The liver has considerable influence over the quality of fluids circulating around the body delivering nutrients and removing waste. The liver’s main functions are in digestion, assimilation and storage of nutrients, red blood cell production and detoxification. The latter is the most vital to the body’s wellbeing, especially when we consider our daily bombardment of toxins.
How important is diet?
With healthy lifestyle choices the liver will retain its efficiency and neutralise these toxins. If our diet is insufficient however, if we are stressed or consume too much alcohol, damaged fats and drugs, the liver’s functions become deficient and the tell-tale signs are sluggishness and a ‘woolly feeling head’.
Dietary Support for Liver Detoxification
The liver is best supported by a diet rich in organic, unrefined and unprocessed foods, in particular fruits and veg. Water is fundamental, and we need 4 pints of plain bottled or filtered water daily. Replacing caffeinated drinks with something herbal like grated ginger root is stimulating to the liver.
Supplemental Help
- Multi-Vitamin & Mineral formula: The foodstate multi-vitamin & mineral is a broad spectrum of vitamins, minerals and other beneficial nutrients that support liver function.
- Vitamin B Complex: B vitamins are co-factors in many enzyme systems, including those involved in liver detoxification.
- Multi Antioxidant With Co-Q10 containing;
- Vitamin C is depleted by detoxification reactions, and depletion of it impairs detoxification. Therefore a daily supplement is useful to safeguard intake.
- Vitamin E is a very powerful free radical scavenger and therefore a daily supplement can again be useful to safeguard intake.
- Selenium is being progressively depleted from soil, and therefore may not be provided in sufficient quantities by vegetables.
- Zinc is especially useful for drinkers, who need a zinc dependent enzyme in the liver to detoxify alcohol.
- CoQ10 is a particularly useful antioxidant for the liver, and as explained above Bioflavonoids and Ginkgo biloba may also prove useful in Phase I.
- Milk Thistle is a herb renowned for its liver protecting properties
- Probiotic living in the gut are vital to general function and well-being and are extremely useful in liver detoxification to help combat harmful bacteria
In Summary, a Liver support program is as follows:
All the above should be taken away from food