A (22:25)

And.

B (22:25)

And this happens at the level of body, mind and spirit. And, you know, for thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine has taught that the liver is responsible for the smooth flow of energy and blood throughout the body. In fact, they have a condition they diagnose people with, and it's called liver Qi stagnation. And that just means there's not enough energy. Energy could be vitamins and minerals, blood flow. There's not enough happening for the liver to be able to detoxify properly. And so they would recommend certain foods for supporting liver detoxification, certain practices and movements in order to support the liver. In fact, I think this is interesting. One of the things that they would pinpoint is really important for liver health is your emotional health. They would say if you're storing up anger or resentment or unforgiveness, that would actually cause liver toxicity. And so, and we know and even think about this, if somebody, we would call somebody oftentimes like an angry drunk, if somebody drinks a lot of alcohol, sometimes it can make them angry or vice versa. And so there's definitely a connection there between excess alcohol abuse or liver issues and emotional outbursts and anger issues. And here's another one. They say it's also tied to the vision of your future and your purpose in life. So if you don't feel like you have a clear vision or something, you're moving forward to, if you're not growing, according to Chinese medicine, is that's going to block your liver health. Okay? The liver is all about movement and growth. It's connected to the color green. A lot of the foods that support liver health, like broccoli sprouts and Granny Smith apples and chlorophyll, right. These things tend to be green in nature. They move and support the liver. Doing a lot of steamed vegetables is great for the liver, but also there's a sense of if you don't have a clear vision for your life and if you're not growing, it leads to frustration. So if you're dealing with the emotions of any type of, and this is not all together just separately, anger, resentment, unforgiveness, and here's the single biggest one, frustration. You're frustrated about where you're at in life. You're frustrated about a situation you feel like more should be happening more quickly that will actually back up the liver and cause more liver issues. And different organ systems store different emotions and those act as toxins to those organs. So if you're dealing with a lot of impatience and frustration and maybe even anger issues at a situation or person, or unforgiveness, those will store up causing liver toxicity. So in Chinese medicine, the recommendation is there is to go and work on those emotions, work on releasing those in healthy ways. In fact, they actually recommend hitting things like doing tennis or pickleball or getting a boxing bag, those sort of things in order to actually release any pent up and stored up emotions and actually speaking them out and expressing them to somebody and confession, those things actually help release stored up emotions. And that's important for liver function in Chinese medicine. And I think this really also aligns with the Bible. You know, when you look at the biblical connection here, the Bible talks a lot about fostering healthy emotions. And, you know, I think about Jeremiah 29:11, where it says, you know, God has a plan and purpose for your life. Or Proverbs 14:30, it says this. A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones. Think about what envy is. Envy is looking at what someone else has. And not only do you want something similar. No, you want exactly what they have. It's almost a form of resentment towards that person for what they have. And you feel like, I should have what they have, okay, that is going to damage the liver. And so the Bible talks about this. A heart at peace, or even a liver at peace, gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones. It causes disease. Now, when you address these emotional issues alongside the physical support we're about to dive into, with the right vitamins and supplementation and foods to heal the liver, that will lead you to the highest level of healing, especially as we're talking about liver health and detoxification. And something else I want to mention that is so just incredible about the liver is its ability to heal and regenerate. I mean, the liver is probably your body's most powerful organ from the standpoint of it is very resilient. Think about what it has to deal with. I mean, it has to deal with heavy metals, toxins, hormones, blood filtration. I mean, so many different things it's connected to. And there was a study done on this where if your liver is damaged, it can fully regenerate. Not one piece of your liver, literally your entire liver as an organ, can almost fully regenerate in 150 days every year. For the most part, your liver is completely new. And so it's pretty incredible when you look at how resilient that organ is. So I want to walk you through the steps right now to really optimize your liver function, which of course is also going to help lose body fat, support hormonal health, brain fog, and a number of other issues. So the first thing is this. Eliminate your toxin exposure, okay? Eat organic. Get a good water filtration system, whether it's