Liver care is the most beneficial and lasting contribution to your own health. After all, it combines many functions that guarantee us a long and healthy life.
This organ helps the body:
- Build up sugar, minerals, and some important vitamins;
- Destroy toxic substances, including alcohol;
- Convert food into energy;
- Maintain immunity;
- Regulate the quantity and quality of fat reserves;
- To produce bile, without which it is impossible to properly and quickly assimilate nutrients;
- Control the content of cholesterol in the blood vessels;
- Resist infectious diseases and kill bacteria.
In other words, we completely owe our health to the liver, since it is it that largely ensures the vital activity of other organs. Keeping your liver healthy is not so difficult, you just need to follow a few simple guidelines.
Avoiding excessive alcohol
This natural filter in our body has unique properties – it is practically the only organ that can quickly regenerate. Even with the removal of most of the liver cells, after a few weeks, it is restored to its previous volume. But excessive alcohol consumption can lead to a loss of the ability to heal itself, which will inevitably lead to cirrhosis. A safe alcohol rate for adults is 12 ml of pure ethanol for women and 24 ml for men. (120 ml of beer, 30 ml of vodka or 50 ml of wine for a woman). The portion for men, respectively, is twice as large. Anything that exceeds these numerical values is inevitably harmful to health.
Alcohol plus drugs – a terrible blow to the liver
Products containing paracetamol, as well as a number of other drugs, can severely damage liver cells. Therefore, during any treatment, it will be advisable to refuse alcohol intake.
Minimize exposure to toxic substances
Do not neglect protective equipment in those moments when you need to use any paints, aerosols and similar substances that can enter the bloodstream through the respiratory tract. Even if your eyes are not in danger, since you only feel a slight odor, remember that there is a suspension with microscopic particles of toxic substances in the air, to cleanse the blood, from which it is the liver that will have to. And the higher their percentage in the air, the harder it will be for the liver to cope with toxic substances, and the higher the likelihood of damage to its cells. Therefore, when working with toxic substances, the use of a mask and protective gloves is essential.
Proper nutrition is the key to liver health
It is very important that the maximum number of calories from fat does not exceed 30% of the total energy value of the diet. That is, if your daily requirement is 1800 kcal, then the share of fat should be no more than 540 kcal. To roughly calculate your daily energy requirement, it is enough to multiply the weight in kg by 30. Unhealthy diet often provokes chronic liver disease, so it is necessary to consume as little canned foods and foods containing a large amount of carcinogens as possible.
Medicines and vitamins
Despite the very widespread belief that vitamins in any amount are good for the body, this is not entirely true. For example, vitamin A, which is able to accumulate in the liver, when it is oversupplied in the body, can ultimately do more harm than good. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor your own diet and try to maintain a vitamin balance, preventing hypervitaminosis. If you take vitamins in tablets, check the content of this vitamin in them, and, depending on its concentration, adjust your menu.
Herbal preparations, which are gaining more and more popularity in recent years, can also negatively affect the state of liver cells. Therefore, before starting to use them, nevertheless, consult with a specialist, and also make sure that this drug is fully certified. All this fully applies to all kinds of dietary supplements – they must also undergo careful monitoring, otherwise the benefits from them will be very dubious, but harm can be done with the help of components from their composition without difficulty.