Your liver thinks your bogus "detoxes and cleanses" are cute. Really, it's nice that you'd try to recreate the detoxing and digestive powers of this badass organ with temporary changes to your diet, but the truth is, your liver is the only real detox you've ever needed (although your kidneys help out, too).
Plus it has hundreds of functions on top of filtering chemicals out of the blood—a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that often goes unnoticed in healthy individuals. It makes components of plasma, platelets, bile, cholesterol, and a critical protein called albumin, which prevents blood vessels from leaking fluid (which is why patients with liver failure are often simultaneously bloated with fluid and dehydrated). It stores energy and iron for later use. It even aids the immune system by cleaning out bacteria and producing immune factors—molecules that help trigger and tamper immune responses.
Despite all that, we tend to give our largest internal organ (three pounds!) a run for its money with fatty foods, alcohol, and medications that mess with its function. But the liver has a rare resilience in biology: like skin, it regenerates quickly, and never takes a break from its routinely scheduled duties. That's great news for us, because we'd die pretty quickly without it, and even modern medicine hasn't been able to replace its functions. Don't filter this out.
 The liverJanuary 29, 2019 |
Tidying up
Your liver thinks your bogus "detoxes and cleanses" are cute. Really, it's nice that you'd try to recreate the detoxing and digestive powers of this badass organ with temporary changes to your diet, but the truth is, your liver is the only real detox you've ever needed (although your kidneys help out, too).
Plus it has hundreds of functions on top of filtering chemicals out of the blood—a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that often goes unnoticed in healthy individuals. It makes components of plasma, platelets, bile, cholesterol, and a critical protein called albumin, which prevents blood vessels from leaking fluid (which is why patients with liver failure are often simultaneously bloated with fluid and dehydrated). It stores energy and iron for later use. It even aids the immune system by cleaning out bacteria and producing immune factors—molecules that help trigger and tamper immune responses.
Despite all that, we tend to give our largest internal organ (three pounds!) a run for its money with fatty foods, alcohol, and medications that mess with its function. But the liver has a rare resilience in biology: like skin, it regenerates quickly, and never takes a break from its routinely scheduled duties. That's great news for us, because we'd die pretty quickly without it, and even modern medicine hasn't been able to replace its functions. Don't filter this out.
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1: Pint of blood the liver can hold at any given time (roughly 13% of a person's blood)
8: Segments within each of the liver's two large lobes
1,000: Small lobes within each of the 16 segments
500+: Known functions of the liver
2: Number of days you could theoretically survive without a liver (don't try it)
2: Number of liver-related genetic diseases scientists have been able to cure with CRISPR in mice
37%: Share of people suffering from alcoholic liver disease who received liver transplants in 2016 (thanks to a change in transplant policy)
17,000: Number of people on the waiting list for a liver transplant
A controversial delicacy
Earlier this month, California banned foie gras after a legal dispute with manufacturers reached the Supreme Court.
Foie gras is duck or goose liver after the animal has been rapidly fattened through a process called gavage. Farmers force-feed birds through feeding tubes multiple times between two and three weeks, at which point their livers have accumulated so much fat, they're diseased. The only reason the birds don't die of liver disease is because they're slaughtered. (French manufacturers denounced the ban, arguing that they produce the treat humanely).
Here's a fact for your next paté party: Although foie-gras is considered a French food (it literally translates to "fat liver"), the practice goes back to ancient Egypt.
The source of the soul
Livers have always had a valued place among organs. In some cultures, they're considered the source of the soul; the term "lily-livered" is derived from an old belief that cowards had no blood in their livers.
"Physicians in ancient Rome, Greece, and across the Arab world also believed the liver was the true seat of love," Imtiaz Dharker, a British Pakistani poet writes in Beneath the Skin, a collection of essays about organs. (You can hear the essay here.) It's "the organ with the most fundamental role, making fresh blood rather than just pumping it around, controlling the emotions, the temperament, and the character."