just a simple reverse osmosis filter at your sink. I mean, listen, whole body or whole house filters are wonderful, but they're often not necessary, even though I do like them. We have one at home, but definitely, at least you're drinking water, having that filtered, because there's a lot of chemicals in there that your body has to deal with. Avoiding eating out of plastic containers, make the simple switch to glass and stainless steel. Also, here's a big one. If you are taking medications, working with a doctor who wants to help you get off them. Listen, this is a big problem today in the medical field. Doctors want to just put you on medications and keep you on them the rest of your life. Every good doctor out there, which is only about 20% or less of them, here's what they do, here's what they should be doing. If they have, the first thing they should do is deal with, recommend a very specific diet and supplementation program and lifestyle habits to help you reverse your condition. If that doesn't work, maybe they get you on a medication for a period of time, all while trying to get you off it as quick as possible. Because every drug damages your liver and organs. And I want to walk you through the medications that are the most toxic to your liver according to medical studies. Number one is acetaminophen or Tylenol. This is a medication that stresses the liver. What happens is it's converted in the liver to a toxic metabolite called NAPQI and that damages liver cells, especially when glutathione is depleted. Now, I want you to remember back of something that happened just this last year. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Our HHS Secretary, said this. He said, we now know that there is a connection between autism and Tylenol. If a mother takes Tylenol or acetaminophen during pregnancy while she's pregnant, there is a greater increased risk of autism by about 20 to 30% and there's a greater increased risk of ADHD. And this was published in a meta analysis in 2021 in the European Journal of Epidemiology. And, and the other thing we saw here, by the way, there was another study published in the Journal of American Medical association. And they found that when somebody had a high acetaminophen exposure, a mother, okay, they had nearly a 3 times higher risk of ADHD, a 3.6 times higher risk of autism, okay? And there was another study done on over 100,000 children in Norway. So remember, this isn't one study. This is multiple studies, many long term studies. And they saw that women who took acetaminophen while pregnant had a, their kids had a two times increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. And here's why this happens. Tylenol or acetaminophen, that drug, that medication over the counter, you can just walk in any Any store and get depletes Glutathione, this is your body's master antioxidant. When glutathione drops down now your body isn't as protected. Remember I talked about this earlier, when we take a bite of an apple and that flesh starts to turn brown. That's oxidative stress, that's oxidative damage. Your liver is should be kind of this bright red color. It can turn brown. That's oxidative damage. Glutathione is the main antioxidant that protects your liver from that oxidative stress and protects your cells, every tissue in your body from oxidative stress. Glutathione is the number one antioxidant. That's why it's so critically important when, when glutathione drops now your body isn't protected. And so now there can be damage to the fetus. That neurodevelopment impact, it can start to damage areas of development of the child. That's why there's an increased risk. By the way, there's also genetic factors. And I do want to say this too. When they went back and looked at some of these studies, they also found that genetic factors also increased the risk. So it wasn't just acetaminophen by itself, okay? That was one factor. Another major fat major factor was genetic factors, such as if somebody had there. There are two or three in particular I want to mention here. One is called gst. That's really. GST is really the glutathione variant that can impact your overall health. And so if you've heard of mthfr, this is a gene variant that can sometimes slow down your methylation pathways, okay? Methylation is also important for especially phase two of liver detoxification. Now there's also a glutathione variant that can impact how much your body can produce glutathione. And so, and for those people, so like if you have mthfr, most people know this, you need to take certain types of methylated B vitamins, okay? Or at least that's very helpful for that pathway. In a very similar way, if you have an issue with low glutathione, you really want to be taking certain supplements that support glutathione production, like selenium, like N acetylcysteine or take liposomal glutathione. But you want to take some things there to support glycine. You want to support glutathione production, okay? But the moral of the story is this, that there are certain medications that damage the liver and lower glutathione, putting your body more at risk of numerous health conditions and of course, if you're pregnant, also putting gluten kids at risk. Now here is another medication that can greatly damage your liver and it is amoxicillin. Okay? This can trigger immune mediated liver inflammation