The Secret Hero Inside You: How Your Liver Saves Your Life Every Day

The liver is an essential organ for maintaining overall health, and it plays many roles in detoxification, preventing illness and preserving well-being. It stores sugar, breaks down fats, produces cholesterol and blood proteins, recycles red blood cells, regulates molecules and enzymes, produces bile, regulates hormones, and stores vitamins and minerals.

Your liver is responsible for detoxifying your blood from harmful compounds we encounter in everyday life, converting them into compounds that can be safely excreted via the urine or bile. However, if liver detoxification cannot keep up with exposure to chemicals, these foreign molecules can turn into stored fat cells, causing inflammation and a host of other problems. Liver failure can occur if the organ loses the ability to filter blood, leading to high blood pressure and other complications like edema.

Your liver detoxifies your blood from many harsh compounds that the human body is not prepared for, such as pesticides, herbicides, and thousands of individual industrial chemicals. These toxins can travel along global air and water currents and are linked to serious health effects even when exposure is low.

We are universally exposed to plasticizers like phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA). These chemicals, found in various plastics, adhesives, and detergents, can mimic or block hormone activity and damage human DNA. Many studies have shown that the higher the level of these environmental chemicals found in a person’s body, the greater the adverse impact on their health.

Phthalates are the most common environmental chemicals and are known to adversely alter thyroid hormones. A 2011 study reported that phthalate and BPA exposure reduces thyroid hormone function in cells. A more recent study pulled data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and showed that the more a person was exposed to certain environmental chemicals, the greater the adverse impact on their health.

To prevent chronic illness and maintain good health, it’s crucial to protect yourself from harmful toxins by maintaining optimal liver function. In doing so, you’ll be better able to detoxify your body from the wide variety of harmful compounds we encounter in our modern, industrialized world.