Our livers work extremely hard everyday to protect us from adverse affects from toxins and often it is easy for our livers to become overworked compromising our health significantly. When your liver becomes overworked as a result of stress or excessive exposure to toxins, your entire system can be thrown off balance, and your health can be severely compromised.
Your liver Does More Than You Imagined
This is about detoxing the body’s largest gland, the liver. Without a liver, a person cannot survive. It has a number of functions including, but not limited to:
– Detoxifying the blood to rid it of harmful substances (like toxins, drugs, alcohol and more)
– Stores vitamins and iron
– Converts stored sugar to usable sugar when the body’s sugar levels fall below normal
– Produces bile, a substance needed to digest fats
– Breaks down hemoglobin as well as insulin and other hormones
– Destroys old red blood cells
The liver performs so many vital functions, and as a result it is very prone to disease.
When you overeat food, or eat highly processed foods, and any time you are exposed to environmental pollutants or stress, your liver can become overworked and overloaded. When the liver is taxed, it can’t process toxins and fat in an efficient way. There are many foods that can help detox your liver naturally by stimulating its natural ability to clean toxic waste from the body.
Detox Your Liver With These 11 Super Foods
1. Garlic: Just a small amount of this pungent white bulb has the ability to activate liver enzymes that help your body flush out toxins. Garlic also holds high amounts of allicin and selenium, two natural compounds that aid in liver cleansing.
2. Asparagus: Is an excellent diuretic. A diuretic is a substance that helps to promote the production of urine, and as urine is the way that you body naturals evacuates itself of any excess toxins, asparagus actively helps to support detoxification.
3. Apples: High in pectin, apples hold the chemical constituents necessary for the body to cleanse and release toxins from the digestive tract. This, in turn, makes it easier for the liver to handle the toxic load during the cleansing process.
4. Grapefruit: Grapefruit is an excellent source of vitamin C as well as antioxidants, which both help support the immune system and two powerful liver cleansers. Phytonutrients in grapefruit called limonoids inhibit tumor formation by promoting the formation of glutathione-S-transferase, a detoxifying enzyme. This enzyme sparks a reaction in the liver that helps to make toxic compounds more water soluble for excretion from the body. Grapefruit increases the natural cleansing processes of the liver. It also contains a flavonoid compound known as naringenin that causes the liver to burn fat rather than store it.
5. Leafy Green Vegetables: Green Veggies are extremely high in plant chlorophyll’s that absorb environmental toxins, increase bile production, neutralize heavy metals, chemicals and pesticides, which lowers the burden on the liver. Try incorporating leafy greens such as bitter gourd, arugula, dandelion greens, spinach, mustard greens, and chicory into your diet. This will help increase the creation and flow of bile, the substance that removes waste from the organs and blood.
6. Avocado: Rich in glutathione-producing compounds, avocados actively promote liver health by protecting it against toxic overload, and boosting its cleansing power. Some research has shown that eating one or two avocados a week for as little as 30 days can repair a damaged liver.
7. Lemon: Lemon stimulates the release of enzymes and helps convert toxins into a water-soluble form that can be easily excreted from the body. Lemons contain high amounts of vitamin C, which is needed by the body to make glutathione. Glutathione helps ensure that phase 2 liver detoxification keeps pace with phase 1, thereby reducing the likelihood of negative effects from environmental chemicals. Drinking lemon water, which is alkaline-forming, first thing in the morning will help stimulate the liver.
8. Turmeric: Turmeric, one of the most powerful foods for maintaining a healthy liver, has been shown to actively protect the liver against toxic damage, and even regenerate damaged liver cells. Turmeric also boosts the natural production of bile, shrinks engorged hepatic ducts, and improves overall function of the gallbladder, another body-purifying organ.
9. Alternative Grains: Gluten rich grains such as wheat, flour, or other whole grains increase the load on the liver’s detox function and enzyme production. Switch to alternative grains like quinoa, millet and buckwheat.
10. Walnuts: Holding high amounts of the amino acid arginine, walnuts aid the liver in detoxifying ammonia. Walnuts are also high in glutathione and omega-3 fatty acids, which support normal liver cleansing actions. Make sure you chew the nuts well (until they are liquefied) before swallowing.
11. Cabbage: Cabbage contains sulforaphane, a substance that can increase the production of antioxidant and liver detoxifying enzymes. Sulforaphane works by stimulating the production of glutathione, the body’s most important internally produced antioxidant which plays a role in liver detoxification.
Don’t force it – go with the (natural) flow
What it all boils down to is that eating the right foods that will help your body to detox in a wholly natural way, the way Mother Nature intended; not forcing your body into an unnatural emergency cleanse, whereby you stop eating nutritionally rich food. It’s a much healthier way of ridding your body of unwanted toxins, and one which fits in perfectly with a holistic, health lifestyle.