bones and fat cells primarily. Our body does not know how to get rid of these. Examples are things like lead, plutonium, and arsenic. To a degree, we can use substances that bind to these things (chelate) and carry them out of the body.
The term liver cleanse is somewhat of a misnomer. The liver is not dirty and does not actually need cleaning. What the liver needs is support in doing its job. To detoxify the poisons in the body the liver goes through the three phases of processing just mentioned. Supporting the liver means nutritionally providing the liver with all the stuff it needs to do its job properly and the time to do that job.
Before going into nutrition, let’s talk about time. The liver is the most chemically complex organ in the body. It does over 800 different things. It only has so much time and energy to do all this, so various functions have to take turns. The first priority job the liver has is to process your meals and snacks. While it is processing food, detoxification processes grind to a halt and wait for the food processing to finish up. From the time you finish
your last meal of the day, it takes about 8 hours for the liver to process all that food. That means it only has whatever time is left over after that 8 hours before you eat again in order to process toxins. So let’s say you finish eating for the day with a late-night snack at 9 pm and then have breakfast at 7 the next morning. That is 10 hours between the end of one meal and the start of the next. Eight of those hours are used processing food leaving only 2 hours for detoxification. That is nowhere near enough time. You need much more time between dinner and breakfast to allow toxin processing time. For me, I allow at least 16 hours between dinner and breakfast to give my body 8 hours of toxin processing time. If I am doing a liver “cleanse,” I only do one meal a day (usually between 2 and 4).
So the most basic liver cleanse is to engage an eating lifestyle currently called intermittent fasting. It is not true fasting, but it does carry some of the benefits of fasting by allowing your body to have more time to detox itself. Okay, so now how do we support the phase 1,2,&3 pathways in the liver?
Phase 1 is supported by supporting the health and
energy of the liver. In general, these needs are the same as the whole body for health: eat good foods, get enough sleep, get exercise and sunshine, and drink clean water. The idea is to reduce inflammation. Too much inflammation mucks up everything in the body trying to do its job. Specific nutrients that especially help the liver reduce inflammation are curcumin from turmeric and silymarin from milk thistle. Metabolic support calls for zinc, B vitamins, anti-oxidants, and stuff that supports your body’s production of its free radical fighter – glutathione.
Phase 2 support is all about making sure that the liver has all the little molecules it needs to combine with the poison pieces. There are six basic types of these molecular connections:
glucuronic acid – made from blood sugar, cruciferous veggies help
sulfur – need sulfur foods like cabbage and onion family foods
methyl – need methyl donors like egg yolks, cauliflower, liver, flax, lentils
acetyl – usually plenty of that around in the body
aminos – amino acids like glycine, glutamine, and taurine
glutathione – made from methionine and cysteine amino acids
So as you can see, phase 2 is supported by healthy blood sugar levels, cruciferous veggies, egg yolks, flax, lentils, and good full range proteins.
Phase 3 is the process of transporting these changed poisons out and away. Some of them are picked up by the bloodstream and carried to the kidneys for disposal in the urine. The rest is expelled into the bile to be drained out into the intestines. Here the issue is the ability of the bile to drain properly. The liver can get congested or clogged up with too many fats being formed from fructose sugars, processing too many foods, and dehydration. We want the bile to be thin and watery. So good hydration is essential. A powerful tool to help keep the bile flowing is lecithin. Bitter plants tend to draw water to the liver and cause it to flush. Personally I use beet leaves (in tablet form), while other people are tougher than I and eat them along with dandelion greens and other bitter greens to get the liver juices flowing. Once the poisons make it to the intestine, you need the stuff to bind to the poisons to carry them the rest of the
way out, otherwise, they might be reabsorbed from the intestines like food and put back into the bloodstream. This is where insoluble fiber comes in, as well as such things as charcoal, bentonite clay, and things called thiols. They will lock onto the poisons and carry them out and into the toilet.
That is basically how you do a liver cleanse. Eat foods that support the poison breakdown process and will carry the poisons away. Drink enough water and eat bitter plants that will flush the liver. And give your liver the time each day it needs to do its daily house cleaning.
Why would you want to do a liver cleanse? This is all about eliminating poisons from the body. If things are
backed up, you start to feel the consequences of those poisons in the body. Common issues are fatigue, headaches, itchy skin, poor sleep, muscle pain/cramps, nausea, fluid retention, hormonal issues, irritability, depression, sensitivity to smells and chemicals, exercise intolerance, trouble with fatty foods, and in extreme cases, the whites of your eyes become yellow (jaundice).
The health of your liver is central to the health of your entire body. The liver processes all your food and detoxifies everything that shows up that will poison your life chemistry. If your liver is already in good shape, keep it that way by eating the foods that support it, do intermittent fasting, and avoid sugar, alcohol, and Tylenol. Those are the main substances that take livers down.
Tylenol is responsible for destroying over 200,000 livers every year in this country alone. Many drugs are liver toxic, but Tylenol is the most common problem.
Stay healthy and take care,
David