[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome my outside the box thinkers to the Anti Aging Unraveled podcast where I am your host, Dr. Lori Gerber. In this podcast we will explore the fascinating world of personalized anti aging medicine that considers the whole person inside and out and how all systems are interconnected to each other. In today's world of modern medicine, we often find ourselves like just another number in a system that prioritizes quick fixes over sustainable and more natural solutions.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Well, let's get ready for a paradigm.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Shift in health and beauty. We look far beyond treating symptoms and aim to get to the root cause of our health and cosmetic issues. This podcast is your go to source for all things natural, outside the box, and innovative in integrative medicine and cosmetic dermatology. So sit back, relax and get ready to dive deep into the world of functional medicine and aesthetics with me, Dr. Lori Gerber. Let's take a trip down the real skin revolution pathway together.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Hi guys, it's Dr. Lori. I'm back. I know it's been a while with Anti Aging Unraveled and I'm so sorry we've been sidetracked with a bunch of other things that we're bringing to you, but here I am. I'm back. It's almost the new year and it's our favorite time of year because we are so happy to be able to bring you our liver detox kits again guys. So our squeaky clean liver detox kits are gonna be available for pre order. We usually do them mid January as a group and the group of us will go through it together. There's emails that go out troubleshooting. We kind of have little forums where we talk about it. We whine and complain about some of the pitfalls and things that are good about the liver detox while we're doing it. But it's something my husband and I do every year and I have a whole group of people that love to do it. So if you want to pre order, you can go onto mydrlori.com and actually place your order for the Squeaky Clean Liver Detox kit on the website. You can also email
[email protected] all spelled out and you can get your kit that way as well. We'll get an order placed for you or you could actually just even message us through the website as well. I love to get as many people as possible involved in this squeaky clean liver detox. We're going to talk a lot about Liver detox today. There is another podcast too I believe from two years ago in My podcast list that is on liver detox. So if you care to listen to that one as well, feel free. But really excited to bring this topic to you. We're going to talk all about what the liver does. It's an under talked about, under discussed, under understood, I would say, in the general population, organ. So let's get right to it, guys. Why is it so important? It is the filter of all filters in our body. So we are exposed to things 247 toxic exposures, drugs, chemicals, medications, things that want to go through our liver, they have to process it, and it goes into stool or urine or even bile to be able to get rid of them and excrete it. And all of which, the liver plays a really big role in actually making that happen. It converts our food into energy. It has a lot to do with actually glucose metabolism. We're going to talk a lot about sugar and why high sugars lead to. To dysfunction or fatty liver. It actually will metabolize or produce proteins. So it actually has the basis to be able to make all of our lean protein, which is extremely important. If our liver is not working well, we can't metabolize glucose efficiently because we're storing it as fat. And then we get fat around our organs, specifically our liver. Fast forward, we also start to get fatty liver disease. So I always tell people that kind of insulin resistance or diabetes and liver dysfunction or fatty liver or even sludgy liver, they go together. They're like peanut butter and jelly. So we really want to make sure we address both things. And it stores most of our vitamins and actually synthesizes cholesterol. So again, when we talk about lipid profiles, if it's off, if it's high, if it's dysfunctional, you have to fix the liver, too. Fixing the cholesterol by itself doesn't always work because the liver is what processes that cholesterol. It's what filters it gets rid of it and actually creates the balance. So if we don't have that balance, we can't regulate our glucose or our lipids very efficiently. Okay, all right, so let's talk about other things that kind of get into our liver that we see every day. And I always like to tell people there's three things that make our body not behave. I like to talk about three buckets, three buckets of autoimmunity, three buckets of inflammation, and three buckets that can actually burden our liver. Okay. The first bucket is environmental. So everything that we might be exposed to, toxic pesticides, heavy metals, radiation, Inhalational chemicals, if it's are part of our job and that creates a chemical exposure. There's also lifestyle stuff. So caffeine, alcohol, cosmetics, topicals, fried foods, the carcinogenic in fried