Subscribe via RSS Now In: Home → Health Blog → Detoxifying Your Liver Helps Keep It In Good Repair

Detoxifying Your Liver Helps Keep It In Good Repair

Your liver function is a vital part of your health.

There are so many areas of wellness to keep track of—like heart health, memory, blood pressure, colon health and digestive function—that it can be easy to forget about your liver. How often do you specifically think about this organ, anyway? If you've had relatively good liver health so far, chances are you almost never do!

That said, as we age it is more important than ever to think about your hepatic health—that is, the well-being of your liver. This organ may seem inscrutable, but it's really no mystery at all. Your liver function is a vital part of your health.

To ensure that this organ is in peak condition, it's important to keep it relatively free of toxins and fats. Below are some simple things you can do to improve your liver health.

The liver: Three pounds of pure vitality

You probably know where your liver is, if not exactly what it does. Take a moment to feel just below your ribs on your right-hand side. That's where your liver is located, just below the diaphragm. If you could peer through your skin, you'd see an asymmetrical, brownish organ shaped roughly like a triangle.

That's your liver.

This vital piece of tissue is your body's largest internal organ, weighing in at just over three pounds. What does it do? Well, unlike your lungs and heart, which are each responsible for one basic task, the liver accomplishes many things at once. Its multiple duties include:

• Creating bile, which helps your body break down the foods you eat
• Detoxifying your blood
• Producing the proteins that make up your blood's plasma
• Breaking down old red blood cells
• Producing more than 13,000 hormones
• Managing 50,000 enzymes
• Storing glycogen, which your body uses for energy along with fats

There's a reason the liver is called a "vital" organ! Unlike your gallbladder (which can be removed with few ill effects) or your kidneys and lungs (one of which can compensate for the loss of the other), you absolutely cannot live without your liver.

Good liver health means eliminating toxins

So how can you ensure the well-being of your liver? It all boils down to helping this organ do its job, which means assisting your body with the detoxification process.

Your liver is your body's primary defense against environmental toxins. Every day, your system absorbs thousands of toxins from the water you drink and the the foods you eat. Some of these are substances that everyone thinks of as "toxic," like the trace amounts of mercury and other heavy metals found in large fish, or the PCBs—that is, polychlorinated biphenyls, which are a class of industrial chemicals that may be found in drinking water.

However, there are plenty of other compounds that qualify as toxins. Alcohol is a toxin. Prescription drugs are technically toxins, as are certain over-the-counter pain relievers, like acetaminophen and ibuprofen. While these substances can be helpful, they still ultimately need to be filtered out of your blood.

Your liver accomplishes this task. If you'd like to help it along, here are some tips for maintaining good liver health.

Hepatic health tips

1. Drink plenty of water. Your liver is 96 percent water, according to the Nemours Foundation. Likewise, water is what transports toxins from your body to—and then through—this organ, cleansing your blood. To maintain optimal liver health, drink a small glass of water every hour or so.
2. Use nutrition to help your liver revive itself. Your liver is one of the few organs that naturally repairs itself. To keep it in good shape, consider taking nutritional health supplements and multivitamins, as well as herbal supplements that contain milk thistle, artichoke leaf or other plant extracts shown to help break up liver congestion.
3. Avoid alcohol. It can tax your liver and irritate its tissues.
4. Maintain a healthy weight. Being overweight can take a toll on your liver's well-being, since excess weight can leave your liver with an imbalance of fat. Getting even 30 minutes of low-intensity physical activity each day may help.
5. Monitor your medications. If you're concerned about the side effects of certain medications, talk to your doctor about the prescriptions you currently take.