How to Improve Liver Function

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Peter Kramer from Wrightsville Beach Family Medicine in Wilmington, North Carolina. The question is how to improve liver function. The liver is an amazing organ. The liver will synthesis, process, break down many, many chemicals and whether they are toxic, medications, foods and chemicals that we eat during the normal course of life. The liver does process these chemicals by using special enzymes when things come in contact with the liver, these enzymes will then break the chemicals down in their component pieces and either discard them or process them and recycle them into other components or reassemble them into other proteins that it may need. You really can't do anything to help the liver promote itself but what the best thing to do is to remove any kind of offending agent or irritant from the liver. The most common would be Acetaminophen products which the brand name would be Tylenol but Acetaminophen is very common in headache powders, and many other over the counter cold and cough preparations and things like that. So Acetaminophen can be a little bit irritating to the liver. Number one has to be alcohol for sure. If you remove alcohol from your consumption you will really help your liver far more than anything else. Alcohol is really toxic to every cell in the body. There is no cell you can take from the body put it in alcohol and have it live. You can take other cells, skin cells and mouth cells and intestinal cells, put them in a salt water bath and they'll last for a day or two perhaps. Alcohol kills every cell in the body instantly. So nothing good really ever came from drinking alcohol. And it's especially toxic to the liver. There are some people that are called slow accelerators where they can not process alcohol quickly enough and so the alcohol keeps passing through the body and then back through the liver and every time it passes through there it kills more and more liver cells. So those are some things you want to do to have a healthier liver is to remove the offending agents from your diet. So that's a little bit about how to have a healthier liver."