Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Keeping your liver in optimal health is absolutely essential to your overall well-being. This is because the liver is the organ primarily responsible for cleansing our bodies of any toxins that may enter.
Thus, a healthy liver is important for the proper functioning of our other systems as well; if any of our organs are rife with toxins, they cannot operate as they should.
In the Western world, we tend to put a lot of stress on our livers with the vast amounts of unhealthy foods we eat. Fast food items and processed foods contain an array of synthetic ingredients and chemical preservatives that make the liver work overtime. Combine this with the effect of pollutants in our air, and chemicals in our household and personal products entering through the skin, and you’ve got a recipe for liver overload.
As a general rule, whole foods from the Earth support liver function, while manufactured, chemical items do quite the opposite. Many ingredients used in processed foods are bad for the liver, however, there are two that stand out: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and trans fats. Individually, and especially in combination, these two villains can wreak havoc on your liver.
A 2010 study performed by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center highlighted the hazards on the liver caused by ingesting a combination of fructose and trans fats.
During the course of the 16 week study, researchers fed mice either a normal diet, or a diet which included trans fat solids as well as drinking water mixed with fructose and sucrose (in equal ratios, fructose and sucrose combine to form glucose: which is just plain sugar).