and cholestatic hepatitis according to medical studies. So a lot of different types of antibiotics actually, especially if they're done as an iv, very hard and damaging to the liver and your mitochondria. Statin drugs, okay, if you are on a statin drug, what these do is these damage the liver and increase liver enzymes through a mitochondrial pathway. So again, statin drugs damage your liver. NSAID drugs, many NSAIDs, those damage the liver. And listen, almost every medication to some degree has at least a small degree of liver damage. But those are the biggest, the number two exposures that are really damaging our liver. We talked about this earlier. Alcohol, right? Excess alcohol. If you know you have a liver issue, you really want to avoid alcohol altogether. Eliminate sugar, especially sweetened drinks that can spike blood sugar. Avoid fried foods, highly processed seed oils. But also be careful of excess saturated fat consumption from things like butter and animal fats. Now I do want to say this, listen, for some people, you'll do just fine with a certain amount of animal fats and things like grass fed butter, especially if you don't have any liver issues. And if you're on a lower calorie diet, your body will tolerate that better. And if your liver is underburdened, if you have very little stress, okay, everything is flowing well, your body can handle more. But if you're under a state where your liver is already stressed, the food group where your body has to work, your liver has to work the hardest to break it down. It's saturated fats, okay? That's the reality. And these highly processed seed oils, that's gonna stress the liver. You also want to cut. We talked, of course, any fast food, ultra processed snack, and here's another one, late night snacking. Your liver detoxifies really from around 11pm to 3am and if you're eating at night, your liver is now working rather than detoxing, healing and regenerating, that's very hard on the liver. So really eating an early dinner and not eating again till morning is essential for liver health. And of course, smoking or tobacco uses are also very hard on the liver in terms of food. Now here's the next step. We want to get rid of those foods and we want to start eating foods that support bile flow. Okay, so your liver produces bile. It's then stored in the gallbladder. It's then released. And what bile does is bile helps break down fat soluble vitamins. It helps and supports detoxification. It's part of that waste management system. So we want to support bile flow. Some of the best things for that are sour foods, especially doing a little lemon juice in your water, doing apple cider vinegar. These are very supportive for the liver gallbladder and bile. Cruciferous vegetables, especially steamed. If you can buy bok choy and broccoli and cauliflower and cabbage and kale and brussels sprouts and do a lot of those cruciferous vegetables, it is absolutely incredible for liver health, especially if they're just steamed. That's sort of the cleanest version of them. Now, if you want to bake them, I would do that in a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil or a little coconut oil, something like that, with some sea salt. But steaming would be the best there for the liver. And remember what we talked about earlier, especially if you're dealing with estrogen dominance or pcos or PMS or any type of hormonal issue related to women. And actually this is true for men too, because one of the things that causes testosterone to deplete is excess estrogen or your testosterone turning into estrogen. All that being said, cruciferous vegetables contain a compound called Indole 3 Carbinol, which takes this. It supports the liver in breaking down and getting rid of the excess estrogen. So cruciferous vegetables are one of those hero foods for your liver. Now another food is bitter greens. Spinach, arugula, dandelion greens, any of those green leafy vegetables are amazing for the liver. Watercress, they are bitter foods support bile production. So the more bitter you have, the more it actually supports bile flow and production there as well. I also want to mention just sort of a really hero superfood here we don't eat very much of, and that is sprouts. If you ever see in the grocery store, there's little sprouts like broccoli sprouts or alfalfa sprouts. Those contain sulfurane. That actually helps release and get rid of excess estrogen as well. But also it helps the liver get rid of different chemicals that cause cancer. So they have really strong anti cancer properties if you add those sprouts. What I like to do is I'll make a salad at home in the spring and Summer. And I will add on some apple cider vinegar and I will add in some sprouts there and I might have some hummus with it or again, olive oil, balsamic vinegar or something like that as a, as a dressing. But sprouts are a great superfood for the liver. Beets boost nitric oxide. They also support liver detoxification. Garlic and onions, artichokes, really good for bile and gallbladder flow. Doing berries, high fiber foods. Fiber is really, really good for the liver and the gut to get rid of any excess estrogen in the body as well, or chemicals. So doing, you know, berries, doing flaxseeds, doing chia seeds, those types of foods, really great for liver. Gallbladder, extra virgin olive oil and bone broth