What Does the Liver Do? Dr. Jarod Explains Your Liver's Daily Jobs

Your liver never takes a day off. Most people know it as the organ that handles alcohol. That's one small part of its job. Here's what your liver does all day, in Dr. Jarod Ward's words and in the research.

Your liver is the filter for the blood coming from your gut

Dr. Jarod's short version: "The liver is the fish tank filter of your fish tank body." Then he adds the part most people miss: "it doesn't just filter the blood."

The liver gets two blood supplies. Oxygen-rich blood arrives through the hepatic artery, and nutrient-rich blood drained from the gut arrives through the portal vein. The two mix inside the liver and flow past rows of liver cells before draining into a central vein. Water-soluble nutrients from a meal enter that portal blood straight from the intestine, so they reach your liver first, along with anything else that came in with your food.

It makes bile, which digests fat and carries waste out

"The liver is very important for digestion," Dr. Jarod says. "It makes bile and then sends the bile to be stored in the gallbladder, and then the bile is released to help process food and assimilate food."

Bile acids help you absorb fats and vitamins from food. They also carry things out: bile is a route for "lipids, toxic metabolites, and xenobiotics," meaning foreign chemicals, to leave the body. Your liver recycles most of its bile. About 95 percent of bile acids are reabsorbed in the small intestine and sent back to the liver, and each one makes that trip about 20 times on average before it leaves. More on bile is in What Is Bile?

It stores sugar after meals and releases it between them

After you eat, your liver pulls glucose out of the blood and stores it as glycogen. When you fast, between meals or overnight, it shifts to releasing glucose, by breaking down that glycogen and by making new glucose. Dr. Jarod calls the glycogen store a closet: when blood sugar runs high, "the liver is like, come here, I'll scoop you in, and they throw it in the closet."

The liver also stores nutrients. Specialized liver cells called stellate cells hold vitamin A, and Dr. Jarod adds that "the liver also stores vitamins," which is part of why liver is such a nutrient-dense food. The full pantry is in Vitamins Stored in the Liver.

It builds most of the protein in your blood

Your liver makes 85 to 90 percent of the protein circulating in your blood. The biggest share is albumin, about 55 percent of all plasma protein, which helps maintain blood volume and carries lipids and hormones around the body.

It keeps watch on what comes in from the gut

The liver has its own resident immune cells, called Kupffer cells. They "recognize the many pathogenic stimuli introduced through the portal circulation," which is the blood arriving from the gut. Dr. Jarod describes it this way:

"The liver has little fingers or little detectors that feel inside the gut. And so if we get a gut infection, the liver is the one that actually alarms the rest of the immune system about what's going on in the gut, which is pretty cool. People don't know that."

It turns one thing into another

Dr. Jarod calls this the liver's conversion work:

"Taking a fat and turning it into a hormone, taking cholesterol and turning it into testosterone or another hormone, right? Filtering histamine out of the blood and neutralizing it."

The research lists the same range: the liver handles cholesterol balance, fat processing and the breakdown of foreign compounds, "including many current drugs." That breakdown happens in steps, explained in Phase 1 and Phase 2 Liver Detox.

When the house fills with angry people, the sweeping waits

All of these jobs share one liver. Dr. Jarod explains what happens when the incoming load gets heavy:

"If you're in a house and a ton of angry people come in and want to beat you up, are you gonna focus on them or are you gonna sweep the floor? So the liver is having to neutralize all of these toxic, irritating chemicals, right? Like these toxic people who want to beat you up. And so it's prioritizing that rather than its basic hygiene, cleanliness, rebuilding, repair functions."

That's the thinking behind the cleanse: fewer angry people at the door, so the liver gets to the sweeping. It's also why the rules are firm, as explained in Why Is a Liver Cleanse So Strict?

The liver is built for repair. A review of liver regeneration puts it plainly: the liver "manages to restore any lost mass and adjust its size to that of the organism," and keeps the rest of the body running the whole time.

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, 0:22 to 3:01.
• Trefts E, Gannon M, Wasserman DH. The liver. Current Biology 2017;27(21):R1147-R1151.
• Chiang JY. Bile acid metabolism and signaling. Comprehensive Physiology 2013;3(3):1191-1212.
• Gonzalez FJ. Nuclear receptor control of enterohepatic circulation. Comprehensive Physiology 2012;2(4):2811-2828.
• Michalopoulos GK. Liver regeneration. Journal of Cellular Physiology 2007;213(2):286-300.