How to Reverse Fatty Liver Disease Naturally | Jason Fung

today i'm going to talk about fatty liver what it is how we get it and what new research is telling us about how we can reverse it naturally without any drugs just a change in our diet this is a picture of what fatty liver looks like it's pretty much what it sounds like too much fat in the liver what's wrong with that well fat which is the molecule called triglycerides should be stored in fat cells which are called adipocytes if you store fat in fat cells well it doesn't cause a lot of problems but if you store fat in the liver where it's not supposed to be stored then you're going to get a lot of problems so when you look at non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and the first stages what you can see is that the cells are swollen up with all this extra fat as it progresses to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or nash you start to develop a lot of inflammation and this inflammation in the liver can actually destroy the liver and completely wipe it out leading to destruction which is called cirrhosis and at that point you might even need a liver transplant non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in north america and now all over the world in fact it was barely known in 1980 when the first cases were described from a virtually unknown disease in 1980 it's become an epidemic up to 25 percent of people in the united states are thought to have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and it's not just a problem with the fat in fact it's causing a lot of liver problems overall this is data from the united kingdom which shows that hospitalizations for fatty liver disease have increased almost 10-fold from 1998 to 2010 as a cause of liver transplantation it's doubled from 2007 to 2013. normally the liver can produce some fat and it does take in fat from other sources such as the plasma which is the bloodstream their fatty acids the evening meal contains fatty acids as well and it will go into the liver and the liver will export it out the difference between normal livers and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is that there's a massive increase in the amount of fat that is produced by this process called de novo lipogenesis this is the creation of new fat but what is it created from it's not from old fat it's from sugar when we talk about sugars there's two main molecules we're talking about glucose which is the main sugar that you find in starches like bread flour rice potatoes those are long chains of glucose the other simple sugar is fructose and that's what's found in high fructose corn syrup and also table sugar or sucrose that is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose fructose is a very important molecule for de novo lipogenesis because the fructose cannot be metabolized by any cell other than the liver whereas most of the cells of your body that is your heart your muscles your kidneys your liver can use glucose for energy none of those can use the fructose so all the fructose that you eat essentially goes straight into the liver and from this diagram you can see that it gets turned into triglycerides or new fat and from there it's supposed to be exported out but if you're producing too much of this new fat then it's going to accumulate in the liver the other main molecule we have to worry about is glucose if you're eating a very high carbohydrate diet then you're going to take this glucose and you're going to turn it into new triglycerides this is a diagram of how it happens and it seems very complicated but essentially you can see that you're taking the feedstock which is glucose putting it through this metabolic pathway in the liver which is the hepatocyte and out comes triglycerides or new fat we know how this process works in animals for example in the production of foie gras well this is a very controversial food because of potential animal cruelty it is the fatty liver of a goose and it's made by putting a tube down and feeding these ducks large amounts of not fat but starches corn mash in this case they take all this corn which is high in glucose and their liver creates more fat you get fatty liver which is the the food that we call foie gras and it works in humans too in this study what they did was they overfed humans carbohydrates and from baseline when they fed them a lot of glucose and fructose they increased their body weight but only by two percent however when they measured their liver fat it went up by 27 and when they measured how much de novo lipogenesis was happening they found an identical 27 percent when they took them off of their high starch diets they lost all that liver fat when you eat a lot of glucose this is going to stimulate the production of the hormone insulin which is a storage hormone it tells our body to store some of this energy that's coming in and one of the ways that our body does that is through the creation of new fat these studies show that there's a clear correlation between giving people insulin and how much fat is in their liver the same effect is seen in overfeeding of fructose things like sugar or high fructose corn syrup when they did this to humans what they found was that the amount of de novo lipogenesis that was being done in the liver increased the amount of new fat by 79 the rate of de novo lipogenesis increase from baseline by six times so the liver is responding to this high load of fructose by turning it into fat in the liver once we understand how this fat is created and stored in the liver that leads us naturally to how we're going to treat it since fatty liver is caused by too much sugar both glucose and fructose the logical solution is simply to cut them down and that's what recent research has shown us to be highly effective in the reversal of fatty liver disease this study published in 2019 looked at teenage boys who had developed fatty liver and what they did was they randomized them to a normal diet versus a very low sugar diet less than three percent of calories compared to a normal diet which was less than 10 percent of calories what were the results this is a graph of what happened on the low sugar diet the dotted line is the amount of fat in the liver prior to the diet and the circle is how much liver fat there was after following this low sugar diet and on average the liver fat decreased from 25 percent to 17 percent you can see that most of the circles drop below the original dotted line compared to the usual diet where there really wasn't much change and the average liver fat moved from 21 only to 20 or no change at all this study from 2021 randomized people to two different types of dietary intervention either a fasting type diet which is a five to two diet or a low carbohydrate high fat diet in the fasting diet their diet didn't change much although on two of the days they ate very few calories the low carb diet severely restricted the amount of carbohydrates that they ate so what happened both the fasting and the low carb diets resulted in better weight loss compared to the usual diet but more importantly when they looked at the liver fat they could reduce the amount of fat in the liver by over 50 percent both with fasting and low carbohydrate diets this makes a lot of sense if fatty liver is really just caused by too much sugar that is too much glucose and too much fructose then the logical intervention is to simply cut them back by using very low carbohydrate diets and or fasting we can reverse fatty liver disease a blossoming epidemic and one that's contributing to a lot of liver failure and we can do it completely naturally and completely free we just have to take the knowledge of how it develops and apply it to our lives if you want to learn more about how to use intermittent fasting you can check out the other videos in my playlist somewhere here thanks for watching if you learned something maybe share it with a friend they might learn something too and if you enjoyed this video make sure you hit the like button somewhere down below i'll see you next week

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 596,491

Rating: 4.963923 out of 5

Keywords: fatty liver disease, reverse fatty liver, fatty liver, fatty liver treatment, intermittent fasting, jason fung, what causes fatty liver, what is fatty liver, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, low carb high fat, liver cleanse, fatty liver diet

Id: _oBkdmsRu0Y

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021