Top 10 Foods To Detox Your Liver

Hello Health Champions.

A lot of people know that the liver can get congested by fat. A so-called fatty liver

and that's the condition that actually affect 30% of the population today but then along

with the fat congestion the liver can also get clogged up and get toxic in many other ways

so today I want to talk a little bit about how the liver works because when you understand

that then you will very clearly see how to support the liver and why the top 10 foods

in this video can actually help reverse a toxic liver and a fatty liver. Coming right

up. Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you

want to truly 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 life-saving video. Now this whole

idea of being able to detox the liver is a bit controversial I did a video on the signs

of a toxic liver and I got the following very interesting comment I thought. It started off

saying there are 10 signs that your advice is bunk and I was thinking well this is interesting

why is that for example you can't detox the liver really I thought why would that be because

the liver's job is to detox and then he finished off this comment saying I'm glad I didn't

go to med school with you and I want to assure him that that feeling is entirely mutual I

don't know where this kind of thinking comes from but I've seen it in other places and

apparently there's a group of people in the medical field who don't believe that the liver

can be detoxed so basically they're saying that if that function is assigned to the liver

then it can't fail it's not possible for the liver to get overwhelmed for example and that's

also kind of like saying well you know constipation doesn't exist you can't get constipated

because the function of the bowel that assigned function, its purpose is to move things

through and therefore if that's its job then obviously can't stop doing that what they're

forgetting I think is that the body is living tissue they kind of think of it as different

separate systems and separate parts sort of like an organizational chart that if you just

assign a function to something then it's supposed to do that but they're forgetting that living

tissue needs resources and if you don't provide those resources then the job won't get done. So in

this video we will talk about what those resources are and a little bit more about how that liver

works and other things a lot of people don't think about is that the body is not the same

from moment-to-moment it's constantly changing so some cells in your body like intestinal

lining those cells change every few days 5 to 7 days you have all of the cells are replaced

and rebuilt the liver is basically rebuilt every 6 weeks and why is that because the

liver is kind of in the firing line in the process of doing what the liver does it basically

takes a lot of bullets it sacrifices tissue in order to do what it does because in the

process it creates some very abrasive by products and substances that has a lot of wear and

tear there for the liver is fantastic at regenerating itself The liver handles an incredible amount

of functions and one is metabolism but it's not just a metabolism for itself it manages

the metabolism for the rest of the body in many ways it is intimately involved in digestion

most of the things that you eat and absorb goes through the liver first so the liver

get to repackage basically everything that you eat it is involved with energy storage

So it stores glycogen which is a carbohydrate glucose reserve primarily for the brain it

produces hormones to manage part of this metabolism and what we're going to talk about today is the

detoxification aspect of that liver how do we get a fatty liver Well there is a supposed

delicacy Fois Gras which is French which literally translated means fatty liver and it's a goose

liver that they overload they force feed these geese they overload their digestive tract

and their liver so the liver get backed up and it's a terrible terrible method I don't

defend it or condone it in any way but I'm using it as an example to show that what happens

to the fatty liver or the liver when you overload it and what are they feeding these

geese you would think maybe they feed them a lot of fat to get the liver fast know they

feed them corn because corn and carbohydrates is what makes the liver fatty and in humans

it's primarily fructose sugar fructose and excess carbohydrates that create that and when the

liver in humans and in geese turn from a healthy liver to a fatty liver or foie gras as it

gets congested it also loads up on toxins and most of these toxins are fat soluble and this

is why we have to understand that a fatty liver is usually a toxic liver also Now let's look real

quick and how these things move through the body so when you eat food and you breathe

air and you drink water you take in food but you also take in some toxins THese go into

your digestive tract and the digestive tract absorbs the nutrients it absorbs the precious

things the resources and then they get passed into the blood and delivered to the cells

now the cells can use these resources and do metabolism they can transform the fuel

into energy and they can transform the amino acids in the fatty acids into building blocks and

tissue and then when it's done with that there's some metabolic waste just like a fire produces

smoke and ashes the fire inside yourself produces metabolic waste and this has to get out of

the body somehow along with the toxins that kind of trailed along now the cells will excrete

this waste It will just kind of dump it into the bloodstream and the lymph system and now

eventually it makes it into the liver and the liver does something called biotransformation

people think of the kidney and the liver as a filter which it is but it does so much more

than that because these substances are toxic they have to be changed they have to be transformed

so they don't destroy all the tissue on their way out and of course when we talkin about

the cells getting resources we have to realize that the liver is just sells like the rest

of the body and these resources that go to the sell these are resources for the liver

as well and now if the liver is successful in it's biotransformation now we can start eliminating these toxins

and waste products through the sweat through lungs through kidney and through the bowel so the bowel

has two jobs it supposed to reabsorb the excess liquid and then move out the waist but what

happens if the bowel isn't moving then the waste just sits there and the bowel keeps

