The liver is an amazing organ. The largest organ in the body, it has more than five hundred functions. You can't live without your liver. It assists with metabolism, storing vitamins and minerals, and detoxifying toxic compounds. The liver's portal vein delivers both blood containing nutrients from digested food as well as toxic substances from the small intestine to your liver. Nutrients from the food are then carried through your circulatory system to feed every cell of your body. But what happens to the toxins?
One of the liver's many tasks is to recognize and neutralize these poisons, which come from substances such as heavy metals, pesticides, toxic foods, alcohol, cigarettes, synthetic chemicals, medications, and the by-products of stress hormones. If the liver can't keep up with neutralizing the toxins, they leach back into the bloodstream. Leaky gut makes the job of the liver more difficult by forcing it to break down undigested food particles as well as deal with the microbes and their by-products that have entered the bloodstream. The combined effect is an interference with the liver's efficiency.
Bile, which is stored in the gallbladder, helps release toxins from the liver. But in a toxic body, where the liver is overloaded, the bile itself becomes toxic and can kill off good bacteria in the small intestine, setting the stage for candida to take over. The function of bile can be further compromised by excess estrogen hormones, which reduce bile flow through the liver and also elevate bile cholesterol levels. This poses a risk of gallstones and recirculation of estrogens, which can increase the risk of developing breast, ovarian, uterine, and prostate cancers.
An impaired liver can lead to problems in another important area, states an article in the journal Lancet: "When the gut becomes leaky, more toxic substances are delivered to the liver, and if the livers functional ability to detoxify is impaired, more metabolically active substances are delivered through the bloodstream to other tissues, including the brain."
Like the GI tract, the blood-brain barrier can become leaky. When this happens, toxins that escape the liver become stored in fatty tissues, such as the cells of the brain and the central nervous system, causing further inflammation and oxidative stress. This accounts for the wide range of noninfectious diseases you see today. Detoxifying the liver and gut are essential if you want to keep inflammatory agents out of the rest of your body.
ELIMINATION: CONSTIPATION AND HEALTH
The importance of elimination to overall health is grossly neglected by most doctors. Many people tell me that their doctors have said that daily bowel movements aren't necessary. This is false. Daily elimination is essential, and two to three movements a day is best. The optimal transit time for food to go from your mouth out through your rectum is twenty-four hours. Yet, in my eleven years of practice, I have found that the majority of people have transit times that range between forty-eight and seventy-four hours. Looking at this on a larger scale, we see a nation that is suffering from an epidemic of constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, and colitis.
The main cause of all these conditions is inadequate water and fiber intake from fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. When grains are refined, both minerals and fiber are stripped away, robbing the body of nourishment and the assistance the fiber provides in cleaning the colon walls.
If your bowels are backed up, your GI tract must focus more on getting rid of waste than on absorbing nutrients, which sets the stage for malnutrition and dysbiosis. Elimination problems also cause autotoxicity. Toxins that are not released from your body fast enough are reabsorbed into the bloodstream. Constipation can also make the pH level in the large intestine more alkaline, creating a breeding environment in which yeast, parasites, bacteria, and viruses thrive. To find out more, you can check out Female Yeast Infection Causes.