10 Common Habits That Destroy Your Liver
Introduction
Your liver is one of the most important organs in your body. It’s responsible for filtering your blood, removing toxins, and producing bile. When your liver isn’t working properly, you can suffer from a number of symptoms including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. In this article, we’ll look at 10 common habits that can damage your liver and lead to more serious health issues over time:
Drinking too much alcohol
Drinking too much alcohol is one of the most common habits that can destroy your liver. The liver is responsible for filtering toxins from the body, making bile, and helping to digest food. When you drink too much alcohol, it puts a lot of stress on this organ and damages its ability to function properly. It can also lead to cirrhosis or cancer in some cases (1).
The recommended amount of alcohol per day varies depending on whether you’re male or female but it’s generally recommended that men shouldn’t drink more than 2 drinks per day while women should have no more than 1 (2).
Eating too many fatty foods
The liver is a crucial organ, and one of its most important functions is to break down fats in the body. While you need some fat in your diet, it’s best to watch how much and what kind of fat you eat.Fats can be good for you when consumed in moderation; however, too much-saturated fat can lead to weight gain and even heart disease if eaten regularly over time. Fats are also high in calories so eating too many fatty foods will increase your calorie intake without adding any nutrients or vitamins (like protein does). Examples of high-fat foods include:
- Fried chicken wings with creamy sauce drizzled on top
- A deep-dish pizza loaded with cheese and pepperoni
- Burgers dripping with melted cheese
Skipping a healthy breakfast
One of the best things you can do for your liver is to eat a healthy breakfast. A healthy breakfast can help you feel full and avoid overeating later in the day, which will help you lose weight.
Not getting enough sleep
The liver is one of the most important organs in your body. It has many functions, including detoxifying chemicals and proteins, producing bile to help digest fats, removing waste products from the blood, storing sugar (glycogen) for energy when you need it, and making cholesterol. One way that sleep deprivation can harm your liver is by interfering with its ability to produce enough glucose for energy. This means that if you’re not getting enough sleep at night–or even just during the day–your body will have trouble keeping up with its normal processes; this includes those important ones like processing nutrients from food or filtering toxins out of blood before they reach other organs like the kidneys or brain!
Consuming too much salt
Your liver is the organ responsible for filtering out toxins and chemicals from your body. Consuming too much salt can overload your liver, causing it to work harder than it should and increasing your risk of developing kidney disease or heart disease.
While sodium is an essential mineral that helps regulate water levels in our bodies, excess sodium can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). This condition damages both the heart and kidneys by making them work harder than usual–and since these organs are responsible for filtering out toxins from our blood supply, they’re more susceptible than other parts of our body when we consume too much salt!
Taking over-the-counter medications
Taking over-the-counter medications can also be harmful to your liver. Most people don’t realize that some common painkillers, like ibuprofen (Advil) and acetaminophen (Tylenol), can do serious damage to the organ. If you take these regularly or even just once in a while, it’s worth talking to your doctor about alternatives that won’t hurt your liver.
There are many over-the-counter medications that are safe for people with healthy livers but can help those with damaged ones–and some of them may surprise you! For example:
Smoking cigarettes
You’ve probably heard that smoking cigarettes are bad for your health. It’s true, but did you know that it can also damage your liver? In fact, smoking has been shown to cause cancer and heart disease–and this isn’t even including lung disease! If you smoke regularly and want to help protect yourself from these diseases (as well as others), quitting today is the best decision you can make.
Overdoing the coffee and energy drinks
A lot of people have a hard time waking up in the morning, but if you’re one of them and have been relying on coffee or energy drinks to get through your day, this habit could be doing more harm than good.
When you drink coffee or an energy drink, it acts as a diuretic in your body–meaning it causes water loss. If you’re not replenishing that lost water with proper hydration (i.e., water), then dehydration will occur as your body tries to balance itself out by filtering toxins faster and more efficiently than usual through its detoxification system–the liver!
Not drinking enough water
The liver is the largest organ in your body and it does a lot of work! It detoxes your blood, makes bile to help digest food, and breaks down some medications. If you don’t drink enough water, this can cause serious problems for your liver. The recommended amount of water to drink each day is 8 glasses (about 2 liters). This varies depending on how much you weigh and how active you are though–the more active or larger in size that you are, the more fluid (or liquid) will be needed by your body for normal functioning.
If you feel thirsty and drink when thirsty instead of before getting thirsty, that’s not good either because by then it’s too late: The damage has already been done!
Habits such as drinking too much alcohol, not getting enough sleep, and eating too much fat are bad for your liver.
- Drinking too much alcohol. Alcohol can cause fatty liver disease, which is a buildup of fat in the liver cells. The more you drink, the greater your risk of getting this type of liver disease.
- Not getting enough sleep or exercise. Researchers believe that not sleeping enough or exercising regularly may increase your chance of developing the nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). This condition occurs when fat builds up in the liver even though you don’t drink alcohol or have any other known causes for it like diabetes or obesity.* Eating too much fat – especially trans fats found in processed foods – increases your chances of developing NAFLD because they raise levels of triglycerides (fats) in your blood.* Overdoing caffeine: Caffeine acts as an irritant to the stomach lining, causing acid reflux that damages the pancreas and interferes with its ability to produce insulin properly; both conditions lead directly back onto our list here today at number 5 from earlier on how bad habits affect us negatively over time!
Conclusion
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of the habits that damage your liver. The good news is that these are all things that can be changed! If you’re concerned about any of these issues, reach out to your doctor or another healthcare provider for more information on how to improve your lifestyle and protect yourself from disease.