and soups. Bone broth contains the amino acid glycine, which is also critical for liver function. So those are some of the absolute best. Now, I also want to mention in terms of your macronutrients, you really want to focus on high protein, high fiber, and then a lot of nutrients via things like, you know, vegetables, berries, pomegranate, apples and seeds like flax and chia. Okay, that's sort of the ideal diet for the liver, according to a study published in Oxford Medicine. Here's what they say. Adequate dietary protein plays a crucial part in diminishing the risk of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Dietary protein has been shown to reduce fat accumulation in the liver by increasing liver metabolism, eliciting it really being helpful for not having those food cravings and supporting insulin sensitivity. And the more muscle mass you have, the more that supports insulin as well. So getting more protein, around 30 to 40 grams per meal is sort of ideal when it comes to supporting your liver health as well. And the last step here I want to talk about, and this is really important, is elimination, okay? Supporting your liver in elimination. And this is where I mentioned fiber early earlier. You want to get around 30 to 40 grams of fiber daily. And this is going to lower liver fat. It's going to bind to excess toxins and get them out in your body, because if that doesn't happen, those toxins can recirculate from your gut, get back in the bloodstream, and then your liver has to deal with them again. And so making sure you're not having constipation, making sure you're having regular bowel movements is really important for liver function. So high fiber, doing magnesium glycinate at night or some form of magnesium is fantastic. Around 300 to 600 milligrams in the evening. So let's dive into now the top eight supplements that support liver detoxification. And there's probably a few of these that you maybe haven't heard of or didn't realize are really important for liver function. The first one here is really consuming the right herbals. Milk thistle is my favorite, typically around 200 to 400 milligrams a day. This helps actually protect liver cells. In fact, there's a great study on people that have gone through chemotherapy and radiation treatments and milk thistle supporting liver regeneration and protecting the liver while going through those treatments. But milk thistle protects your liver from damage, and so it's probably my number one favorite herb for overall liver health. Now, listen, there's many others I'm a big fan of. Artichoke is great for gallbladder. Dandelion is also wonderful. Schisandra is a berry used in Chinese medicine that protects the liver and supports it as well. But getting those right herbals are really, really great for overall liver function. Number two, n acetylcysteine, 1 of those key amino acids needed for liver function. We talked about glycine earlier, but cysteine is really important for liver function. And N acetylcysteine is a key precursor to glutathione, which, again, as I talked about, it's the liver's most important internal antioxidant and detoxification compound. So making sure you're getting, and I would say you want to be doing at least 600 milligrams daily. For some people, though, you want to take up to 2,400 milligrams daily or more. If you're dealing with major toxicity issues or you're doing a detox or cleanse, I personally take around 1200-1800 milligrams a day. Another one here is glycine. Okay? Glycine taking about 3 grams at night. This supports phase two liver detoxification. Again, when we talk about glutathione, glutathione is known as a tripeptide. Okay? It's a peptide. And two of those most important amino acids are glycine and cysteine. Glutamate is the other one. But really the biggest ones people are missing today, especially as you age. Glycine is the biggest one, and then cysteine. And a lot of times we don't have the nutrients or the amino acids our body needs in order to create enough glutathione. So doing about 3 grams of glycine at night is tremendously beneficial. By the way, I mentioned this earlier. If you wake up in the middle of the night, let's say it's between especially 1 and 3am That's a sign that the liver is overburdened or doesn't have what it needs to detoxify. And consuming glycine has shown in a few studies to help keep you from waking up at 3am because now the body has what it needs. So taking glycine before bed. And I really love pairing glycine with N acetylcysteine and with magnesium glycinate. It'll help you sleep deeper, it'll help you sleep longer and not wake up at night because of that. So if you want to improve your sleep quality, and that's one of those symptoms you have related to liver issues, glycine is amazing. Now, I want to mention there is a new supplement out there that a lot of people are taking today where they're combining glycine and N acetylcysteine, giving your body really what it needs to create glutathione. And the supplement tends to be called Glynac. And there are some great studies on this. In fact, there was a study where people supplemented with Glynac for 16 weeks and it reduced insulin resistance by 64%, lowered fasting insulin by 65%, and improved actually, longevity markers like gait speed and grip strength by around 14%. It also corrected many of the hallmarks of