food, especially charcoal, food, hormones, antibiotics, things like that, refined sugar. And then last but not least, let's talk about bugs. So we can talk about bacteria, yeast, fungus, overgrowth, metabolic products that are bad during our metabolism, such as ammonia buildup or carbon dioxide, even foods that you're sensitive to that you can't break down efficiently. And obviously we talk a lot about lifestyle and trauma, unresolved trauma, unhappy relationships. These can all cause the liver to be sludgy or junkie. Okay, so there's lots of liver disease. What you and I are mostly going to talk about is non alcoholic fatty liver disease. We're not talking about alcoholic necessarily. Now, are we going to avoid alcohol? Of course, but we're not talking about that type of alcohol liver disease. We're not talking about end stage or fibrosis or some of these other metabolic or systemic liver disorders. Okay. We're talking about liver disorder from buildup of sugars, buildup of bad metabolic byproducts. Okay. All right. Now let's talk about, if you're a candidate on the labs, what can cause it? I'm kind of going backwards a little bit to what I just said. Insulin is high, greater than 10. You guys know I love to check insulin. Most docs only check a glucose. Sugar is high, even if they're over 92. Forget diabetes for a minute. Even if they're in the 90s or mid to high 90s, that increases your risk of diabetes. Every 2% increases your risk of diabetes. So if you're diabetic or you have sugars or insulin, that's dysfunctional. That means you're taking all the extra sugar your body can't process and storing it as fat. That fat primarily, once your stores of fat are full, it lays it around the organs. So once you have this organ fat layer, the liver is the most common. That is when it starts to become actually dysfunctional. High cholesterol, it's a slippery slope. The liver gets sludgy, the cholesterol gets high, the cholesterol gets high, the liver gets sludgy. Okay? It actually filters all of the cholesterol and actually keeps the good and should filter out the bad. Obesity by its nature is higher fat. Right. So again, it goes back to fat being deposited in areas around organs, primarily the liver. Polycystic ovary is kind of a similar Scenario that it's a glucose intolerance issue. So when you don't have the glucose being processed efficiently, you're going to have a higher incidence of a fatty liver sleep apnea. Similarly, it actually has to do with a CO2 exchange. But also there's lots of people that have sleep apnea that have the obesity issue as well. So you're seeing a little bit of a combination of toxic byproduct and weight related changes causing this fatty liver thyroid issues. Specifically underactive thyroid have a much higher predisposition of liver dysfunction. Pituitary gland being underactive, we don't see as much of that clinically. But genetically speaking too, people can just have a genetic predisposition to have a sludgy liver. That would be me. People that don't tolerate alcohol as they get older, it's either a genetic predisposition and an enzyme or it's the liver just getting backed up. And same thing with people that drink a lot of alcohol. By that same token, it's gonna sludge up the liver and make it a little bit slow functioning and slow to actually filter. So sedentary lifestyles, poor diet, increased fat, poor sleep cycles, chronic stress, high cortisol. Again, goes back to that glucose metabolism thing. When we have high stress, we don't metabolize glucose efficiently. Again, it kind of all these things are linked, right? I wish I could isolate one and just say I'm going to treat this. Hormones, perimenopause, menopause, andropause for men, belly fat, hormone dysfunction, liver dysfunction. Okay, so they all go together. So I've probably addressed just about everyone that's listening, or maybe more. So what will you feel? This is a hard one. Symptoms are always tough, but with an overburdened liver, you're gonna feel subtle symptoms and sometimes you'll feel more significant symptoms. So lack of concentration, mood swings, lack of energy, drive, trouble sleeping, tiredness, bloated, not tolerating food or feeling full after foods. If you know that you have a poor work environment with a lot of exposures, forget what you're feeling for a minute. That environmental pollutant might be enough to just say, this is something you should do regularly. Headaches and skin conditions, I see it a lot with new eczemas or new rashes. Your body has got a critical threshold. Once you hit that critical threshold, something has to give. There's usually a point at which your body cannot keep up with the demand. And then you start to have clinical manifestations. Weight loss or weight gain, tiredness loss of muscle actually having an enlarged liver. I mean, I've seen it where you can actually get a little bit of a palpable liver on exam, where you kind of just feel the tip of it a little bit. Itching or having like a chronic itch is a sign of a more advanced liver issue or new insulin resistance or new glucose intolerance. Again, think liver fat around the waist, abdominal obesity. We kind of talked about that a second ago. Also think