Our health has been top of mind for months, and when the news headlines exclusively focus on threats to your health, I think it is a good time to ask, “What more can I do to protect my health?” The obvious answer is to follow the advice from healthcare officials on how to limit your risk to COVID 19 exposure. Nonetheless, people who are being careful about their exposure, are still becoming ill.
Since no course of action appears to be foolproof, we must consider what we can all do to ensure that we are in the best health that we can be so that we can best fight COVID 19 should we contract it. So, over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll feature health tips of ways to improve various areas of your health, and in this post, I’ll start with the liver.
Why The Liver?
Your liver is one of the largest filters within your body, and largely responsible for eliminating unwanted waste so that the body can function in peak condition. Bottom line, with a healthy liver, you stand the best chance of conquering diseases.
The liver is also an amazing organ in that it can regenerate damaged areas and is fairly self sufficient as long as do a few things to protect it.
- Stop heavy drinking: If you knew anything about the liver, then you knew this would be tip #1. The liver can only process so much alcohol at a time, and too much alcohol kills the live cells. Remember when I said the liver can regenerate? It can, but you MUST give it a rest from alcohol.
- Watch out for dietary supplements: Body building formulas and weight lose formulas many times contain substances that can harm your liver, and if you are using these products for 30 plus days, you could be doing real damage. Surprisingly, illegal anabolic steroids and green tea extract, accounted for about half of the cases of liver damage linked to supplements. Other herbal products known to harm the liver include chaparral, comfrey, kava, skullcap, and yohimbe.
- Maintain a healthy weight: Obesity increases the risk of fatty liver disease and liver cancer.
- Healthy diet: To maintain your healthy weight, you need to eat a healthy diet. A healthy diet also takes pressure off the liver, as won’t have to work so hard to filter out “the bad stuff”. Skip the manufactured food, refined sugars, and high saturated fats (sausage, bacon, ground beef, cold cuts).
- Don’t mix your OTC drugs with alcohol: The big one here is to watch acetaminophen, as too much can damage the liver, and if you take the drug regularly and consume alcohol, you are putting the liver under greater strain.
- Vaccinate for Hepatitis A & B: Vaccinations for these strains of hepatitis are available now. Talk to your doctor and see if you are a good candidate for vaccination.
- Safe Sex: Hepatitis B & C is passed by bodily fluids, so at the very least, wrap that rascal!
I hope you found this information helpful. Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
The Wide-Body 