Do you happen to feel your head heavy or sleepy after eating? This is a common sign that your liver is working a bit too hard.
Many foods are bad, even toxic, for your liver health and hinder your ability to detox naturally. If you only consume them on occasion, it’s ok. But unfortunately, many people have them in their regular diet without really knowing what it does to their body. People knows how certain foods are linked to obesity or cardiovascular diseases, but a very few knows the foods that negatively affects the liver.
White flour
Grains can supply us with many beneficial nutrients. It contains vitamins, minerals and dietary fibers. However, with the numerous chemical transformations to produce our common white flour, grains lose all their possible health benefits. Refined flour products attacks our liver health in many ways:
All the chemicals, pesticides and organic residues that they contain have to be treated and eliminated through the liver. This is therefore additional work for it.
Lacking their initial fiber content, refined flour products increase the risk of constipation. This leads to a bacterial imbalance in the colon, by producing too many pathogen bacteria and killing beneficial ones. Pathogen bacteria can then migrates to the gallbladder and create liver lesions and severe inflammation.
Refined sugar
We all know that eating refined sugar can lead to a plethora of health problems, including consequences to the liver. Because the sugar has been stripped of the ferments that help his assimilation, the liver has to compensate by creating those substances. Like with refined flour products, this means more work for your liver. And since the liver is responsible of regulating blood sugar, exhausting your liver can have severe long-term consequences.
Fats
Fats aren’t equals. Some people simplified it as bad fats (trans and saturated) and good fats (poly and mono-unsaturated, including omega-3). However, when “good” fats are heated, they can be as bad as trans and saturated fats, and this can have a direct impact on your liver health.
To assimilate saturated fats, the liver has to produce tons of bile and bile salts through the gallbladder. When too much bile is secreted for too long, it promotes premature ageing of the liver and gallstones.
Proteins
As stated in my previous post, we’ve been completely brainwashed on how much protein we should eat. We grew-up thinking that eating a lot of proteins is they best way to be healthy. However, eating too many proteins, especially those coming from animal source, is very harsh on the liver. It’s in the liver that the breakdown of proteins into amino acids occurs. This process produces a lot of metabolic waste. When we eat too much proteins, the increased production of those wastes can be toxic not only for your liver but for your entire body. The maximum calorie from protein you should eat is 15%.
Alcohol
I couldn’t write about the liver enemies without mentioning alcohol. We often hear about the French Paradox, saying that French people are protected against cardiovascular diseases because they drink red wine. What they don’t tell us, however, is how France has one of the highest rate of liver cirrhosis in the world.
Beware of occasional excess: Alcohol excess, even occasionally, can leave scars on the liver. When the scars appear too often, it creates a silent yet dangerous path to alcoholic cirrhosis.