By Dr Sandra Cabot

If you focus on improving your liver health, you can see enormous benefits within a few months. Your liver responds beautifully to some TLC. This is not surprising because your liver is the most strategic organ for overall health in your body.

Take a look at our diagram. At the centre is the liver and the arrows show some of the things that the liver is designed to do. Incredible that the largest organ in our body does all this and more, 24 hours, 7 days a week to sustain our life.

Many people have a liver which is too fatty or overburdened by toxic chemicals or is inflamed from chronic viral or parasitic infections; but what I see all the time is that they don’t realise this is the reason their health is down and they are not getting better. Many doctors also underestimate the liver’s role in failure to recover from illness or achieve really good health. Doctors are trained to treat liver disease but often by then it’s too late.

Recently I saw a middle-aged man who was struggling to get over long COVID because it had given him blood clots. I explained to him that because he had a fatty liver, he would not achieve his pre-COVID health status. However, he could reverse his problem by improving his liver by quitting sugar, eating more vegetables, good quality protein and drinking more water and freshly made juices from lime, lemon and grapefruit. He would also need to follow the eating guidelines in my book Fatty Liver: You Can Reverse It.

What are some of the benefits of improving your liver?

• Easier weight loss from better metabolism – a healthy liver burns fat whereas an unhealthy liver stores fat
• Lower blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels and thus a reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes
• Better control of blood sugar levels, thus fewer sugar cravings
• Improved energy because the liver is the metabolic furnace of the body
• Clearer mind, better memory and improved moods.
• Improved immune system.
• Reduction in allergies and sensitivities.
• Clearer and younger looking skin.
• Slower ageing.
• Less headaches.
• Higher testosterone levels in men.
• Reduction of breast size in men with low testosterone.
• Improved sleep.
• Hormonal balancing – the liver breaks down and regulates many hormones that are made in our body, and if it does not do this efficiently all sorts of hormonal imbalances can occur. Many women with oestrogen dominance have an underlying liver problem.
• Better thyroid function – the liver converts thyroid hormone into its active form so the metabolic rate stays efficient.
• Less inflammation, meaning less aches and pains.
• Less digestive complaints, i.e., gas, bloating and more regularity.
• Fresher breath.
• Improved blood pressure control – I well remember a middle aged woman who came to see me with uncontrollable blood pressure despite the fact that she was taking 5 different blood pressure medications at once! She had no idea that her blood pressure was uncontrollable because her liver was unhealthy. The blood pressure medications were interacting with each other causing severe brain fog and brain dysfunction. My strategy was to send her to a health retreat for 2 weeks for a detox and a course of raw juicing. I am sure the rest helped her as well. After the detox her blood pressure was quite acceptable and she only needed one medication.