aging, including oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation. There was an animal study where people took Glynac, which is again glycine plus N acetylcysteine, and it increased the lifespan in mice by 24%. So many, many benefits there. And if you're wanting to take a great detoxification supplement that's also great for longevity, then taking Glynac would be a great option. There's also another protective compound along with glutathione I really like, called alpha lipoic acid. You can take around 300 to 600 milligrams of that. This helps reduce oxidative stress on the liver as well. Choline or phosphatidylcholine, this supports bile production and fat transport. So this is also really important for your cell membrane. So it's important for the liver, but also the cells of your liver and your cell membrane. So it's going to support that detoxification at the cellular level as well. Magnesium glycinate, I mentioned this earlier. This is one especially if you're having issues with sleep or relaxation or not having enough healthy Bowel movements. That's the supplement you'd want to take. And then a couple others. Tudka tudga is essentially taurine combined with ox bile or bile. And this has been used for. It's naturally found, actually, I think, in the liver and gallbladder of bears. It's a great product and supplement for improving bile flow. One of the conditions I've seen people come in with over the years oftentimes is vitamin D deficiency. And I just had a patient here this week, and I was reviewing their blood work, and one of the things I noticed was, and they had it in their history that they'd been doing, taking a vitamin D supplement for years, and their vitamin D levels were still low. It was around like 31. And one of the things that when I sit down with this patient, I'll walk through with them is that the reason why their vitamin D is still low. What's right, your vitamin D level should be at least 50 or above. Right. 50 to 80 is optimal range. Now, a lot of doctors want it in the 20 to 30 range. That's normal. That's not optimal. So it was low for them. But one of the reasons why people have low vitamin D is that their body isn't absorbing vitamin D. Right. So sometimes the body has enough, but it's not absorbing or utilizing enough in the body or it's not converting it well enough. Which did you know, in order to make vitamin D, the process, partly it goes through, is there's cholesterol on your skin and the UV light from the sun hits your skin, and then it takes some of this type, this specific type of cholesterol, and it will then go to the liver, which then your liver takes it and creates the vitamin D that your body stores and utilizes. But if your liver isn't healthy, it cannot turn enough of that type of cholesterol into vitamin D. Okay. And so tudka as a supplement can help create enough bile then and support your liver to create vitamin D and for your body to utilize vitamin D as well. But anyways, if you're dealing with gallbladder issues, especially if you've had your gallbladder removed or had gallstones or gallbladder stress, Tudka is one of those. Absolutely. Must have supplements, typically around 500 milligrams with meals that have any type of fat in them would be kind of ideal for taking tudka. And then also, if you had your gallbladder removed, ox bile or taking lipase enzymes is also a good idea. And then this last Supplement here is fiber getting about 5 to 10 grams. This can help with digestion, elimination, binding. I really like of course getting it from your food. Apples are an amazing form of fiber. Pomegranates, blackberries, blueberries. So getting it in that form, doing a little chia and flax, that's great as well. But I also really like fiber as a supplement and taking something like modified citrus pectin, this is a great form of fiber that is a gentle binder. Now typically people take modified citrus pectin for cancer, has anti cancer properties, but I recommend it for people with liver issues and a lot of my patients that have heart health issues. This type of fiber binds to those toxins and excess hormones, getting rid of them out of the body. And typically you'd want to do about 5 grams daily or so of MCP. That's modified citrus pectin and other fiber is great as well for liver health. Psyllium, husk, acacia fiber, a lot of the plant based types of fiber as well. But that would be the next supplement that has tremendous benefits for liver detoxification. Are you interested in functional nutrition tips to burn fat, reduce inflammation, improve your brain and energy levels and heal naturally? Then I want to encourage you to listen to my friend, Dr. Dave Jockers podcast, the Functional Nutrition Podcast. This podcast is designed to help you with easy, actionable steps to improve your nutrition and lifestyle, understand your lab work and address the root cause factors that may be driving up inflammation in your body. Now, I've been friends with Dr. David Jockers for 20 years and he's truly a world expert in functional nutrition, cellular healing and so much more. If you want to learn the best nutrition and natural healing tips, tune into the Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and wherever you can listen to podcasts worldwide. Now I want to talk about a few therapies that can be greatly beneficial for detoxifying your liver. And