liver. I'm not going to go into what advanced liver disease is because that's not for our purposes, what we're talking about. We're talking about you and I walking around the streets not having liver disease as an ICD code that really can't process things efficiently. Our cholesterol starts going up, our sugars start going up, Maybe our blood pressure is climbing, maybe we have a really toxic job, maybe we're gaining weight and belly fat, we're going through menopause or andropause, those types of things. Okay, all right, so what tests do we do? This is always a really hard one for, I think, primaries, because they're always looking for just elevated liver functions. Now, again, if your liver functions, your alt and your asd, or even just one of them is elevated, that does give a sign that your liver is overworked. But clinically and from a history, we should be able to find that much sooner. So what else am I looking for? Again, it goes back to an insulin level. Forget the sugars. If I see an insulin level greater than 10, I know that this patient has more glucose sitting around than they should on a regular basis. This tells me that that's not good, and that that glucose has to be stored as fat somewhere. Once it's stored as fat, either the glycogen stores are full, which is where you keep all of your fat as energy as glucose, or it starts storing it around the liver. So I will assume that this has been going on for a while and that your liver is dysfunctional and that at some point we need to do a liver clean out. So I could see that from a glucose that's high, a hemoglobin A1c that's high, or even better yet, an insulin level that's high. I, of course, will check cholesterol, and I like to do the size of your particles, which is called an nmr, and see how sticky, how dense, how small your cholesterol particles are, and what that ratio looks like. If your ratio looks off, meaning you don't have a lot of good cholesterol but you have a decent amount of bad cholesterol or your total is high. I will think about working on that liver and trying to get it to. Especially if you're a healthy eater and we're not talking about dietary changes or lower sugar, healthy, non processed, non saturated fats. If that's the case, then I will work on the liver. Leptin is another good one. It's actually one of the numbers that an adiponectin that we check for weight and the ability to have satiety and fullness, but also the ability to store your sugars. And I check for leptin and adiponectin and then inflammation markers, a crp, really basic easy inflammation marker. If that's high, listen, it probably tells me there's other inflammatory things that are going on, and your liver is probably having a hard time filtering out. So they're the big ones. Occasionally I will check your pancreatic function and even like a ferritin to see if there's any other inflammation going on inside the body or if your pancreas is straining in general. That means the gallbladder might have issues as well. So we'll look for some gallbladder, some pancreas numbers. And in that case, I might also clean out the liver if they're off. Okay. Smokers. Almost always, I'm doing a liver detox. Regular alcohol consumptions. Almost always I'm doing a regular liver detox. Caffeine consumption on a regular basis to a decent level. I would say more than two to three cups a day. I'm definitely doing a liver detox. Over the counter Tylenol or some prescription medications that go through the liver. Again, I'm almost always doing once a liver detox. Every year or two, we talked about hormone imbalances, gut issues, these people. I'm almost always again looking at the liver saying, all right, can we clean it out? Will that help? All right, so what does the liver actually do? And I like to explain this because people think a liver detox is a colon cleanse. They are not the same thing. A colon cleanse takes the stool out of the colon. It actually will debulk your stool, clean out your gut, for lack of a better way to describe it, and obviously give you a fresh start, if you will. A liver detox uses chemicals, so phytonutrients, minerals, different ingredients to upregulate phase one of liver detox, which we're gonna talk about, and phase two of liver detox. And what that means is we're taking away Food usually, or the majority of food for about two days. Why food is the biggest burden on the liver that really exists because our liver needs to process everything we eat, from pesticides, to sensitivities to food, to the actual ingredients, to the glucose. Okay. And protein for that matter. So when we eat, our livers are burdened at baseline. So if we take that away, that's where some of these fasting diets come into play as well. When we take that away, we're able to focus just on toxic exposures, heavy metals, pesticides, things that might be in our system that our liver can actually just pull out. So phase one of liver detox is actually getting all those toxins to what we call an intermediary metabolite. So I always say it's somewhere in the middle, it hasn't gotten out of our system, it's just kind of pulled out. The problem with those intermediary metabolites is they're actually more toxic than