As such, any kind of torture to the liver was considered the ultimate punishment. In Greek mythology, Zeus punished Prometheus, a god who brought fire to humans, by chaining him to a rock and sending a crow to eat his liver every day. Although ancient Greeks probably had no idea of the organ's actual restorative properties, they believed that it was immortal because it was the soul's origin.
So how bad is booze for you, really?
Alcohol is primarily processed in the liver, and it's not an easy job. In the process of breaking down booze, the liver creates a carcinogenic chemical called acetaldehyde, which causes the liver to accumulate fat. This fat attracts more inflammatory immune cells, which can release chemicals signaling the cells to die.
As mentioned above, though, most of the time the liver can regrow its cells. Irreversible problems, which can be fatal, begin when alcohol routinely overwhelms the liver, without giving it time to heal. And although scientists know that drinking correlates with elevated risks for other conditions, including heart disease and other cancers, the exact amount of alcohol consumption over a lifetime that directly causes them is still unknown.
Healthy individuals' livers don't actually need to go through any periods of abstinence, like Dry January, although there's certainly no harm in cutting back. The real benefit to taking time away from drinking actually comes from reshaping your habits, so that you're more likely to drink less when you come back to it.
"We have mechanical ventilators to breathe for you if your lungs fail, dialysis machines if your kidneys fail, and the heart is mostly just a pump, so we have an artificial heart. But if your liver fails, there's no machine to replace all its different functions, and the best you can hope for is a transplant."
— Anna Lok, president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and director of clinical hepatology at the University of Michigan, to the New York Times.
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Pop quiz True or false: Liver transplants require a dead donor. |
The life of the liver transplant
1955: C. Stuart Welch, a physician at Albany Medical College, conceives that it'd be possible to transplant a liver.
1958: Boston-based surgeon Francis Moore conducts the first liver transplant in dogs.
1963: The first liver transplant is conducted by Thomas Starzl, a surgeon at the University of Colorado. His 3-year-old patient bleeds to death in surgery. In subsequent attempts, recipients die after a maximum of 23 days.
1967: Starzl performs the first successful liver transplant, in which the recipient lived for over a year.
1977: Only about 200 liver transplants have taken place at two major institutions.
1989: Starzl reports that thousands of his patients have survived for a year or five years.
2017: Livers with hepatitis C are cleared for transplantation into recipients without the virus.
Antifreeze, or ethylene glycol, is toxic to humans (and pets). This is because the liver breaks it down using one of the same enzymes that it uses to break down alcohol, called alcohol dehydrogenase. In the process, alcohol dehydrogenase turns some of the chemicals in antifreeze into sharp crystals that can slice up the kidneys, according to Cate Mackenzie, a family medicine doctor at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in New Brunswick, Canada. But one of the cheapest treatments for antifreeze poisoning is actually an IV drip of alcohol, like vodka, which occupies alcohol dehydrogenase and therefore protects the kidneys.
Break it down
The liver plays a key role in digestion by secreting enzymes (big proteins) that dismantle a sludge of food mixed with gastric acids, or chyme, into carbs, fat, protein, and nucleic acids for our cells. It works with the salivary glands, pancreas, and gallbladder to form the ultimate chemical digestive dream team. Hank Green from Crash Course explains.
Gout, a particularly painful form of arthritis, originates in the liver, when it produces too many urate crystals that accumulate all over the body. The cause is usually a diet high in fatty food, though it can also be a result of kidneys being unable to excrete these crystals. But gout used to be considered a sign of a good life, because a person had to eat a lot of rich foods, like wine, chocolate, and meats, to get it.
Today, gout has made it back into the spotlight. As Katy Schneider notes for The Cut, improperly executed quick-fix diets, like keto and paleo, have led to an uptick in cases even among thin people, as they replace carbohydrates with foods high in fats and protein.
Poll What do you think of your liver now? |
In Friday's poll about skiing, 49% of you say you love it. 📧 Don writes: "Check out Mt. Chacaltaya in Bolivia as the highest ski lift in the world. I skied it in 1980." (Unfortunately, it can't be skied anymore, as its glacier has disappeared.)
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