absorbing fluids, liquid from the waste product the waste product gets harder and harder and

denser and denser and they sit there longer and longer and now we start reabsorbing these

toxins back in the GI tract they never leave the body so it's it's a form of autotoxicity

so therefore constipation is one of the first things that we have to handle that kind of

has to work first a lot of programs that you see where you buy little box that says liver

cleanse it really doesn't do much more than get the bowel moving and that's a good thing

but it's just one aspect of this it's like the last step and if you hadn't done any of

this first then you're not really detoxing much at all I'm going to get to the list of

foods and just a moment the trust me without this basic understanding the list of foods

is a huge waste of time so just bear with me I'll keep it as simple as I can the whole

process of the liver is called biotransformation and what the body is trying to do what the

liver's trying to do is just turn something fat-soluble into something water-soluble because

the fat-soluble that's the toxins and the body can't get rid of it until it turns it water soluble

so it kind of blends with the blood and with the other fluids in the body so to do this

it goes to two phases in Phase 1 there is an enzyme system called the cytochrome p450

system and don't worry about the name but I'm showing you that there's two steps because

that's important after this step there's an intermediate metabolite so a lot of people

can do this side but they can't do the next so now if this intermediate starts building

up now we get a lot of reactive oxygen species also known as free radicals and if they build

up and you can't get rid of them if you can't complete the second half now you basically

start rusting on the inside So phase two is different so we're going fat soluble to

water soluble and halfway through it's sort of halfway water-soluble but in phase two they're

using something called conjugation pathways in conjugation just means you add something

to it and now it's water-soluble now these fat soluble toxins they're also known as non-polar

that means that the electrical charge is evenly spread throughout the molecule that's different

than water because water is polar and we have to make this polar in order for it to become

water-soluble so this enzyme system uses things like oxidation and reduction to modify these

toxins and here is where the food comes in that we need B vitamins we need something

called glutathione which I'll come back to we need amino acids and there are certain play

compounds cold flavonoids and a very important thing called choline choline is an interesting

nutrient it's a vitamin that was only 1998 which is classified as an essential nutrient

it helps maintain cell membranes in your body so when you talk about that phospholipid cell

membrane this is a component of that it's involved in DNA synthesis it is part of the

choline portion of acetylcholine which is one of our dominant neurotransmitters for sending

messages in your nervous system but most importantly for what we're talking about today is it's

involved in fat metabolism so if we have enough of that we can help burn through that

fat in the liver and without it then that fat is pretty much stuck in the liver now

phase two has some of the same nutrients but also a lot of additional ones and here were

talking about conjugation this means that the body can't modify these molecules anymore

they're too dangerous they're too stubborn so what the body does it conjugates it adds something

to it it's like you take a guy and you hang a backpack on him and now you've changed his

balance a little bit and make it water soluble

we talked about glutathione previously and this one comes back here this is the number one antioxidant

in the body antioxidants are very very important in the body but it doesn't mean we should

buy a bunch of pills I'm not a fan of that of taking antioxidants in a pill form the

one you need is glutathione it does occur in some foods but you can't really absorb

it because your digestion breaks it down so what you're looking for are the components

of glutathione and these are three amino acids so if you get enough of these amino acids

that your body can make as much glutathione as you need now Glycine and glutamine are

usually plentiful the problem is Cysteine because that's a sulfur amino acid and we don't get

so much of it so that's typically the bottleneck it's the one that's in short supply that keeps

us from making as much of this as we want the other amino acid we're interested in is methionine

Now this is also a sulfur containing amino acid and even though it's not included

in glutathione methionine can become cysteine so it indirectly fuels the production of glutathione

as well so when you hear people talking about sulfur rich foods being healthy and reducing

inflammation and healing people this is why because these two amino acids contain sulfur

and they're components of glutathione some of the processes the body uses in this conjugation

is sulfation it can hang on some sulfate switch again it can get from these amino acids it

can hang on the glutathione they can conjugate the whole glutathione it can add on some methyl

groups called methylation so there's some nutrient supplement called trimethylglycine

then if you take that now you get 3 methyl groups but you also get some glycine and there's

some other nutrients like wheat germ oil is one of the richest sources of natural Whole

Food vitamin E which also supports this phase 2 and there's some other nutrients milk thistle

is a very popular liver support nutrient when people talk about detoxing the liver very

often they just talkin about maybe drinking celery juice or wheat grass or taking some

herbs or something and they can be beneficial but the whole picture is so much bigger and

this is not a quick-fix even if the liver regenerates every 6 weeks we're not replacing

and getting rid of all the toxins all at the same time it's it's cycles of regeneration

so this is going to take many many years and we need to be consistent in doing a number

of different things so first of all you want to stop adding the burden you want to stop

putting in the things that created the problem and that means stop alcohol stop fructose