the original form because when you store it, you store them in a store, it is a less toxic form when we pull it out. We need things to help us get it out of phase one really quickly and into phase two. One, so we don't feel sick, two, so they don't back up in our system. So we use B vitamins, we use folic acid, we use glutathione, we use flavonoids, we use antioxidants. Those will help to pull everything into phase one and then quickly into conjugation, which is phase two is where the liver takes the highly toxic compound and makes it more benign. It actually makes it what we would call a less toxic metabolite and actually will bind it and excrete it. So it will actually be sorted based upon what it is and become a non toxic water soluble compound. What that means we can pee it out, we can poop it out, it can be excreted in our bile. So on a daily basis, we can't do that really efficiently when we have food on board. So that is why it's so important when you do these, I would call it more aggressive liver detoxes, that you really avoid a lot of the toxic compounds. So we tell you to eat some clean fruits, that we tell you to eat clean vegetables. We're not doing a lot of inflammatory food groups, especially after those first two days. And the first two days you're literally just doing a couple hundred calories, generally with lots and lots of water to help clean it out. And there's a couple of different companies that we use. But I personally like our squeaky clean liver detox. That one is two days of fasting and then after those two days again, you're taking the supplements with the fasting and you're doing a liver clean out for up to seven to 10 days where you're reintroducing one food group in at a time after those two days. Why is that so cool? It's basically like an elimination diet and reintroducing the foods after as well. So if you have a reaction, let's just say to gluten or let's just do actually like berries or something like that when you reintroduce them. If you have a reaction, new stomach aches, you don't feel well, you know that there's probably a sensitivity there to that food group and you can back, back off of it, move on to the next food group and then maybe at a later date do a food sensitivity test. Or if it bothers you, you just start doing food avoidance, right? And then we treat the gut. So I always say this type of liver detox is great cause it gives you a guidance on food and it cleans out your liver. So it's like a two for one. It's actually awesome. So we do this seven to 10 day, up to two week program. That's a road I would call like a more yearly clean out. There are lots of supplements that will do this on a regular basis and there's lots of ingredients that will do this on a regular basis. So there are certain supplements that we can take consistently. Especially if you're like me and you know that your liver gets really congested that you might want to take regularly. I take our hepato pure, which is kind of a combination of some of these ingredients that I'm gonna talk about in a minute. That is a slow clean out all year. So like for example, there's like oregano and sometimes we'll use bergamot and milk thistle. So these things will all help to clean out slowly if you take them regularly. I know a lot of people will do different drinks that are little liver cleanouts over the years. They're fine, they're just a little slower and they're not as aggressive. So for example, bitters, which is basically in a botanical extract, milk thistle, bergamot, berberine, turmeric or curcumin, all your polyphenols, your vitamin E's, your vitamin C's, even vitamin D will help to clean out selenium and manganese will actually help with an antioxidant blend to pull things out. Believe it or not, your fish oils will actually help to modify your liver as well on what it maintains. That's why it helps with lipid panels and improving your cholesterol. A lot of people are talking about NAC right now, so NAC and lipoic acid do a really nice job. And obviously pre and probiotics, if we treat the gut, the liver is always going to start to be in a better place. So how do you start doing this? Obviously you could just reach out to me and say, all right, Dr. Lurie, I'm ready to do a detox. I'm ready for my seven to 10 days. Let's do it. I love that and I think that's a great option. We can start however by just removing toxic foods. So doing environmental exposure elimination and eliminating near toxic foods. So sugar, getting rid of refined sugar. I know we talk about it for lots of other reasons, but it does create fat. Fat doesn't make us fat usually guys, it's sugar. Extra sugar creates extra fat. That fat gets put onto the liver amongst other organs. So lower carbohydrate diet, lower processed foods, removing those environmental exposures, maybe taking away, if you use a lot of creams and lotions, getting rid of the parabens, topicals, things like that. And also if you can do what I would call the dirty dozen, avoiding those fruits and vegetables, then you can look those up. They're very common, but it's really just thin skinned fruits and vegetables because pesticides penetrate through there into the meat of the fruit or