How Does the Liver Function?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Peter Kramer with Wrightsville Beach Family Medicine in Wilmington, North Carolina here to talk a little bit how the liver functions. The liver is a very complicated organ. It's one of the most complicated organs in the body. It's primary role is to filter all the blood that goes through the body on a continual basis. It's responsible for extracting proteins and nutrients from the intestinal tract once the intestines absorb the nutrients they're all run through the liver so they can be broken down into their component parts and processed. The liver makes all, it has a very important function in synthetic function, it synthesizes several vitamins and it processes triglycerides and cholesterol, it manufactures cholesterol then it also manufactures all of your clotting proteins and all your clotting components. If you have a problem with your liver you may find bruising, bleeding, bleeding with your gums, those kind of things. That's involving the synthetic component of your liver function. There are several other things that the liver does in terms of making blood proteins called albumen. If you have a problem with your liver and you can't produce enough albumen it can really mess up the balance of your body. And so the liver functions by it has a series of enzymes in it and those enzymes will then break down the different nutrients that absorb from the GI tract and break them into their component pieces which the body then and the liver can reassemble to make different kinds of proteins. That's a little bit about how the liver functions."