Digestion, Liver Health and Detoxing

I recently had the opportunity to talk to a group about the importance of liver health, basic detoxification techniques, and digestion.  Here is an overview of what we discussed.

Our Livers are responsible for more than 500 different jobs in our bodies, one of the most important things that our livers do is filter the toxins out of our blood.  Our blood flows through our bodies at a rate of 5 liters/minute, and it is estimated that our bodies have more than 700 toxic chemicals in them.  That’s an enormous job for our livers. 

There are several things we can do to help our livers with this burden.

*First,  we can eliminate the toxins from our food.  The easiest way to do this is to buy organic produce whenever possible.  Remember the clean 15 and dirty dozen list?  Look for free range, non GMO fed poultry and eggs, and grass fed beef whenever possible.

*Second, we can eliminate the toxins from our self care and cleaning products.

*Limit alcohol, caffeine.

*Avoid processed, Standard American Diet (or SAD for short) foods (including soda).

*Eat good fats (pastured or organic butter, unrefined coconut oil, olive oil, lard) and eliminate the rest (canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, margarine, hydrogenated oils).

*Don’t eat difficult to digest foods after 6pm (proteins).  Instead, end your day with fresh vegetable juice, a light salad, or some raw fruit or veggies.

*Digest our food.  This is easier said than done, and it really requires an entire blog post.  For now, try to eat in a relaxed atmosphere, chew your food well, and be mindful of whether or not you need hydrochloric acid-HCl (keep reading to determine this).

Our livers need Amino Acids (AAs)to complete the two phases of detoxification, these AAs come from proteins, some of which can only come from animal products.  To make sure these proteins are being fully digested we need to do many things…from eating in a parasympathetic state (calm, not rushed, relaxed), to chewing our food well enough, to making sure our bodies have enough HCl (hydrochloric acid) to digest the proteins we eat.  Most people don’t have enough HCl, which is evident from the number of people we see on antacids and other proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) such as Tums, Alka-Seltzer, Prilosec, and Zantac.  These antacids and PPIs come with side effects and they are actually making your digestion problem worse by reducing your stomach acid, when what you really needed to digest your food was MORE stomach acid!  Read the book "Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You" by Jonathan Wright, M.D. to learn more about this topic.  

How do you know if you have enough stomach acid?  Well, if you get heartburn, it is almost a guarantee that you don’t have enough.  Here’s how that works.  If you don’t have enough acid in your stomach, the food that you eat is not able to be broken down.  It just sits in your stomach and rots/ferments.  When this fermentation happens, gas is created in abundance. There’s not enough acid in your stomach for the food to pass into the small intestine (this is only triggered when the pH is acidic enough), so the valve between the stomach and small intestine remains closed.  With passage into the small intestine locked (because the pH of the stomach isn't acidic enough) this gassy mixture begins to travel up into the esophagus (the valve between your stomach and esophagus goes both ways unlike the valve that goes from your stomach to your intestines).  Now, the esophagus really burns!  The food and gasses from the stomach are acidic (maybe a pH of 4 or 5).  A pH of 4 or 5 is much more acidic than the esophagus is used to or designed for, but not acidic enough to actually digest the food (needs to be a pH of 1.5-3 to digest proteins).  Therefore, we feel acidic heartburn (again, even though the pH isn’t acidic enough to digest the food  it is still more acidic than our esophagus).  Another way to know whether or not you need HCl is by how gassy you feel.  I can always tell when one of my kids hasn't taken his HCl by the increase of passing gas!!

What can we do to increase our stomach acid?  Lemon water, raw apple cider vinegar, bitters, and HCl supplementation.  Eating zinc rich foods, and foods high in vitamin B6 are also important for increasing your level of HCl.

When we are digesting our proteins, our livers get the AAs (Amino Acids) they need for detoxification. 

Digestion is also important for healthy lymph.  What is lymph?  It is another filtering system for our bodies.  Lymph flows through our lymph nodes, filtering bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens.  If we are not digesting our fats well, our lymph gets clogged.  Our lymph is a pre-filter for our livers. 

One way to make sure we are digesting our fats is by eating healthy fats.  These include coconut oil, butter and ghee from grassfed cows, lard from organically raised livestock, duck fat, olive oil (ok for light saute, but best used cold), and different nut and seed oils (never heat these).  Another way to make sure we are digesting our fats is to keep our bile healthy.  Our bile is made in our livers (another one of it’s 500 jobs!).  If we eat healthy fats, our bile will be healthy.  To keep our bile thin and free flowing, we need to include things like apple cider vinegar, fermented foods, dandelion, and most importantly, beets!

There are many reasons we should include beets in our diets including that they are an anti-inflammatory food, which helps with things from arthritis to heart disease, and they are full of vitamins and antioxidants (I’ve even heard they’re good for the libido), but for today the point I want to get across is that they help detoxify our blood (so they unburden the liver).

This thin and free flowing, healthy bile will be stored and released by our very important gallbladders at just the right time to help us break down and digest more healthy fats.  (Remember these healthy fats need to be digested well so that our lymph does not get clogged.)

Clogged lymph is not a good thing.  Our lymph does not have a pump like our blood does (the heart) to help it travel through our bodies.  Lymph relies on us to help it.  First, eat healthy fats, eliminate the other fats from your diet.  Second, EXERCISE!  It is so important that we exercise to move our lymph (and to sweat-another way the body gets rid of toxins).  Our lymph is holding some pretty nasty stuff in it and it is important that we help it move through our body to get it out.  Some additional ways to move our lymph...rebounding, jumping rope, dry brushing, lymphatic massage.

Additional ways to detoxify…drink half your body weight in ounces of clean WATER daily, get a full night of sleep, eat fermented foods/probiotics, yoga/meditation, cut back on sugars (too many sugars deplete the body of vitamin B which is essential for detoxification), castor oil packs, enemas, don’t use antiperspirants (this blocks an important elimination pathway for our bodies to release toxins, use deodorant without antiperspirant instead, better yet, make your own *), and find a way to reduce stress.

Eat plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits, the best for detoxification are leafy greens, garlic, watercress, broccoli sprouts, beet greens, lemons, cabbage, sesame seeds, fruit, dandelions, and beets of course.  I believe it is best to ferment or cook many of these so that our bodies can absorb them well.

*It's easy to make your own deodorant!  Just mix a little coconut oil with baking soda (will make a nice paste).  Add a few drops of your favorite essential oil and voila!  Apply with finger tips.

If learning more about optimal health through good nutrition interests you, look into the Nutritional Therapy Association at www.nutritionaltherapy.com.