how to reverse fatty liver disease what it is and why do you want to know about
this even if you don't think it relates to you coming right up
the fatty liver that sounds like something alcoholics and old people get
right well it used to be that mostly alcoholics got fatty liver disease but
now most people who get it is what they call non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
and we're going to talk about what the liver does and what the mechanisms are
and why you really want to know about this it is very very tightly linked to
insulin resistance the mechanism is is basically the same for the most part
just like insulin resistance it is a matter of degrees so you can have a
little bit of fatty liver or you could have severe family ever just like
insulin resistance you can have mild insulin resistance or it could progress
all the way up to diabetes or insulin dependent diabetes type 2 if we talk
about mild to moderate to severe we want to think about the liver as an organ
that has a lot of reserve capacity the the body is amazingly adaptable okay it
doesn't break down at the first sign of trouble it starts to stress a little bit
but it has a lot of reserve capacity it can deal with a lot and the liver is one
of those organs that could be 80 maybe 90 percent dysfunctional clogging up
fatty before it really starts breaking down before it can't perform its job
anymore and before it starts showing up on blood tests that's why this blood
tests often give people a false sense of security because you get a blood test
and the blood test comes back and you say oh my liver enzymes are normal well
it's because the liver can still keep up you haven't pushed it far enough into
severe fatty liver that it starts to totally break down and the end stage of
liver disease is called cirrhosis this is where you start getting
scoring and in these cases it might even lead to cancer and you'll be a candidate
for a transplant at this point but even if it never gets to that point the
greater the degree of fatty liver that you have the more severe the health
consequences just like insulin resistance it depending on how we define
it the official definition of insulin resistance is with an a1c over five
point seven and that puts over a hundred million people in this country alone at
moderate insulin resistance the same is sort of true with this that there's
maybe twenty thirty forty percent of people with severe fatty liver but that
probably puts a majority of the population at mild to moderate fatty
liver so I don't have exact numbers but just judging on the prevalence of
insulin resistance and how tightly the mechanisms fall together then it's not
too far-fetched to draw that conclusion so let's talk a little bit about what
the liver does and the liver is an amazing organ it is a chemical factory
it performs most of the chemical transformations that take place in your
body it's this little lump that sits under
the rib cage on the right hand side it is between three to five pounds in most
people and it's a very large organ it wraps around the whole side and when
people get liver problems and fatty livers very often it gets sensitive and
tender because it starts to swell and kind of stick out under the rib cage a
little bit so it does over 500 different things over 500 different chemical
functions and transformations and procedures but we're going to just focus
on two broad categories and one is it takes all of the food that comes into
the body and it processes it so everything that you eat goes into the
gut and then it goes in to a big vein that leads straight into the live
it's called the hepatic portal vein the main thing that it does is it takes
sugar and turns it into glycogen and fat okay it does a lot of other things as
well but for our purposes we're gonna focus on that because that's what drives
this mechanism of fatty liver so whenever you have excess blood sugar the
excess turns into glycogen and when the glycogen stores are full then the rest
of it turns into fat so with our modern diet the liver has pretty much turned in
to a fat Factory that's all it does all day long is just to turn sugar into fat
and that's what drives this insulin resistance and this fatty liver process
other thing that it does is it detoxifies and everything that you put
into your body that's foreign that's a chemical that's a harsh substance that's
a foreign substance the the liver has to detox it it has to take that poison and
has to transform it by taking stuff away and adding things making it
water-soluble and harmless so that you can get rid of it you can dump it in
through the gall bladder into the gut into the bowel and eventually just expel
it and get rid of it the more the liver gets overwhelmed the harder it is to
keep up with all of this so the mechanism is that whenever blood sugar
goes up insulin goes up and insulin pushes the sugar into the cells
primarily into the liver because that's where the food comes first
then the insulin goes up it pushes it into the liver when the liver doesn't
have room for more like again it turns into fat and then we eat more sugar and
it turns into fat and eventually this fat starts building up and the liver
gets overwhelmed then of course the toxins if we at the same time put in a
bunch of toxins then that makes it just that much harder because now the liver
as more to do it has more tasks to perform and alcohol is another thing
that turns into fat and that's why alcoholics get fatty liver because they
drink a lot but if you drink some and you eat a lot of sugar now you're kind
of creating the same effect there another thing we want to be aware of is
all of the toxins and this is something that didn't exist in our society hasn't
been on the planet for most of human existence but now we have pesticides and
herbicides and chemicals and plastics and chlorine and over-the-counter drugs
over-the-counter drugs see may seem harmless to most people you pop a little
pill for your headache or your fever but over-the-counter drugs are responsible
for 16,000 cases every year of acute liver failure so we don't want it we
want to take these things seriously and have you ever thought thought about why
they tell you don't take tylenol if you had a drink it's because the burden
increases okay if the liver has trouble dealing with one thing and you give it
to at the same time it's twice as hard so now we have sugar and we have toxins
and we have alcohol and we have over-the-counter drugs and then they
sprayed your lawn with pesticides and you breathe in something else and you
have some chlorine in the water now there's hundreds and thousands of
different sources that become a burden on the liver
okay so sugar is what drives it but all these toxins are what makes it harder
and harder for the liver to keep up also the solution is kind of obvious you want
to add things that help the liver nutrients and things that give the liver
resources without becoming a burden eliminate all the things that become a
burden it's not so difficult once we think about it we want to stop alcohol
and alcohol and sugar they're both the one of these things