one of those is infrared sauna. You know, simply sweating and heating your body, that's going to help move blood. It's going to support those liver detoxification pathways. So infrared sauna, three to five days a week, 20 to 40 minutes. Ideal for liver health. Just exercise, especially outside, going for a jog, going for a bike ride, going for a walk, outside, these sort of things where you're just kind of moving and carefree. Very, very good for liver detoxification, almost any type of exercise, but really cardio and being outside while working out, probably even more beneficial than weight training. Though weight training does have even More indirect benefits, because when you build muscle mass supports insulin, that takes stress off the liver. Another favorite detox protocol I have for the liver and gallbladder and the gut is doing castor oil packs over the liver. This helps with bile flow and lymphatic drainage, all while calming local inflammation, promoting relaxation. So, and this is really easy. What you do is you buy castor oil. By the way, you don't want to do castor oil internally because it tends to your body, starts to rely on it, and then it can cause constipation later. I mean, if somebody has major constipation is one time use, it's fine. But for the most part, it's not what I recommend internally. But doing it topically is great. So what you do is you buy what you call a liver pack, which really isn't a pack. It's sort of this piece of cloth and you put about a tablespoon of castor oil on this castor oil pack. Okay? And then what you'll do is you'll put it in a space that's about the size of two tennis balls next to each other, and you'll kind of evenly distribute some of that tablespoon of castor oil there. You'll then wrap it right over your liver. And so that's going to be kind of that lower part of your right rib cage, and you'll put it over that area. Now, what I like to do before that, though, is I like to take an infrared heating pad and put that directly over that liver area, warming it up for about 20 minutes or so. And then I'll put the castor oil pack on for about 40 minutes. So it's about an hour protocol, 20 minutes of an infrared heating pad, about 40 minutes of the castor oil pack, and then you can remove it. But it's amazing, the testimonials I've seen in success stories of people dealing with chronic constipation and liver issues that did a castor oil pack and followed that protocol. I just shared with you and saw amazing results for lymphatic system and liver and gallbladder health. It really is an amazing therapy for overall liver health. And what it does is that castor oil just stimulates the liver liver to flow and for bile release. And I've seen, you know, some of my friends, for instance, Barbara o', Neill, a friend of mine, you know, she talks about it, a lot of others that are into ancient natural forms of medicine who have talked about the great benefits of doing that castor oil pack for supporting liver function. Now, the last thing I want to dive into before I go through the final protocol is blood work and why this matters. Did you know up to 80% of people with fatty liver disease have normal ALT and AST levels on their blood work according to the NIH? And here's the thing. Having normal lab values does not reflect true liver health. I mean, liver enzymes may remain normal even when there's a major issue. And we've seen it happen to where somebody's had completely normal blood work. And yet when we went and did a type of a liver scan, they saw fat accumulation around the liver, inflammation, fibrosis starting to develop. And so just because your liver markers on those conventional panels are normal does not mean your liver healthy. Now, I do more advanced blood work in my clinic where I'm looking at more of the markers that are actually truly connected to liver issues before they show up on more of those conventional markers. And it's really helpful to know, you know, some of the markers like even APOB or, or high sensitivity C reactive protein, or taking some of these markers together and looking at them, oftentimes I can tell if there's a liver issue far before the conventional blood work. On the more advanced blood work, we're looking at these cellular markers, you know, even more than liver markers. Oftentimes looking at metabolic markers can tell us more about fatty liver disease. Looking at, you know, triglycerides, fasting insulin or glucose, hemoglobin, A1C levels, HDL cholesterol, these can tell us a lot about fatty liver function. You know, before some of the even liver markers or what we think of as primary liver markers will tell us. Now, what I like to do oftentimes is look at B vitamins. This is also going to tell me a lot about the liver, what it needs, how it's functioning, Looking at nutrients such as vitamin B6, B9 and B12, this is great for liver function. Looking at somebody's genetics, if somebody has mthfr, that's very revealing and can tell me if they need specific things for liver health as well. One of the things that I really like to look at in blood work as well is what are some of the vitamins and minerals your body's depleted in? Because if you're depleted in just one nutrient, it can greatly impact your liver gallbladder and detoxification channels. One of the most important is magnesium. I mean, looking at your