How To Do Liver Cleanse

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for checking out my video. I’ve been asked by numerous people in the past several months if I could do a video and talk about liver detoxification. How to do a proper liver detox. What are the steps you can do? What are the foods you need to avoid? What are the foods you need to include?

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Well, as usual, I spent a good hour on YouTube checking out videos by all kinds of people, ranging from armchair experts up to really smart people. I found some very good comments from lots of different people. I found some not so good comments and I found some crazy comments from some weird people. Remember, YouTube’s full of all kinds of different people with many different experiences.

Some people actually recommend that you drink alcohol in small amounts for liver detoxification, would you believe it or not. Other people recommend you keep right away from it. Some people recommend not to do a liver detox and take supplements because they could make you sick. There’s all sorts of comments, so you need to be very careful with the kind of advice you’re going to take onboard. This is going to be a pretty common sense kind of video with a bit of technical information thrown in.

One video I’ve just viewed which talked about liver detoxification in five steps has had nearly 700,000 views. It fails to mention one major thing which is going to kill any kind of liver detox, and that’s drinking alcohol. It’s amazing how many people I see who think they can drink even small amounts and still think they can do a liver detox. Obviously, we can’t have any kind of alcohol if we’re serious about liver cleansing. It’s one of the number one toxins for the liver, so we need to avoid that if we’re really serious about it.

First, let’s look at some signs and symptoms at what goes on if your liver is not very happy. I’ve made a few points here on paper and I’ll read a few out to you. Coated tongue, bad breath, red palms and soles, flushing or sweating, flushed facial appearance, yellowy eyes, mild headaches, waking up with this sort of dull, sort of low grade hungover kind of feeling.

Remember the last time you were hungover? Maybe you don’t drink alcohol, but if you ever have had alcohol and maybe a tiny little bit too much, you’ll know all about what a hangover is. You don’t have to be vomiting to have a hangover. You could wake up with a very mild, dull achy feeling in the head. That’s how some people feel all the time with a liver that’s toxic.

Itchy eyes can be a sign of problems with the liver. Swollen eyes or problems around the eyes. Dark circles under the eyes can be liver or kidney. Brownish spots or blemishes on the skin, we call them liver spots. Especially if a woman has a lot of spots on her hand and different parts of her body, it could also mean that she’s not detoxifying estrogen or other hormones properly. What about digestive problems? Gallstones, queasiness, nausea, burping, sour stuff coming up, burping up bitter stuff from inside, intolerance to fatty foods, drinking one glass of wine and feeling like you’ve been wacked over the head, drinking one beer and thinking you’ve drunk a keg of beer.

An inappropriate reaction to alcohol can be a very clear sign of a liver problem. Same with fats. Smelling fats or eating fatty foods can make you sick. Reflux, indigestion, abdominal bloating, constipation, IBS. Constipation’s a very common sign a liver that’s in dire need. A lot of these things I’ve mentioned may make you think you’ve got a parasite problem or a Candida problem or IBS, when in fact it could be a liver problem. Very important point for you to know that.

What about nervous system problems? Well, we know that people with what I call “emotional constipation,” people who get frustrated, very angry all the time and get really peeved off – those people can have liver problems. People with liver problems can get angry, and angry people, for example, can get liver problems. Look what alcohol does to people. It turns them into instant idiots. A lot of people who drink alcohol go out and do stupid things. The police spend every Friday and Saturday night cleaning up the streets because there are a lot of sick people out there who drink and start punching other people up.

Poor concentration, foggy brain, overheating, mood swings as well, recurring headaches, especially if they are associated with nausea. What about immune dysfunction? More signs and symptoms of a liver in need of attention because your liver is one of your big primary immune organs. It’s got cells in it called Kupffer cells. They’re involved also in keeping the body having a very powerful immune response. When the liver is sick or not well, it can also mean allergies, sinus, hay fever, dermatitis, hives. Many different skin problems can come as a result of a sick liver.

Many different types of skin rashes and inflammations. Chemical and food sensitivities. MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity). Autoimmune diseases nearly always have some link with a liver problem. Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia often times is a liver dysfunction. Recurrent viral bacterial and parasitic infections. Liver congestion. Sick liver. Poor detoxification pathways. All very common with liver problems.

