How to reverse fatty liver? 3 tips you might want to consider!

Author's Bio: Marcie Vaske, MS, LN, CNS

Video Transcript:

Non-Alcoholic fatty liver disease or fatty liver has been grossly underdiagnosed. And what has been found is that nearly 90 million Americans actually suffer from fatty liver. And it is a serious disease, but one that can be easily fixed and preventable.

Now, fatty liver is where an excess amount of fat has been stored in the liver, which creates inflammation and can turn into things like cirrhosis or even liver failure. So very serious and people who are struggling with obesity and even type two diabetes seem to be more susceptible to fatty liver.

Now, fatty liver has been found to be caused by sugar and not just regular sugar, but the offensive high fructose corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup is found in many of our foods. Things like packaged goods, pasta, sauces, dressings, and syrups.

So take a look at the back of the packaging by the ingredient list on some of the things that I just mentioned and see if it has high fructose corn syrup.

If it does, you wanna get rid of that because that's going to increase inflammation all over your body, but specifically, create inflammation in your liver.

Now a diet even high in carbohydrates like pastas, breads, crackers, cookies, and cakes, that's also going to increase your risk for fatty liver because of course that contains sugar, which I just mentioned causes fatty liver.

So before we move on and talk about how to reverse fatty liver a little bit more, I'm just gonna introduce myself. I'm Marcie Vaskie, I'm a functional medicine nutritionist and I specialize in gut health.

So I see a lot of people with bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, and really that's just to name a few things because as we learn more about the gut, we know how impactful it is on other systems in our body.

So I work even with people with thyroid diseases, autoimmune problems, and things like blood sugar dysregulation or hormone imbalance.

So if this sounds like you or someone you know, you can easily sign up for an initial appointment and get some help starting on that journey to better gut health.

But if you're kind of like the person who you know does stuff by themselves or just wanna learn more in general about the gut, download our free guide, which is Five Ways to Improve Gut Health. So you can get started on your own or you can share it with people that might find it interesting and helpful.

How to reverse fatty liver? Here are the 3 tips!

So today is all about fatty liver and specifically, I'm gonna talk about three tips to improve fatty liver. And as we've talked about kind of the cause of fatty liver, which is sugar or a high carbohydrate diet, probably have already guessed that my tip number one is going to be all about the food you put in your body.

1. Maintain a Healthy diet and increase your healthy protein and healthy fats

So what you wanna try to do is maintain that healthy diet and you wanna work on increasing your proteins, those healthy proteins, making sure you're getting lots of green leafy vegetables, healthy fruits.

Also, healthy fats because having a nice balanced meal, having some of that protein, the carb, the healthy fat in there also helps your blood sugar, but it also reduces inflammation in the body and it keeps your liver a lot happier.

So you guessed it, you want to limit your sugar intake, you wanna limit processed foods intake and you might even want to think about reducing alcohol if you do drink alcohol because as we know, alcohol can damage the liver and just exacerbate that fatty liver disease that you might be experiencing.

2. Weight loss is recommended if you want to reverse fatty liver

So as you incorporate that healthy diet, this feeds right into my tip number two, which is weight loss if you need to lose weight. So weight loss is extremely important for reducing the fatty liver and it all depends on how much excess weight you might need to lose.

So it's advisable to work with your healthcare practitioner, your nutritionist, or your dietician to come up with an appropriate weight loss that's right for you to meet your goals.

So as I shared above in tip number one, a nutrient-dense diet is going to be your best bet for reducing the fatty liver and reducing weight.

And that nutrient-dense diet again needs to be full of proteins, green leafy vegetables, nutrient-rich fruits, and healthy fats, and staying away from those packaged foods that contain that high fructose corn syrup and even damaged fats.

And a lot of processed and packaged foods will contain things like soybean oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, or corn oil. And those are all damaged fats and obviously, that's not going to be good for anything in your body but today, specifically your liver.