vegetable. More than a waxier type fruit or vegetable where you can actually do a pesticide cleanse on it. There's a million of those out there too. But any kind of pesticide rinse, there's tons of them. You pop them in the sink for 10 to 15 minutes and then you take them out. You can do something like that. You want to add a pre or probiotic. So kind of like our gut biome or one of our sporify, they're really good options to help you gut metabolize foods better. And then they won't be stored inappropriately as fat around your liver. Strengthen your gut barrier. So we're talking about actually working on that leaky gut. So things that calm down inflammation. I talked about this a second ago, but like turmeric, but also quercetin, if your inflammation numbers are high, glutamine things are going to work on those leaky gut cellular barrier again. So those three buckets I talked about don't start to drive your inflammation and your liver to be dysfunctional. We love antioxidant foods. Sunflower seeds, salmon, avocado, high in omega 3s, almonds. So any of your good fats will help to replace and eliminating saturated fats will actually flip the switch on your liver, help it to absorb the good fats and maintain the good fats into your system and actually will take away the burden from the cholesterol metabolism that it has innately and then maintaining a good body weight. I think ideally the liver, when your body is smaller, it has less to filter. So if you think about it like a big sponge, we are not going to get a sponge as easily to break down toxic byproducts of someone who's on the larger side for their body height and age and their BMI is elevated. But if they're smaller, you're going to get a liver that's much more capable of doing the work. Okay, so when we talk about the liver and what it's doing, it's our sponge, it's our clean out, it's our eraser without our eraser. Lots of bad things happen downstream besides the metabolic changes, right? We had talked about glucose and we talked about cholesterol. Let's talk about what happens when all of that stuff goes wrong. What happens when you can't break down these toxic compounds. You can start with different cancers, you can start with different exposures that can lead you down what I would say an autoimmune or a carcinogenic path. And what that means is you start to get different types of fighting yourself. So whether it's autoimmune, thyroid disease, or is it rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, or are we leading down a path of what we would call pathogenic cancers, which we know can come from bugs, which if you can't process liver, can't process efficiently, we do get a buildup of bugs, and it can come from autoimmune disease. So again, if we're triggering these pathways, what happens next and how do we prevent that? So we go back to basics. We take something on a regular basis to clean out our system. We clean up our diet, we clean up our exposures as best as we can. I'm not saying go crazy, you know, using glass containers, not heating up plastics in the microwave, not putting on parabens and things like that in creams, going back to not eating refined sugar. Clean, healthy diets, omega 3s, not saturated fats. And then last but not least once a year, taking advantage of One of these liver detox kits, I think that they are incredible and you definitely notice the difference. Anyone that's ever done one with me can tell you the first two days are rough. Sometimes it's just the first day you can feel a little achy, a little flu, like you are mobilizing those toxic compounds right into phase one. So sometimes you can feel worse before you feel better. So those first couple of days can be rough at times. Usually by day two into three or day three into four when you introduce some foods back into your diet, it's a little bit better. So you're getting those exposures, are getting excreted, you're not feeling as achy, not feeling as flu like or as headache. Your energy levels tend to come up all of a sudden and you feel much, much better. And then you're reintroducing those food groups in and you're getting an idea of what foods you're sensitive to. And then at the end you can decide whether or not you actually want to do clean eating on a regular basis, whether it's something you know, the food avoidance. Did that make sense for you or is it just that you've really figured out what foods you were sensitive to? So if you want to go ahead and place your order, I encourage you guys to pre order. Go to mydrloria.com Place the order online on our products page with the Squeaky clean liver detox kit or send me a message infoydoctorlori.com and we'll get your pre order set. It's fun to do as a group. We commiserate together. We get our bodies healthy and we're ready to start the new year fresh and clean and a new you. And then we can lose weight more efficiently because now our livers are ready to metabolize that fat. So you could talk to me about our other programs like our weight loss program and our wellness program. So I encourage you to do this with me. And on that note, guys, I'm going to sign off. Enough talk about liver and we'll talk soon with Anti Aging Unraveled podcast.