And don't put more than you have to of these pesticides and glyphosate and the herbicides

and the chemicals that they spray on your food then once you've done all that now you have

to give the body a fighting chance you have to give the body a break so just like you

can force feed a goose you can give him a bunch of corn and he gets a fatty liver we

have to stop force-feeding carbohydrate so low carb and intermittent fasting is the window

it's the opening that allows the liver to start burning some of the fat in the liver

instead of just putting more stuff in there and then when you've done all that now you

go to the more specific things and this is support the phase 1 with B vitamins with

glutathione with choline and then you support Phase 2 with sulfur and methyl group for conjugation

and things like milk thistle and wheat germ oil and so on so I'm sure after this video

people will ask what what about such and such so there are hundreds or thousands of different

things that are beneficial and the idea here is not to give you every single one of those

it's to help you see the principles then you can go look for things that have Sulphur

you can look for things that have choline so the first category of foods are things

like beef and fish and poultry and eggs and these are things people typically think of as

oh no those are heavy Foods those are full of fat those are full of congesting things

but no they're full of the things your body has to have the support those phase 1 phase 2

processes so they're full of sulfur, choline vitamin E and vitamin B and again I'm not

claiming that this is a complete list of important nutrients they're just examples of some of the

foods that contain some of the most important things next we have nuts and seeds peanuts

legumes and again they contain a good amount of all these different support nutrients we

have organ meats and roe which is basically fish eggs and I put these little further down

on the list not because they're not as good they're probably even better but they're not

as readily available people are typically on average not going to find or eat as much

brain and kidney and liver and fish eggs as they would the other food but things are also

excellent excellent sources Then we get into the foods that are high in sulfur garlic

onion leeks and scallions they're called allium plants and they contain a lot of sulfur especially

per calorie so you can eat a fair amount of these they don't have much of the others but

like we said the sulfur groups people eat sulfur rich foods can typically reverse

a lot of disease so it is a very important aspect to look for next we have an important

group of plants the cruciferous the broccoli the cauliflower cabbage and also leafy greens

like kale and lettuce arugula etc these are pretty high in Sulfur and choline they're

not as dense as the animal products but you can eat a good amount of these and you're

not going to load up on carbs plus these also have a lot of fiber that will help keep bowels

moving fiber and water and they're also have a lot of different phyto factors a lot of different

plants factors that don't fit into these categories that are very beneficial for liver in terms

of cleansing so just in general the plants are cleansing but the animal products are

rebuilding that's how you want to think about that then we have some items that make it

on every list for liver detox because they have other properties they don't contain any

of the things we're talking about so they don't support Phase 1 and Phase 2 but there

other chemicals other things in there so these are things like coffee tea beats and basically

any low carb plant any non-starchy plant can help you detox and help cleanse the liver

and then I want to look at some supplements and the first one is N-acetyl cysteine so this

is a very inexpensive form of this amino acid it's a sulfur-rich amino acid that supplies

the body with glutathione building materials and this one is so powerful that it is the

first line of defense in the emergency room with someone comes in with acute liver failure

so very very inexpensive it's a great thing to take if you just want to make sure that

you're getting enough or if you feel like you want a little jump start on it next one

is choline you can also get it from a supplement these Foods the rich animal foods have lots

of choline but if you want a little extra it's not a bad idea they're relatively inexpensive

wheat germ oil is a great source of natural vitamin E is not like synthetic tocopherol

that you buy this is the real thing it works at a whole different level than the supplements

you buy and for B vitamins nutritional yeast again not synthetic B vitamins not isolated

nutrients but the whole food complex the way that our body really needs it. Again I'm not

trying to be exhaustive. I'm not trying to cover every combination but I want you to start

thinking of what is actually going on what is the liver need to not just the traditional

cleansing plants but it is more of the dense nutrients that supply things to support these

liver pathways important thing to keep in mind if the liver is successful in its process

of conjugating and biotransforming these things it's going to dump it in two places either

the gallbladder or the blood and via the gallbladder it's going to go to the bowel

from the blood it's going to go into the kidney and then the bowel can eliminate it as feces

the kidney can filter it out as urine but what if you buy into this idea of a low-fat diet

that you think well vegetables green leafy things is all I need again they're good you

want them but what if you think that that's the primary thing that you want to go low

fat and just eat a bunch of plants then this low fat is not going to stimulate the gallbladder

because it's fat specially saturated fat that need the bile to break down the fat so if

you eat a high-fat diet you're going to empty you're going to have this gall bladder empty

out its content into the bowel a low-fat diet is not going to do that enough plus a low fat diet

is probably going to have a lot more carbohydrates that drive up blood sugar and Insulin which

can create micro vessel disease and ruin the kidney so now the kidney can't filter things

out either so all I'm saying is you got to keep the big picture in mind it's not as simple

as just going vegan or carnivore or this or that just look at the big picture and understand

what each component does and when one extreme might be a good idea if you enjoy the great

one for you next thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time