Why Do We Focus So Much on the Liver?

It’s similar to looking at how well a work team functions dependent on how many sick days staff take. That doesn’t actually tell you if the work is getting done efficiently.

If a liver isn’t detoxing well the body starts to deposit toxins throughout the body. And this might not do anything to the body in years or decades. But chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re already a few decades old and your body isn’t functioning the way it used to.

LFTs only test liver function, when it’s already inflamed, diseased or damaged.

There are other tests we can do to assess liver function, however, given that living in 2025 comes with a broad array of unavoidable toxins, we can generally assume that the liver can always do with a bit of extra help.

Things that affect or burden our livers that are pretty much unavoidable:

Avoidable Choices we may make that burden our livers:

Just think, there are over 160 million chemicals known to man with 40,000 -60,000 used commercially. Add their chemical byproducts and think just how it is possible to avoid them. Many chemicals have been tested for safety in humans but are only tested by themselves. The real problem is the chemical cocktail our body is dealing with. Having 1 chemical in our body, sure, we can filter that out. 10? definitely! 100? Our body makes more toxins than that, so probably. 1000! or 10,000!? We have no idea how this is affecting our liver's ability to process

And our exposure to chemicals can often fall into a toxic dose. Ever wondered why the serving sizes on some foods are stupidly small? Like a serving of a biscuit is 1 or 2 tiny bars totaling 20g when a chocolate bar serving size is 50g. Serving sizes are decided by the manufacturer and they have to follow strict toxicology limits. One example is food colouring. There are daily limits on how much a particular chemical colour a person is allowed per day and it’s pretty small. Manufacturers know you might eat 4 or 5 bars a sitting, but labelling 1 serve as 4 or 5 bars might exceed the daily toxic dose for the chemical additives inside. So it gets labelled as something abhorrently small that no one is actually going to stick to.

That’s just an example of how food choices (or more like misleading advertisement) can introduce a toxic burden in your body. And yes, this one food choice may result in a tiny amount of chemical exposure, but combine 1 choice with another and then another, we have no idea the impact that is happening on our body and the later generations that will inherit it.

The liver’s job (plus a few other organs) is to break toxins down and eliminate them. Our body is very efficient in doing this. But when it can’t do it all we store them in our bones, fats, tissues and brain and it can stay in our bodies forever and even be passed on to children during pregnancy.

When we have so many toxins in our environment and we know they stay in our system for so long, how can we say that our liver won’t ever need help?

This is only scratching the surface of what affects our liver. And if our liver has too much to do and becomes burdened, it can put other jobs it’s meant to do on the back-burner. This can affect our gut, mood, inflammation, brain, metabolism, hormones the list goes on.

The liver is the backbone of our health. It’s constantly supporting every part of our body. That’s why it’s important to give it some relief and sometimes some help.

15/02/2025

As a naturopath, most if not all therapies involve some focus on the liver. But I hear time and time again that promoting liver detox is pointless because the liver is there to detox and doesn’t need help to do what it already does. But that’s the same as saying a car will run on subpar fuel. It will, but not as efficiently. And something will break along the way.

When you go to a GP and they test your liver function through LFTs (which generally includes ALT, AST, ALP and GGT) they’re actually testing liver damage. And they can then surmise that liver isn’t functioning if it’s damaged. They don’t actually test function or how well it’s detoxing.

• Old toxic building material in our soil

• Hormone Disruptors lining our plastics and receipts

• Decades old banned chemicals still in our oceans

• Heavy metals in our soils, water and food

• Diseases/Disorders our body may be dealing with

• Chemicals passed on through the womb

• Pesticides and chemicals in all of our foods

• Plastic particles

• Fuel Emissions

• Additives in our water supply

• Pollutants in our water supply

• Air Pollutants

• Fire-retardant coatings on our furniture and clothes

• Hormone disruptors in:

• Makeup

• Skincare

• Body wash

• Cleaning Products

• Laundry Products

• Poor dietary choices

• Alcohol

• Drugs

• Pesticides