that is not a toxin per se but the dose becomes the poison because we're
designed to have a little bit of sugar in the fruit we're supposed to have some
sugar in the vegetables but we're not designed to have half a pound a day
we're not supposed to have I fructose corn syrup virtually injected in an IV
into our bloodstream there's no the body has no defense against that similarly we
haven't had pesticides or chemicals on the planet very long we haven't had
drugs we haven't had over-the-counter medication we haven't had any of these
things so we have overburdened the liver tremendously compared to what it's been
used to for our forefathers now when we talk about sugar it's not just the white
stuff out of the bag even though that is the worst okay table sugar sucrose and
high fructose corn syrup those are especially evil because sugar is 50%
glucose and 50% fructose and fructose is something it's a kind of sugar that we
can tolerate that's really good in really small amount so in nature
fructose occurs in fruit and if we get just a few grams a day then that's
perfect because it doesn't raise blood sugar much and it doesn't mess with the
body but once we start getting up into above 5 or 10 grams a day and we'll get
into 30 40 50 60 70 grams which has been the average for the last few decades
that fructose can only be processed by the liver okay sugar is glucose and
fructose the glucose can go into any cell in the body it can go directly in
and the cell can use that but fructose can only be used by the liver there's no
other cell in the body that can do anything without fructose if you eat 200
grams of sugar a day then 100 grams can be spread evenly over all the cells in
Vonnie but a hundred grams of fructose has to be metabolized by this one little
organ that's about three to five pounds which is maybe two three percent of your
body weight that all of a sudden has to take care of half of the excessive sugar
that you're putting into your body so fructose that's why fructose is the
number one factor in driving insulin resistance and fatty liver disease
because it gets into the liver the liver has to metabolize it it turns it into
glycogen but as soon as the stores are full it turns it into fat but the sugar
just keeps coming it keeps coming fructose is is especially evil because
even though it doesn't drive insulin it overwhelms the liver very very quickly
the other sugars are bad they're not as bad but they're very very bad because
everything sugar everything carb especially simple processed carbs but
all carbs turn into sugar and they drive insulin and insulin is what packs more
of the sugar into the liver that turns into fat so that's why you have to stop
the alcohol and the sugar if you have some amount of fat buildup in your liver
then you pushing the process in the wrong direction and it cannot recover if
you keep doing that then of course drugs complicate it they become an additional
burden on the liver so if you have prescribed drugs that you have to take
then you have to take those but talk to your doctor if it's really necessary and
start learning how to heal your body so that you can have that discussion and
maybe get off of them eventually the other thing that is a enormous burden
because anything foreign that the body doesn't recognize the liver has to
transform and one of the worst things are man-made fats so we're talking about
anything hydrogenated especially margarine and trans fats
and shortening and things like that but also the so called vegetable fats and I
call them so called because they're not made from vegetables they're made from
seeds and nuts and they're requiring a very very heavy amount of processing
when you turn corn and safflower and canola into oil you have to process them
with harsh chemicals very very high heat and they turn out very very different
from the fats that occur in nature and now they again become foreign to the
body they become something that the liver has to process and becomes an
enormous burden on the liver the good stuff then is everything that's not that
so good fats those are natural fats where the molecules have not been
altered those are things like olive oil extra virgin olive oil grass-fed organic
butter coconut oil those are wonderful wonderful fats they provide good energy
without being a burden on the liver and good fats they're very satiating that
very satisfying they provide you energy without providing any burden in addition
to that they replace a lot of the carbohydrates so if you're going to cut
back on carbohydrates that drive insulin and and fatty liver you need to replace
it and fat good fats natural fats is the best source of energy that doesn't put a
burden on the body or the liver vegetables are something that you want
to eat in mass because they contain nutrients and Fido factors that assist
the liver okay the liver loves vegetables
especially the leafy greens but any of the vegetables if you remember my video
recently on my faith my favorite 15 keto vegetables those are all vegetables that
you can eat as much as you like and your liver will love you for it so the
absolute most important thing is to remove the stuff that destroys the liver
and then to start putting in the food and the nutrients you can also give
the liver some specific nutritional support and these are things like
turmeric or curcumin or milk thistle in our office we use muscle testing so that
we can determine for each person exactly what is optimal for them so we use
mostly standard process but we also have a lot of different homeopathic and
herbal formulas so I wouldn't just go out and start indiscriminately spending
tons of money on everything that he called liver support but see if you can
find someone who is skilled and trained who can assist you in finding out what
would be right for you so this could be a good add-on but again 80 90 percent of
it lies in taking out the bad and putting in some of the good so I hope
that you can see how this actually relates to almost every person in this
country because if you've been eating carbs and processed foods and you live
in a toxic environment like we all do then this is something that you should
be concerned with and it is what's mostly tied to the epidemic of obesity
and diabetes that we're seeing if you are obese chances are that you probably
80% of those people have severe fatty liver and if you're diabetic then the
numbers are about the same so it's one of the most important epidemics that we
have is that of obesity and diabetes and this is just one of those factors that
can become a huge problem in itself but it is part of the mechanism so we want
to understand this if we're going to beat diabetes and insulin resistance and
get us healthy as possible please share this with as many people as you can
because this is not a rare occurrence this is to some degree this affects the
majority of the population you'd like to learn more about this and you haven't
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more videos and please check out our playlist and our other
videos on insulin resistance on diabetes on carbohydrates etc because they all
help build a picture to help you understand this and other conditions