Recommended foods to consume to reduce fatty liver

Coffee

So instead of talking about all the things you can't eat, I picked out a couple of things that you should consume to help reduce fatty liver and one of them is my favorite, which is coffee. And coffee has been shown to reduce enzymes in the liver to help increase antioxidants.

So your daily cup of coffee can actually be assisting your liver in not having fatty liver disease and even reducing your fatty liver disease that you might be struggling with right now.

There was a study done in 2021 that showed that coffee could actually reduce fatty liver disease and that fibrosis that happens within the liver also changes and protects you from getting fatty liver disease.

Nuts

Another one of my favorite foods is nuts. And adding nuts helps to reduce inflammation in the body. It's rich in antioxidants and fibers that help reduce inflammation, reduce insulin resistance and help keep that liver happy and healthy.

There was a study that was done in China that actually showed that people who consume nuts largely reduce their risk of getting fatty liver as well as some people who were consuming walnuts actually helped improve the fatty liver disease that they presently had.

So adding a few nuts into that healthy diet is another great way of keeping your liver happy.

Turmeric

Now the last food that I'm going to talk about is actually seasoning turmeric and the protective piece of turmeric is the curcumin inside of that.

And in a study done using turmeric supplementation, found that it did reduce fatty liver by reducing the inflammation that the liver was feeling and reducing those liver enzymes, our A L T and our A S T, which they use to measure our liver and if it has inflammation going on or not.

So adding a little bit of turmeric reduces inflammation within the whole body and we've talked about that on this channel before.

So I would recommend supplementing with a little bit of curcumin per day to bring down inflammation if fatty liver is something you're dealing with or even if you're dealing with pain and inflammation in general.

So I've talked a lot about diet and weight loss so far and you might be thinking, okay, well I can add in some more proteins, some healthy carbohydrates, some good fats, but what does that really look like?

So just for example, if you get up in the morning, a great breakfast would be something like two or three eggs, maybe some sauteed up vegetables cooked in a little bit of butter or any in coconut oil, beautiful breakfast, you got your protein, you got some carbs and you have some healthy fats.

And maybe for lunch you get some chicken salad and have it in a nice healthy, a gluten-free wrap or a just a nice wrap in general that's organic and serve it with some raw vegetables, maybe some carrots and hummus or some cauliflower and guacamole and maybe for dinner you make a steak for yourself and have great vegetables with that.

And some, you know, maybe some steamed Brussels sprouts or even roasted broccoli and cauliflower and have a little bit of sweet potato or half a cup of white potato and put a little bit of healthy fat with that.

You can throw on some butter if you like that on your potatoes or maybe you like full-fat sour cream butter on your potato and that's a great well-rounded meal that helps to keep inflammation down your blood sugar steady and helps your liver be happy.

3. To reduce fatty liver disease you need to exercise!

So the last tip for the day for reducing fatty liver disease is one that fits perfectly with eating a healthy diet and weight loss, which is exercise.

And of course, we talk about exercise a lot because keeping the body moving helps heart health and that also when we're moving, I mean it could be something as simple as just walking, right? You don't have to go run a marathon or be in the gym weightlifting for five hours a day.

You could simply just take a 30-minute walk per day and that keeps your heart healthier, that keeps your blood sugar stable, and that brings down inflammation in the body. And inflammation and fatty liver go hand in hand.

So the three tips just for a quick recap is to improve your diet. Think of eating whole real nutrient-dense foods. Along with that, we'll bring a little bit of weight loss if that is something that you need to work on or deal with.

And then finally get some movement in per day walking, maybe some yoga and weightlifting as well.

And my whole point of this is that it doesn't have to be overwhelming, just eat real food, walk a little bit, and your liver will definitely thank you.

If you'd like to explore any of this information further or obtain an individualized nutrition plan, you can schedule an initial appointment at our clinic. We also take insurance and some of our clients get full coverage, which is great.

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