magnesium levels is incredibly helpful to know. It's so important for so many liver reactions and functions. B vitamins are crucial for liver function, especially B6, B9, which is folate, vitamin B12. That's really important as well. Your genetics can matter. I mentioned earlier your MTHFR looking that specifically or GST to see if you have any of those genetic markers. Those can also be really helpful when we're looking at your blood work. Now, I want to break this down before we close up on exactly what you need to do for liver detoxification in terms of the pathways. Now, I walk through so much today when it comes to liver health and detoxification, but I want to break it down in three simple things just for you to remember moving forward to make sure that if you know you need to heal your liver and detox better, that you make sure you hit all these three steps. Number one thing we need to do to support the liver is support liver processing, the main liver pathway. There's two things you want to do there. One, reduce your exposure to toxins, okay? That's number one. If you are eating a lot of food that's not organic, especially meat, and you're being exposed to glyphosate and you're eating out of plastic containers and doing this all the time and doing a lot of excess sugar and alcohol, that's going to overwhelm the liver, okay? And the next is the way the liver processes that liver pathway, making sure that the liver in phase one detoxification, that you've got B vitamins and some of those things, it's really important for the liver to function properly. That's step number one is we want to reduce the toxin exposure and just make sure your liver has a lot of what it needs to function properly. The second thing is we need to support bile flow. This is connected to the liver and gallbladder, especially in the lymphatic system. With that, eating more bitter herbs, eating a lot of the foods we talked about that are liver friendly, sour foods, bitter foods, Granny Smith apples, artichokes, green leafy vegetables, steamed cruciferous vegetables. These things are going to help. And taking some of the right supplements for bile. We talked about tudka, glycine, magnesium glycinate. A lot of these are gonna support bile in a really powerful way as well. And the last one is this. It's actually not treating the liver, it's treating the gut microbiome. But remember, if you. Let's say, let's say you do this, let's say you start taking N acetylcysteine and glycine and tudca and Doing all the things, and now your liver is really dumping and getting released the toxins. The liver's working well, but your bowels and your gut microbiome aren't healthy. There's not enough good bacteria and there's not enough fiber to bind to the toxins to pull them out of the body. Then they're going to recirculate and those will start to overwhelm your liver over time. So getting good bacteria in your gut, like doing some coconut yogurt or a probiotic supplement and taking some good fiber, getting good fiber in your food and maybe even taking a supplement that's going to help bind to those toxins and excess estrogen metabolites and now clear it out of your system. So to optimize detoxification, we need to support and strengthen the liver and processing. We need to support bile flow to make things are moving through the body. And we need to support the gut microbiome and colon in getting rid of any of those excess toxins out of your body. So remember, some of these key takeaways. If you have a sluggish liver, oftentimes there's warning signs. There's insulin resistance, right? There's excess estrogen. You can have skin issues, hormone issues, fatigue, a number of those problems, right? So look out for those warning signs that we talked about. Remember, alcohol isn't the main driver. It is a driver. It's a big driver. But sugar, especially processed sugar, is just as big of a driver, if not a bigger driver of liver issues today. Also remember, there's an emotional tie in there, right? If you're dealing with frustration, impatience, resentment, envy, unforgiveness, those act as a toxin. They overwhelm the liver and cause issues. Spending time creating a vision board, spending more time outside, forgiving others, reading your Bible, doing things, having a personal growth plan. Remember, the liver is responsible for numerous things. We wanna take care of this incredible organ. So I wanna say, hey, thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. Remember, every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally and spiritually. Hey, do me a favor. The number one thing you could do to support the show is subscribe and and also be on mission with me. You know, there are millions of people today that don't know how to take care of their liver. And by listening to this episode, they're now going to know. I mean, I believe that this show, we're able to save lives, transform lives, help people reach their optimal level of health. So just know it means so much to me when you subscribe and also when you share this episode. I'm so grateful for all of you being part here of the community and I just love that we're locking arms together. We're making a big impact together. So thanks so much for subscribing, for sharing, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode. To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.