What are the three sources of liver fat in fatty liver disease? How can you remove that?
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is currently the most frequent chronic liver disease due to the obesity epidemic and is also seen in children. “(n) There may be NAFLD in the early stages of obese children.” Why do we care? Fatty liver can progress to steatosis, which can cause scarring and cirrhosis, which is bad enough, but can also lead to the development of liver cancer.
What is the source of liver fat in fatty liver disease? There are three main sources. Excess sugar in our diet, excess fat in our diet, and fat spilling out of our excess body fat so that we can see the best diet for fatty liver disease treatment at 0:51 in my video.
How do you know that extra dietary sugar is bad? Because it’s being tested. When teenagers with fatty liver disease randomized free sugars to a low diet (sugar and sugar drinks mean low diets), they experienced significant improvements within 8 weeks. Given these new data, the editors of the Liver Journal read, “We can make a strong argument that we are beyond any uncertainty about the harmful effects of excess sugar consumption, and that we must now act on the large amount of data available to inform the public about the health risks of eating too much sugar.”
And how do you know that excess dietary fat is bad? Because it’s also included in the test. If people were randomized to a low-fat or high-fat diet with the same calorie count, within just 2 weeks, liver fat on low-fat diets was reduced by 20%, while participants got the same calorie count but increased by 35% on high-fat diets.
Insulin levels fell by about 15% on low-fat diets, and insulin levels rose by about 15% on high-fat diets. Advocates of low-carb and ketogenic diets often talk about how you need to eat more fat and fewer carbohydrates to lower your insulin levels, but the exact opposite happens when you actually test them. A single high-fat diet not only increases liver fat, but also increases insulin resistance. Within 4 hours, our body must pump so much insulin, as our whole body insulin sensitivity can be reduced by 25%. As the accompanying editor said, “A single fat bolus (dose) packs the punch.”
Therefore, patients should limit or avoid fat-rich foods to help prevent or treat fatty liver disease. Although longer-term clinical trials are always needed, “based on current evidence, we recommend a diet with low saturated fatty acids, and refined carbohydrates. Therefore, meat, dairy products, junk, and especially soda, meaning a diet with low diets. Saturated fats are not only “metabolicly harmful to the human liver than unsaturated fats”, but saturated fats are more harmful than straight sugar. What happened when a study participants disrupt 1,000 calories of saturated fats (such as cheese or coconut oil), unsaturated fats (such as nuts or olive oil), or sugar (such as soda or candy)? Eating too many 1,000 calories a day is not good for us, but saturated fat increases liver fat by 55%, significantly more than unsaturated fat, with candy between the two.
Therefore, “Weight loss is beneficial in NAFLD, but certain diets known to induce weight loss can actually cause or exacerbate this disease, and therefore may induce insulin resistance, such as very low carbohydrates, high fat diets.” In contrast, “A healthy plant-based diet is associated with a lower risk of NAFLD and a more favorable liver functional test profile.” For example, consumption of legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, lentils) is associated with a lower risk of fatty liver and a lower odds with eating more beans.
In previous studies, researchers have not seen people eating strictly plant-based diets, more or less. It is currently difficult to study people who eat completely meatless meals, as they represent only a small portion of the US population. But what about Indian Americans? Individuals from the Indian subcontinent are “one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States,” and they seem to retain the diet, and are vegetarians of the same proportion as India, usually at 40%. In India, meat eaters know that fatty liver disease is significantly higher. The same is true in Taiwan, with vegetarians who have a significantly lower risk of fatty liver. And in my video, at 4:35 and below, even affected vegetarians have significantly less liver scarring. Their data suggest that “replacement of soybeans with one serving of meat or fish or fish intake is associated with an increased risk of 12% to 13%.”
And in the US? Eating a vegetarian diet was slimmer and associated with better blood sugar levels, better cholesterol and less than half of the odds of fatty liver disease. Is it a cause and effect? You need to go through a test. To reverse inflammatory bowel disease in fatty liver patients with a plant-based diet, researchers found that liver inflammation had dramatically improved, but it is difficult to induce the specific effects of the diet across their own, as they lost about 9 pounds in the first 11 days to eat healthy. In fact, we need to be careful about rapid weight loss. Because everything that excess fat breaks down can get flooded into the bloodstream and sometimes make things worse. Therefore, for people with fatty liver disease, it may be safer to lose about 3 pounds a week.
Although the plant-based diet has not yet been properly tested in randomized clinical trials of fatty liver disease, I still think it is the best diet for this disease and it is not based on a single case report, but on the fact that cardiovascular disease, rather than liver failure, is the most common cause of death among patients with fatty liver disease. There are also randomized controlled trials that demonstrate that healthy plant-based diet and lifestyle programs can reverse heart disease and open arteries without a drug, surgery or stent. Yes, patients with fatty liver disease and steatosis “may eventually develop cirrhosis (of the liver), but only if they do not die from cardiovascular disease first.”
Doctor’s notes:
There are a few specific foods that may be useful. See my video in the related post below.
If the excess sugar is so bad, what about fruits? Check if fructose is bad, how about the fruit? And how many fruits are there too many?