Blood sugar problems. What about hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar? Liver problem. Craving for sugar? Liver problem. Look at people who’ve got Type-2 diabetes or mature onset. They often have liver issues. They have high cholesterol. They can’t metabolize fat properly. They have sugar cravings. They have a lot of signs and symptoms of liver dysfunction. Hormonal imbalances – we spoke about that briefly, particularly with women with the brown spots. Menopausal symptoms like hot flashes can often involve the liver as well.

Now you can see that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that can happen with liver dysfunction. We’re going to talk now about how to cleanse the liver. I’m not going to talk about these are the five steps because there are a lot more than that. Needless to say, it’s very important for you to keep your liver in very good shape. It is one of your largest organs. It’s the biggest organ in the body in terms of its ability to burn fat and clear toxins from the body. It is also a metabolic regulator. It warms the body up and cools it down. It has over 350 to 400 different chemical actions in the body.

There are two main pathways how the liver works. Phase one and phase two. In fact, I might just grab this chart here. I often show patients this chart. You can see my liver detoxification chart here. Let’s see if I can just stand here and walk you through a few things. Here you can clearly see phase one: toxins coming into the body. This phase works by virtue of a bunch of things called P450 enzymes. Then we have phase two: the conjugation. Then we have this stuff here in the middle.

I can’t hold that picture up for the screen and talk to you about it, so I’m going to talk you through this a little bit.

Doctors know phase one quite well. How do they know phase one? Well, look at this drug guide here. This is a New Zealand drug guide, but if you’re in America or any other country, your doctor will have this drug guide. This drug guide has got over 1,600 drugs in it. Now, what do you see at the top there? You see “drug interactions related to liver enzyme activity.” Here, we can clearly see pages and pages of drugs here. At the top you can see weird things like 2C9 and 2A6 and stuff like that. These are different P450 enzymes. There’s a couple of hundred of them.

Enzymes have a specific affinity for breaking certain toxins down. Drugs are hard on the liver. In fact, when the liver enzymes break these drugs down, they become more toxic, and then they create what we call free radicals, or actually damage to the body. That’s the intermediate pathway I showed you. Toxins come in (let’s just say drugs, but it could be hormones, pesticides, all sorts of junk in your diet, hydrogenated fats, aspartame) the P250 enzymes have to break those toxins down.

They become more toxic through that breakdown. They go into intermediate phase, and then this is why it’s important to have antioxidants to stop oxidative stress. Vitamins A, C, E, Selenium, Zinc. Many other kinds of elements there.

These things actually help to protect the liver. Glutathione, which we find in milk thistle. Very important herb. It’s a very important we call tripeptide. Three amino acids make up this compound that stops damage to the liver. The liver is full of glutathione. Then these toxins go from this middle pathway into the second phase called conjugation. There are different types of conjugation pathways. Now the toxins get broken down further into either pee or poo or it comes out through your breath. Metabolically, there are different ways you can eliminate toxins; through your skin, for example.

The stool and the urine are the two primary routes that the liver has to dump garbage out of the body. Now that you know that, it’s important that you pee properly and you poo properly. Constipated people should not do a liver detox. If you can’t poop every day and your bowel is blocked up; if you’re sitting there on the toilet in the morning and you’re trying to have a go and it’s not happening, or little bits are coming out and you’ve got to come back later on (what I call ineffectual urging). If you’ve got a particularly bad case of constipation or a history of it, you need to do a bowel cleanse or purge before you even think about doing a liver detox.

This is what was missing on a lot of videos I saw. They never talked about that. If you’ve got a problem with your plumbing – let’s just say you’re trying to wash the dishes, but when you let the water down, the drain’s blocked. It’s not a really a good idea to fill up the sink right up to the top because the water’s not going to be able to go out. If you’ve got toxic residues on your plates and cups you’re trying to get rid of and the drain’s not working, you’re pretty well stuffed. So what do you do? You’ve got to clear the drain pipe first. Your drain pipe is your bowel. The bowel has to be clean.

