Help your liver detoxify: 4 Tips to remove toxins from the body by: Zoey Sky for Natural News
Your liver helps detoxify your body. Detoxification is a crucial bodily process, and you can help your liver detoxify by following a healthy diet and avoiding substances like drugs and alcohol.
Detailed below are four tips that can help your liver detoxify.
Your overall well-being depends on detoxifying enzymes, which are so important to human health that your body makes them for itself. You don’t need to purchase expensive foods if you follow a balanced diet and make healthy lifestyle choices, all of which are important if you want to boost your body’s natural abilities to detoxify.
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The liver as the body’s detoxifying organ
There are detoxifying processes throughout your body, but most detoxification efforts take place in the liver.
Your liver creates a family of enzymes known as cytochrome P450 (CYP) that changes molecules in specific ways to make them less toxic.
CYP enzymes combine toxins and potential toxins with oxygen (O2). One of the oxygen atoms combines with the target molecule to transform it into another compound.
Then, the other oxygen atom combines with hydrogen ions (“acidity,” but the good kind of acidity) from the bloodstream to make water (H2O). (Related: Easy ways to detoxify naturally.)
Note that liver enzymes don’t exist in limitless amounts. If the enzyme is busy detoxifying one chemical, it can’t detoxify another.
Toxicity usually involves too much of a load on the liver, which can cleanse a lot of toxins but takes time to do so. To ensure that your liver functions normally, it’s best not to overwhelm it.
Sometimes not having “enough” liver enzymes is a good thing. For example, the liver enzyme CYP1A1 transforms otherwise harmless chemicals in tobacco smoke into carcinogens that can cause liver cancer.
Before your liver changes these chemicals, they are not carcinogenic.
If you have genes for “highly inducible” CYP1A1, which means it’s easily “switched on” by exposure to chemicals like those used in dry cleaning and in making gasoline, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer. To lower your lung cancer risk, avoiding chemical pollution may be as important as avoiding tobacco smoke.
4 Ways to help your liver detoxify
Specific enzymes have specific detoxification and activation duties. This means that you can make dietary changes that help activate or preserve the enzymes that detoxify common harmful chemicals or deactivate or prevent the creation of the enzymes that “pretoxify” harmless substances into toxic forms.
Follow the tips below for better overall health and to help your liver detoxify.
Have an apple (or an orange) a day
Apples and oranges are accessible and affordable sources of the sticky plant fiber, pectin.
Once consumed, pectin captures many heavy metals while they are still in your lower digestive tract and before the small intestine sends them through the hepatic portal vein to the liver. Certain pectins also activate your immune system.
Detoxifying carcinogenic compounds in cigarette smoke
Some “healthy” foods activate the carcinogens in cigarette smoke but other “healthy” foods counteract them.
The production of CYP1A2 enzyme that activates tobacco smoke carcinogens is “switched on” by the stinky sulfur compounds found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, mizuna and turnip greens
Meanwhile, it is “switched off” by superfoods like chamomile tea, cumin, curcumin, grapefruit juice and peppermint tea. While this process is impressive, these foods only counteract some of the detrimental effects of tobacco smoke.
Neutralizing the effects of excessive alcohol consumption
Alcohol doesn’t damage tissues until an enzyme called CYP2E1 transforms it into acetaldehyde. Watercress contains chemicals that can help inhibit CYP2E1 and may protect organs from alcohol damage, but it will make your hangover worse.
Counteracting the side effects of nicotine
If you can’t control your smoking and are concerned about the effects of nicotine on your heart or brain, try adding starfruit to your regular diet. However, you should avoid starfruit if you take any prescription drugs.
While superfoods like apples and cumin can help your liver detox, the best way to boost your liver health is to stay hydrated, consume enough dietary fiber and eat a variety of nutritious fruits and vegetables.
