Fat and clumsy livers

The liver is responsible for over 500 crucial functions, so this is serious! Recent studies estimate that 26%–38% of U.S. adults have NAFLD (now often called MASLD, Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease). That is roughly 1 in 3 adults, and some newer research suggests the number may even exceed 40%.

A fat liver is unable to perform as well as a lean healthy liver, and since our liver helps with so many critical functions of the body, this can become a major generator of various health issues and symptoms whether to us personally or throughout our healthcare system. 

Why is this so big a problem? I believe to find this out, we need to simply look at what we are doing differently that is causing our liver to store more fat.

The sugar trap: sugars/glucose that gets trapped in our blood by insulin resistance is something I like to refer as a sugar trap. Insulin resistance can be caused by huge surges of insulin from eating high sugar food and drink over a long period of time. It can also come from caffeine, which causes temporary insulin insensitivity. When the cells of our body are not receptive to insulin (which is our sugar transport agent) and these sugars are left trapped in the blood for too long, it can really cause problems, imagine how sticky and syrupy things get if these sugars stay in the blood. This can slow down circulation, which can cause blindness and amputated limbs due to the lack of. These trapped sugars also cause advanced glycation end products (AGE’s) that cause rapid aging.

High fructose corn syrup: this sweetener is especially bad since it breaks down much easier. The fructose/glucose ratio is not 50/50 like sugar, it’s a 55/45 ratio of fructose to glucose. This easy to break apart binding lets it slide like quicksilver into our bloodstream without the normal breakdown in the digestive track or the spike in insulin, which is our sugar digestion hormone. If this fructose is not burned off while in the blood, it will rapidly go to the liver and trigger lipogenesis, which is the process in which the liver converts the fructose to blood fats.     

My opinion is that our body is designed to reroute things when it’s necessary to protect us. If this is true our body will be looking for a place to deposit these extra sugars that we are not burning off. If we have insulin resistance, (even if temporarily from caffeine consumed with sugary foods), it only makes sense that trapped fructose and glucose circulate to the liver, where the liver attempts to store it as a defense mechanism not to hurt us but simply to keep blood glucose levels safe.

Once these extra unburned, unabsorbed sugars get transported to the liver, it will go through a conversion process where the liver changes sugar over into fat through a process called lipogenesis and triglyceride synthesis. It then becomes a stored energy in the form of fat. This is an awesome way for our body to control the uptake and the release of energy, however if our liver is constantly taking up energy and not releasing it in equal proportions, it only makes sense that it will continue to build up in our liver and our network of blood vessels.

What we can do: the reserve energy in our liver is a primary source for an energy snack when we go into a calorie deficit, so if we simply cut our calorie intake down to about half of our normal daily intake for 1-2 days, this decrease in calories will cause your liver to release reserve energy snacks (fat) back into the blood in the form of triglycerides. 

My opinion is that periodic calorie deficits will help decrease the fat in our liver in the same way calorie deficits will cause the release of energy inside our fat cells throughout our entire body for their calorie content thus making them smaller fat cells. 

Our liver is our largest solid state organ handling 500+ crucial functions in our body, and when it is able to properly perform, just imagine how efficient our inner healthcare system can become when a network of 500+ functions is affected by a healthy liver that not only breaks down and helps get rid of our body’s toxic waste products but generates energy and nutrients for our body as well!