If you look at my Candida Crusher book, also in some of the videos, I talk about a bowel purge. It’s very important to do a bowel purge before you even consider liver detox. Unless you’re a really healthy person and have got a really good gut like I have, don’t even think about doing a liver detoxification without having a clean bowel. It’s a silly idea. If you liberate a lot of toxins from the liver and they’re not going to be excreted properly, you’re going to take them up all over again. So, rule number one: bowel purge first. You can use magnesium for this, different types of products like vitamin C powder. That’s an important concept I want you to really remember. The bowel has to be clean before you even consider it.

If you’re going to consider the liver cleanse, I want you to really consider changing the way you eat for several weeks leading into the liver detoxification. There’s no point like having KFC every day or McDonald’s for breakfast three times a week. Diet coke, pizzas every night, smoking 10 cigarettes a day and having three or four cans of beer and then “I’m going to go on a liver detox right now! I need to get that liver clean because I’m feeling like crap.”

What’s going to happen if you throw your body straight away into a detox when you’ve been living like crap is you’re going to feel like crap. You’re going to be vomiting, diarrhea, headaches. Sick for days, even weeks. I’ve seen this with many people. A good point is to lead in. This is what I call a “warm turkey” approach. You don’t go cold turkey. You don’t just stop all your beer and your pizzas overnight. You do this way back.

What if you’re already eating an amazing diet? Your bowel is working beautifully. Then it may be time for you to consider a liver detoxification. There are many different ways you can do a liver detox. I like herbal detoxifications. I like using specific formulas from different companies that include specific kinds of nutrients. If we look at my chart again here, you can actually see the co-factors that help each phase. Let’s have a look here. You can actually see and find these charts on the internet. Here for example different things that expedite phase one. You’ll see a lot of B vitamins here, for example. In phase two here, we’re looking at proteins in particular – methionine, cysteine, choline, different kinds of elements.

How do you really clean the liver up? Well, one website I saw said you just need three herbs: milk thistle, turmeric, and dandelion. Well, that’s pretty simplistic. I think you need a little bit more than that. I like people to drink a liver tea. Go to your health food shop and buy a good quality liver tea. You can drink one or two cups a day. That’s a smart move. Look at eating a cleaner diet leading into the liver cleanse. When you do the liver cleanse, we’re looking at one, two or three weeks of quite intensive dietary work.

The best time to do the liver cleanse is spring going into summer. What is it now? It is May, so in the States now – I think you guys are in spring or going into summer. Now’s a perfect time to do a detoxification. First, get that bowel working. Don’t forget. Consume foods that actually help to clean the liver. We’re talking sprouts, apple cider vinegar, sour foods, bitter foods, beet roots, artichokes, capers, olives, rocket and endive, lettuce, chicory, lemon juice, lime juice, grapefruit juice. Be careful with grapefruit juice if you’re taking pharmaceutical drugs. If you’re taking different kinds of heart pills or brain pills because grapefruit contains a flavonoid called Naringenin. Naringenin will really screw up one of your P450 enzymes. It can actually upregulate that and make you detoxify much faster. Grapefruit juice is probably out if you’re taking a pharmaceutical drug.

There’s no reason why you can’t have lemon juice and lime juice. These are very good adjuncts as part of your liver cleanse. A good quality cider vinegar – nice and bitter. Helps to secrete bile. These are good things also if you’ve got a sluggish bowel. I like a formula called Swedish Bitters. Go to google: Swedish Bitters. Try and get the original one. Very, very good liver detoxification will occur with Swedish Bitters. You take one teaspoon per day and build up to one teaspoon three to four times per day before meals. Very good ability to work on phase one and phase two. Good ability to help the body dump and release toxic bile. Wonderful product to use for about a month.

That’s got to give you a little bit of an idea on liver cleansing. I did see a video that made a good recommendation that I never saw other videos do, is to talk about actually eating liver. In the old days, doctors talked a lot about glandular therapy. Let me show you something interesting. “Practical Endocrinology.” Doctor Henry Harrower. Produced by the Royal Lee Foundation. The guy who actually started Standard Process. This book was written in 1932. Henry Harrower was one of the founders of the Endocrine Association. He was right there at the beginning. That book I just showed you is 700 pages. It’s predominantly about glandular therapy. Animal glands. Before the Endocrine Association got into drugs, doctors used glands to help people out. Heart, spleen, liver, lung, adrenal, kidney. All these body parts of animals are actually used for the patient to build their body part up.

