The Liver – How Digestion Works

The liver is one of the coolest organs in my opinion. It does SO MANY things for the body. In fact, It currently has over 500 known functions in the body. The liver acts as the body’s natural detoxification system, it’s crucial for fat digestion, it helps regulate blood glucose levels, it stores essential vitamins and minerals until you’re ready to use them, it synthesizes certain nutrients if you’re not getting enough of them from your diet, and so on.

We will not go over all the known functions of the liver in this post, but we will go over:

• Some functions of the liver that are critical to digestion,
• how northern digestion affects the liver,
• how the liver affects southern digestion, and
• practical dietary and lifestyle habits that benefit the liver.

How The Liver Works

The liver produces bile which is used to breakdown and emulsify fats. This is the main role the liver plays in the actual digestion of food. Once the liver creates bile it stores it in the gallbladder. The gallbladder is a small, pear-shaped organ that is attached to the liver. The function of the gallbladder is to store and release bile into the small intestine for fat digestion. Bile is triggered to release when fatty acids reach the small intestine.

The liver metabolizes drugs. It goes through a special process that breaks them down to a point where the body can utilize them for their intended purpose. Your liver can also identify toxins and either store them away in adipose tissue (body fat) or flush them out through urine and/or stool. Your liver will do whatever it can to keep you safe and healthy.

All blood flows through the liver. It’s highly involved in fatty acid digestion, glucose regulation, and vitamin and mineral regulation. Fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) will all eventually find their way into the liver. This is where they are broken down to the point of absorption. Your liver will then decide if the body needs them at the present moment or if it needs to store them for later. The liver also stores B12, copper, and iron.

Creating hormones, synthesizing nutrients, and converting proteins into glucose are also all processes that the liver is either highly involved in or responsible for. What did I tell you? Isn’t the liver incredible?!

How Upper Digestion Affects The Liver

The brain is very involved in the entire digestive process. The pituitary gland (located close to the hypothalamus) is called the master gland and is in charge of most endocrine functions. The liver performs a number of endocrine functions. A healthy pituitary gland is crucial to the proper function of the liver. The brain is also very involved with fat digestion from the second it hits your mouth. Your brain triggers lipase (enzymes that chemically breaks down fats) production in the stomach and in the saliva.

Your stomach is where fatty acids will have the most exposure to the pharyngeal lipase enzyme (the other enzymes, hepatic and pancreatic, are produced by the liver and pancreas). Any digestion of fat in the mouth and stomach makes fatty acid digestion and absorption easier down the line.

Check out the previous How Digestion Works posts to learn more about the upper digestive system:

The Brain And Mouth – How Digestion Works

The Stomach – How Digestion Works

How The Liver Affects Southern Digestion

The lower digestive system (south of the liver) consists of your intestines and pancreas. Your liver is situated under your lower right ribcage. Technically, your stomach sits behind your liver and a little lower. However, the liver only starts it contributions to the digestive process during and after the stomach does it’s job.

The pancreas sits a little lower than the liver but performs it’s digestive functions at roughly the same time of the liver. The liver and the pancreas both play a big role in blood sugar regulation. The liver regulates blood sugar by controlling the release of glucose into the blood. If the body doesn’t need glucose at the time of ingestion, the liver can store glucose until the body is ready to use it. We’ll talk more about blood sugar regulation in our next How Digestion Works post about the pancreas.

Bile is secreted into the small intestine to digest fats as the food (or chyme as it’s called after passing through the stomach) travels through your small intestine.

