First, more on why a high fat diet harms the liver at this post:
http://www.vitamincfoundation.com/forum ... 888#p63888
Here is a short excerpt on glucose.
YOUR LIVER’S FAVORITE FUEL
Glucose isn’t solely useful for keeping your blood sugar under control; your liver itself needs it, too. In the ideal liver training, we’d learn from birth that our livers live on oxygen, water, glucose, and mineral salts. Glucose—that is, sugar—is the real fuel.
Now, isn’t sugar a bad word? While protein and fats are celebrated much of the time, we’re very often taught to fear sugar instead. Here’s the truth: our first food, breast milk, has a high ratio of sugars—because a mother’s body knows that her child will thrive on glucose. It’s glucose that builds muscles in a child and allows for the development of organs such as the brain, liver, and especially the heart. As we grow up, that need for glucose doesn’t go away. It’s critical for cooling the brain when we’re in confrontation, being challenged, or even in a simple debate at work or school.
Without glucose, we can’t cope with any pressure or stress. We need it to maintain healthy muscles, a healthy brain, and a healthy heart. And it’s imperative for the liver’s function and its ability to support your entire body. Not that all sugars are beneficial. Sweeteners such as table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, which aren’t attached to nutrients, aren’t doing anyone any favors—they’re a drain on health.
Certain sugars, though—natural sugars from whole foods, like those found in fruits, coconut water, raw honey, sweet potatoes, and the sugars you get from digestion of good carbohydrates like squash and potatoes—are wildly beneficial. That may sound scary or flat-out wrong, given the common anti-sugar advice out there.
Maybe you have fruit fear. That’s probably because you’ve been told at some point that the sugars in fruit feed everything from Candida to cancer.
You might have heard, too, that the condition fatty liver can be caused by sugar, so you should therefore avoid fruit. Well, you don’t need to live with that burden anymore. The truth is that you need those natural sugars—and all the other nutrients you get from fruit—to function at your best. (You’ll find plenty more about why it’s okay to trust fruit in my books Medical Medium and Life-Changing Foods, and we’ll examine the real cause of fatty liver in Chapter 11 of this book.)
When you hear that you should stay away from every sugar possible, know that doing so will hurt your liver. When you hear that sugar turns to fat in the body, understand that it’s really fat turning to fat.
What no one realizes is that nobody eats a diet with just sugar in it; they also eat a lot of fat to go along with it, and that’s what’s problematic. I don’t care how strong the trend is—this is about you, and what you need to thrive. It’s critical that you know the truth, which is that getting high-quality, bioavailable glucose from healthy sources such as fruit is one of the best actions you can take for your liver.
So why all the confusion? Why the saying that “sugar is sugar,” as though your body can’t distinguish between the sugar in a grape and that in a gumball? Because medical research and science have not yet developed tools advanced enough to fully analyze the true value of natural sugars from whole-food sources.
Remember: as institutions, research and science look out for research and science. If they don’t have the tools to analyze and distinguish different types of sugar, they protect themselves by saying that all sugar is the same, and all sugar is bad.
As I said at the beginning of this book in “A Note for You,” I’m not talking about the noble individuals who devote their brilliant, tireless minds to science and stumble upon amazing discoveries in the lab; I’m talking about the establishment, the investors, the decision makers at the top who decide which potential advancements to greenlight and which to stifle or sweep under the carpet. This means that the ill effects we all witness of table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup on health continue to get grouped with the effects of the sugars in something like bananas—and that’s a major loss for everyone, because that natural sugar is (1) bonded to critical nutrients that you can’t get any other way and (2) a missing piece in liver health.
Much of the time when sugar gets the blame, what scientific observation is truly picking up on—without realizing it—are the ill effects of the combination of processed sugar plus fat. We covered this a bit in the previous chapter, and we’ll look at it in much more detail later. It’s not only that the nutrients happen to be bonded to sugar; the liver needs nutrients that are surrounded by sugar, because sugars help it do its job.
Sugar is how other nutrients propel through the bloodstream and enter into organs; without sugar, a nutrient can’t drive itself where it’s needed. Fat doesn’t work this way. The fats we eat don’t carry an antioxidant, vitamin, or other nutrient for delivery in the body; they don’t drive nutrients into organs and tissue. That doesn’t mean that healthy fats don’t hold nutrients—it’s that they don’t deliver them the way sugars do. A healthy fat will indeed contain vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, and that’s the basis of the scientific belief system that fats are so beneficial.
What medical research and science don’t realize is that as healthy as a given fat source may be, as much as it may have to offer, it’s a microscopic fraction of what sugar has to offer in the way of actually getting nutrients to their destinations. Radical fats’ nutrients are hard to access, because they’re suspended and encapsulated in globules of fat that aren’t easily broken down.
On top of which, excess fats in the bloodstream are like a school bus driving in front of a mail carrier for an entire delivery route. It doesn’t mean the school bus is all bad; it’s filled with wonderful children, and the bus driver’s duty is to travel at a measured pace. Still, the bus does slow down the mail carrier (the sugar delivering nutrients). It holds up deliveries, some of which are critical, like the refund check that will allow you to take your daughter out and get her the soccer equipment she needs. While fat is just trying to do its job, too much of it keeps sugar from doing its own vital duty.
It takes work for the liver to process vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and the like—and all that work generates heat. The liver is the organ that runs hottest to begin with; as the heater of the body, it’s there to help you stay warm when the temperature drops. It generates additional heat doing its many jobs; the more fat and toxins it has to process especially, the harder it has to work, and the hotter it gets.