Eating liver is very powerful for your liver. If you look at Gerson Therapy in Mexico now, Dr. Gerson recommended raw calf’s liver. Very powerful, high glutathione content containing product for cancer therapy. Chicken liver, very good. Helps to build your liver up. What Harrower found through Swiss and German research, it didn’t matter if a cow, for example, consumed a frog’s liver, it still had an incredible affinity on the other animal’s liver. You can even cross species with benefit.

Glandular therapy has been very maligned. Many people don’t eat things like liver or lung or spleen anymore. But right up until recently, they did. I believe that people had much more powerful abilities to have strong organs than they do today because of this very reason. If you don’t want to eat things like cow’s liver organic, non-GMO, then you can look at supplements from certified, clean animals. If you don’t want to do that if you’re a vegan or vegetarian, that’s fine. You don’t have to eat these body parts at all. I’m just saying it is a powerful way for you to get your liver restored and in top shape by doing so.

Other videos I’ve seen talk more about the emotional detox. It’s important for you to understand frustration and anger make your liver quite sick. People that are very stressed and angry can have a very sick liver. The Chinese have attached emotion to each organ. With the Kidneys it’s fear. With the Liver it’s anger. With the Lungs it’s sorrow and grief. With the Heart it’s loss of love or the shin, the loss of spirit. Being very angry and resentful and hateful of certain people in your life can give you a very sick liver. Probably another reason why you drink or take drugs, which again toxify the liver.

We mentioned the herbs – I like Swedish Bitters, it’s a formula that’s been tried and tested for over a 100 years. Instead of going off and buying milk thistle, dandelion, turmeric, dipluran, schizandra and lots of different kinds of herbs and playing around. Unless you’re an herbalist like me, I wouldn’t recommend you go there. Milk thistle is a tea, but Swedish Bitters – good product. Should you eat meat? It’s up to you. I don’t think people have a problem with meat with detoxification at all. In fact, phase two needs proteins and amino acids to detoxify properly.

You can follow a system, which you may see on YouTube, but you don’t need to do any of this with liver detox. Remember: spring and summer, fresh foods, salads, sprouts, foods we spoke about, fresh produce, fresh herbs. Eggs are fine as part of a detox as far as I’m concerned. You don’t need to starve your body to do that. But it does pay for you to cut out all the crap out of the diet. Processed foods, hydrogenated fats, which you’ll find in cookies and cakes and biscuits and things like that. Another thing we didn’t talk about was chocolate. You cannot detoxify the liver in my opinion with cocoa or chocolate. It’s not going to happen.

Some of the core things to keep away from for a few weeks is alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, pharmaceutical medications. All non-essential drugs must be stopped. They’re very toxic to the liver. Pesticides, sprays in the garden, glyphosate in the garden, those sorts of things. Personal care products, go for the organic natural ones. If you can, take a couple of weeks out from work and do the detoxification properly. Do the bowel purge, take the herbs, eat the food, maybe have some saunas or some sweating, which is an extremely powerful adjunct, drinking lots of fresh water, lemon juice, cider vinegar, cultured and fermented foods. They’re very bitter and create a good lactic environment for beneficial bacteria to grow.

Don’t forget to do a bit of a cleansing approach. Maybe look at my Canxida Remove product to clean up any bugs you might have, parasites, bacteria, fungi, get rid of them. Look at the Canxida Restore – enzymes and probiotics. Get that gut working better, the pancreas activated. Put the good bacteria where you want them to go and crowd out the bad guys. All perfect parts of liver detoxification.

I hope that gives you a little bit of an insight into how to cleanse the liver and some good ideas there. If you have any questions, please don’t forget to post a question with regards to this video. Don’t forget to click on the link below for my free report, and please do check out my Candida survey to see if you have got a yeast infection and how severe it is. You’ll find that at CandidaCrusher.com. Don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.

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