Practical Dietary and Lifestyle Changes

You can support your liver by

• Eating a wide variety of nutrient dense, properly prepared foods
• Limiting alcohol
• Lowering sugar intake
• Eating high quality fats
• Increasing physical activity
• Using real salt (not table salt)
• Adding berries, beets, cruciferous veggies, fatty fish, liver, and nuts into your diet

We always start with a wide variety of properly prepared, nutrient dense foods. If the foundation of your diet is made up of these types of foods, you will be getting a wide variety of nutrients. These nutrients are needed for proper function of the liver. Inadequate nutrient levels are also put you at a higher risk for diseases like fatty liver disease. Berries, beets, cruciferous veggies, fatty fish, liver, and nuts are especially good to focus on when it comes to liver health. This is because these foods have specific nutrients and good fats that the liver needs. Vitamins D, E, A, and B12 are crucial. Liver in particular (either cooked and eaten in a dish or taken through a supplement like cod liver oil) is like a targeted multivitamin for your liver.

Alcohol is a toxin. Every time alcohol is processed through the liver, liver cells die and it causes a certain degree of damage. Your liver is one of the few organs that can regenerate, but too much damage can stunt its ability to regenerate at the level it needs to. Often, people will experience health complications after 5-10 years of heavy drinking. However, every time you drink you are increasing the toxic load on your liver. I’m not saying everyone has to be completely sober all the time. However, drinking should only be an every once in a while occurrence. Even then, I would caution against getting blackout drunk.

A diet high in sugar causes a lot of problems throughout the body including inflammation and magnesium, vitamin D, vitamin C, chromium, calcium, and B vitamin deficiencies. Excess sugar will turn into fat cells to be stored. Over time, as the body stores sugar in the liver, these fat cells can crowd out liver cells and result in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Some people will tell to lower you fat intake to support your liver, especially if you suffer from fatty liver disease. This makes sense, right? If fat is what’s taking over your liver, you should reduce the amount of fat your eating. I have a slightly different approach. Eating too much fat is not always what causes liver issues in clients. Often, sugar is the culprit. Healthy fats are actually good for your liver. I will usually encourage clients to reduce their sugar intake and focus their efforts on eating high quality, healthy fats (like nuts, seeds, avocados, cold-pressed olive oil, oily fish, duck fat, grass-fed butter, and coconut oil) and avoiding bad fats (anything with trans fat, rancid fats, and fats that have been cooked at a higher smoke point than they can withstand). I will also encourage people to use a wide variety of fats. This will help you get a balance of different kinds of fats and a good omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.

Both cardio and resistance training have been shown to be beneficial to the liver. Exercise increases fatty acid oxidation, helps prevent cell damage in the liver, and decreases fatty acid synthesis. There are positives to pushing yourself, but it doesn’t have to be super strenuous. You can experience some of these benefits by doing regular yoga or walking.

When I talk about real salt, I’m talking about salts like celtic sea salt, pink himalayan salt, or redmond real salt (amazon links). Not table salt. Table salt has been bleached and stripped of many of its minerals. Many iodized table salts have toxic amounts of chemicals added to them such as potassium iodide, aluminum derivatives, and anti-caking agents. The real salts I listed above are mineral rich and do not contain additives. The naturally occurring minerals in salt are necessary for liver health.

Even real salts can cause harm if overconsumed. However, keeping ultra processed, pre-packaged foods out of your diet will naturally lower your salt intake since most of these foods are extremally high in table salt.

Summary

Your liver is super cool. It plays so many roles in your overall health including filtering your blood, storing multiple nutrients, synthesizing multiple nutrients, and creating bile to digest fat. It can even regenerate…kind of like a time lord (do I have any Whovian readers?).

Anyway, your northern digestion has an effect on your liver. One of the best ways to take care of your liver is to take care of your brain, mouth, and stomach (I go over how to do this in my previous posts linked above). You should also consider:

• Eating a wide variety of nutrient dense, properly prepared foods
• Limiting alcohol
• Lowering sugar intake
• Eating high quality fats
• Increasing physical activity
• Using real salt (not table salt)
• Adding berries, beets, cruciferous veggies, fatty fish, liver, and nuts into your diet

I’ll see you all next week for our post the pancreas (woo-hoo)! If you have a question or comment, let me know!

Have a fantastic week, my friends!