The only way the liver keeps from overheating is with sugar; along with the right blend of water and mineral salts, glucose is what helps the liver keep its cool. Like a cooling agent for a car’s engine, glucose keeps it running.
Glucose also feeds the liver. As I said, it’s fuel. While the liver is made up of two main lobes and also includes the smaller caudate and quadrate lobes, it has tiny lobes internally, too, called lobules, which you can think of as elves in a toy factory. Those elves are busy. All day long, they sort through material deliveries (everything you’re exposed to, from food and drink to what you breathe to what goes on your skin), deciding what’s a useful building block and what needs to go to the trash heap. The elves bundle up the good and bad and send them on their separate paths—and this work makes them hungry.
They need to be fed at regular intervals, and glucose is what they crave. It’s yet one more reason why your liver’s backup supply of glycogen is so precious. Otherwise, the liver can’t function. It can’t process critical nutrients, it can’t protect you from fats, and it can’t do anything else that we’re looking at here in Part I.
When you take fuel away from the liver for too long, it not only runs out of steam; it begins to fight for its life—and yours. It may even send out soldier elves—that is, chemical compounds that act as agents to gather minuscule sources of glucose from throughout the body and then bring them back to the liver. It’s something like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
This is one of those times when the liver shows itself to be like another brain, because it keeps a record of the glucose it takes from other parts of the body—a record that cannot be weighed or measured, a record of intelligence. With cellular information, it documents the glucose stolen from Peter so Paul can make sure he pays him back along the way: When the liver gets restocked with an adequate amount of glucose, it will then release not just the normal, regulated amount of glucose that Peter needs; it will release a little extra. The liver tags the extra glucose with a hormone that allows for quick, easy usage—paying back Peter in a very efficient manner that not only satisfies him; it makes him forget he was ever robbed.
Notice that today’s high-fat diet trend throws in little bits of sugar now. If it didn’t, and a diet were only fat and protein long term, it would create a tragic situation of the liver scraping by to survive. It would also cause the robbing Peter to pay Paul situation to go on way too long. And so, because experts have observed that an all-fat-and-protein diet leads to negative health effects, they’re allowing pints of berries in a diet or bringing in apples, pumpkin, or avocado or adding hidden sugars in their protein bars. Avocados, by the way, were thought to be poisonous until very recently, with experts of yesterday calling them dangerously fattening and terrible for health. Now they’re in vogue, though no one even realizes just how wonderful they are for health.
Along with fat, avocados contain very valuable, viable sugar. Before you worry that their fat-sugar combination is a problem, know that an avocado is a rare, random exception to the fat-sugar issue; the avocado’s fat content is so infused with its sugar that it’s designed not to let the sugar get in the way and to keep the liver balanced, unless you eat avocados in high quantity day in and day out. So while you don’t want lots and lots of avocado, the liver won’t cry out so much when avocado’s fat is coming through; its viscosity is easier on the organ, making it a healthier source than many others. Avocados are good for you.
Now back to the diet experts: note that they haven’t been bringing avocados and other low-sugar sources into diets because they understand that the body is desperate for glucose. It’s because they’ve seen that the old model wasn’t getting people anywhere in the end; they weren’t improving. If diet experts knew that the liver was literally starving on a high-fat diet, considerations would be made and today’s diets would be different. They’d realize that a high-fat diet is accidental cruelty to the liver.
With any other living thing, we know it needs to be fed, and that feeding it the wrong food would be inhumane. We know, for example, to feed a horse or a hamster or a pet bunny rabbit this and this and not that. With the liver, medical research and science aren’t there yet—so we need to be the ones who know how to look out for our livers.
REAL RESTORATION
So many trends over the years have convinced so many of us that carbs and sugar are to be feared. If you’re on a diet with no sugar, though—no carbohydrates like fruit and squash and potatoes and sweet potatoes and millet and raw honey—then your liver will starve slowly, and you’ll age rapidly over time. If you do eat carbohydrates and they’re always accompanied by fat—think a twice-baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits, a banana split, or even meals we’re taught to think of as healthy, such as whole-milk yogurt with fruit and granola; a salad with grilled chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and a whole wheat roll; or a turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise—your liver can also starve for glucose.
Shielding the pancreas from the fat in a meal prevents the liver from getting all the precious glucose it can out of the food, and the result can be a constant, nagging hunger that won’t go away no matter how much you eat. (More on this in Chapter 13, “Mystery Hunger.”)
Whether on a high-fat, no- or low-carb diet, or a diet where all carbohydrates are accompanied by fat, the liver never gets restored. Any little bits of downtime the liver gets don’t feel like real rest—it’s like when you take a three-day weekend thinking it will be the perfect opportunity for restoration, and at the end of it, you don’t feel fully rested. Has that ever happened to you? That’s how the liver feels with fat always blocking glucose.
Give your liver what it needs, on the other hand, and it will support you like nothing else can. With bioavailable glucose in the diet from healthy sources plus a stockpile of glycogen for times of need, your liver can give you energy, slow down the aging process, and help shield you from disease. It can easily adapt to your needs on a moment-by-moment basis without a fight, and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, it can act as the ultimate conversion tool and medicine chest.
William, Anthony. Medical Medium Liver Rescue: Answers to Eczema, Psoriasis, Diabetes, Strep, Acne, Gout, Bloating, Gallstones, Adrenal Stress, Fatigue, Fatty Liver, Weight Issues, SIBO & Autoimmune Disease (pp. 20-24). Hay House. Kindle Edition.