Sugar and Your Liver: Where Extra Sugar Goes and Why Cutting It Matters

Your liver sorts the sugar you eat. It stores some, sends some back out to keep your blood sugar steady, and turns the extra into fat. Dr. Jarod Ward has a simple picture for this, and the research on sugar and liver fat shows how quickly the liver responds when sugar comes down.

Your liver keeps a sugar closet called glycogen

Here is how Dr. Jarod describes what happens after a fast-hitting, sugary meal:

"When the blood sugar is so high, the liver is like, come here, I'll scoop you in, and they throw it in the closet, right? And they store the sugar in the liver."

That closet has a name. After a meal, as blood sugar rises in the portal vein, the liver builds glycogen, a stored form of glucose. Between meals it breaks that glycogen back down to glucose to keep your blood sugar steady. It's one of the liver's daily jobs, and it runs alongside the pancreas. In Dr. Jarod's words:

"When you're eating a bunch of sugar, your blood sugar will bounce up and down, and your liver helps to calm down that balancing along with your pancreas. So if you can help the liver not have to work as hard at that, it can do its other jobs better."

A full closet means your body burns sugar before fat

Dr. Jarod's point about the closet is what it does to fat burning:

"When there's a ton of sugar stored in the liver, when it's time to burn some energy, the liver's like, here, burn sugar instead of fat."

He describes the cleanse as giving the liver a chance to use up what's already stored:

"It makes the liver use up the stored sugar it already has, called glycogen, and then eventually when it clears out all those stored sugars, then your body can actually go to fat burning mode. But why would the body burn fat if it has rooms full of sugar ready to burn?"

Extra sugar gets turned into fat inside the liver

Dr. Jarod pushes back on the idea that fat in the blood only comes from fat on the plate:

"Your body takes too much sugar and converts it into fat, because sugar burns quick, fat burns slow. So if you keep eating those quick burning calories, your body's like, I have too much quick, let's put some in reserve."

Researchers call that process de novo lipogenesis, or DNL: the liver building new fat from sugar. Fructose, found in table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, plays a big part. It is absorbed into the portal vein and delivered to the liver in much higher concentrations than other tissues see. A review in Digestive Diseases and Sciences found that hepatic DNL is increased in people with fatty liver and that "fructose metabolism supports DNL more strongly" than a high-fat diet.

A controlled trial makes the point in people. Adults who drank fructose-sweetened drinks for 10 weeks made more fat in the liver and gained visceral fat, the fat packed around the organs. Adults drinking glucose-sweetened drinks at the same calories did not see the visceral fat gain.

Nine days with less sugar cut liver fat nearly in half

The clearest result comes from a study of 41 children aged 9 to 18 who normally ate a lot of sugar. For 9 days, researchers provided all their meals with the same calories and the same balance of protein, fat and carbohydrate, but swapped starch in for sugar.

Median liver fat dropped from 7.2% to 3.8%. The liver's fat-making fell too, from 68% to 26% on the study's measure. The study was small, had no comparison group and was done in Latino and African American children with obesity. It still shows how quickly a liver can respond when the sugar load comes down.

Drinks matter in particular. In the Framingham Heart Study, adults who had one or more sugar-sweetened drinks a day had 61% higher odds of fatty liver than people who didn't drink them. A 2018 review in the Journal of Hepatology concluded that "reducing sugary beverages and total fructose intake, especially from added sugars, may have a significant benefit on reducing hepatic fat accumulation."

Sugar also reaches your hormones through the liver. In lab studies, glucose and fructose reduced how much SHBG, a hormone-carrying protein, liver cells make. More on that in How Your Liver Shapes Your Hormones.

Why cutting sugar is the first lever Dr. Jarod pulls

Put the pieces together and the reasoning behind a strict cleanse gets clearer. Less sugar coming in means less for the liver to store, less to turn into fat, and fewer swings to smooth out. Dr. Jarod sums up why his cleanse avoids grains, sugar and alcohol: "Why would the body burn fat if it has rooms full of sugar ready to burn?" The full reasoning is in Why Is a Liver Cleanse So Strict?

If you notice an energy dip every afternoon, blood sugar swings are a big part of that story. We cover it in The Afternoon Energy Crash.

The full plan comes with the cleanse

Love Your Liver is Dr. Jarod's 21-day guided liver cleanse, and it's self-paced. The full meal plan, supplement schedule, shopping list and daily texts come with the cleanse. Your supplements ship to your door, and Day 1 starts the moment you tap start.

Prefer to start with a conversation? Dr. Jarod runs functional medicine and lab testing at Crown Chiropractic in Fort Myers. Call (239) 441-2275 to book a consultation.

Sources

• Dr. Jarod Ward, Crown Chiropractic. Liver episode on YouTube.
• Agius L. Role of glycogen phosphorylase in liver glycogen metabolism. Molecular Aspects of Medicine 2015;46:34-45.
• Softic S, Cohen DE, Kahn CR. Role of dietary fructose and hepatic de novo lipogenesis in fatty liver disease. Digestive Diseases and Sciences 2016;61(5):1282-1293.
• Stanhope KL, et al. Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans. Journal of Clinical Investigation 2009;119(5):1322-1334.
• Schwarz JM, et al. Effects of dietary fructose restriction on liver fat, de novo lipogenesis, and insulin kinetics in children with obesity. Gastroenterology 2017;153(3):743-752.
• Ma J, et al. Sugar-sweetened beverage, diet soda, and fatty liver disease in the Framingham Heart Study cohorts. Journal of Hepatology 2015;63(2):462-469.
• Jensen T, et al. Fructose and sugar: a major mediator of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Journal of Hepatology 2018;68(5):1063-1075.
• Selva DM, et al. Monosaccharide-induced lipogenesis regulates the human hepatic sex hormone-binding globulin gene. Journal of Clinical Investigation 2007;117(12):3979-3987.