Dear friend, dear friend,
Your liver is an extraordinary digestive organ. It weighs regarding 2.5 kg, making it the heaviest of your organs. It is also the most vascularized in the human body.(1,2).
It contains 10% of the total blood volume of the body and it is crossed, in adults, by 1.4 liters of blood per second(2)!
It is also crossed by bile ducts that carry bile and lead it out of the liver. The latter is a yellow liquid that helps your body digest fat. It is stored in the gallbladder(3).
The liver participates in more than 500 functions in the body. It is an essential organ.
It is good to take care of it!
And sometimes maybe your liver has trouble keeping up with the pace you impose on it…
Our grandmothers called it liver attack. Doctors prefer to speak of hepatic tenderness. Either way, something has to be done!
The organ of detox
One way to help the liver is to accompany it in one of its main functions, which is eliminate poisons from your body.
It cleans drug residues, alcohol, tobacco, pesticides, food toxins, heavy metals, etc. and expels them in urine and feces(1).
When your liver can’t take it anymore, it says “STOP”, you can feel very tired or feel nauseous for a good part of the day.
It’s time to act !
How to help this liver which skates?
Obviously, consulting a therapist seems necessary, but while waiting to get an appointment, you can already count on the help of nature and in particular three plants, friends of the liver.
Milk thistle: a blessing for the liver
It is an extraordinary plant that is found especially in southern Europe, southern Russia and Asia Minor.
Milk thistle is called silybum marianum by scientists(4).
It is also called Marie’s silybe, Notre-Dame’s milk or the wild artichoke.(5).
It contains a valuable substance, silymarin, which reduces the effect of toxic products for the liver(6,7).
Silymarin, whose main compound is silybin, also allows the liver to regenerate(4).
These virtues of milk thistle make it a useful plant once morest hepatitisTHE liver inflammation or thees cirrhoses which are permanent liver damage(8,9).
But this plant can also accompany heavy drug treatments such as chemotherapy(4).
You can take milk thistle in tea, in which case, you will use the leaves or the dried fruit.
You can put for example a tablespoon of dried leaves or a teaspoon of dried fruit per cup of water(4).
Done boil the water for 3 minutes et let infuse for 10 minutes. You can have a cup avant every meal.
And if you don’t have the time to prepare your decoction, you will also find food supplements offering, most often, milk thistle powder in capsules.
The artichoke: the dish of the poor and the healthy!
Here is the cousin! The Artichoke is a very large thistle. Its scientific name is cynara scolymus.
Coluche said it was a dish for the poor, because there is more on the plate following you have finished eating it than when you started.
And it’s true that the artichoke in vinaigrette requires a little work of skinning the leaves.
But it’s worth it!
The best-known active principle of the artichoke is cynarin.
But the protective action of the liver, known for a long time, comes from all of its active ingredients.
It’s a story that Jean-Marie Pelt, in his time, liked to tell in his lectures.
In the 80s, scientists wanted to know where the beneficial action of the artichoke for the liver came from.
They isolated all the assets and tested them separately for a zero result.
So they mixed them and found the protective action of the artichoke in favor of the liver.
And the botanist concludes with a broad smile: “The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts!”
The artichoke stimulates the production of bile by the liver as well as its evacuation. It also regulates cholesterol levels in the blood as well as urea and uric acid levels.
Urea is a waste product containing nitrogen. It is a residue of protein degradation that must be eliminated(10,11)).
When the urea and acid levels uric acid levels are too high, you may suffer a gout attackwhich can be painful.
The artichoke helps you prevent such a situation. It facilitates the work of the kidneys and the burning of sugars and fats.
This last action is essential for the liver, one of whose roles is to transform excess sugar into fat and store it.(4).
All these actions are also useful for the health of the arteries, once morest diabetes and once morest dermatoses(4).
Once once more, the link between the digestive system and the skin is established.
And the artichoke is good for the liver, for the blood, for the digestive system in general and for the skin!
You can take it as a dish or as an herbal tea. Your herbalist will provide you with dried leaves of which you will add a tablespoon per cup of water.
you can drink two cups a day, before meals(4).
Fumeterre: a weed that has its place in your family pharmacy!
And There you go fumaria officinalis !
It is also called earth gall, earth flower, yin soup; géline foot, buttermilk, red shoe or even jaundice grass(4).
Fumitory is a weed. It is common along the roads. It wedges itself into the interstices of the old walls.
And yet! It is also a valuable medicinal plant!
It contains alkaloids such as protopine, fumarin, and many others, or even flavonoids and organic acids(4).
All these substances together give the fumitory exceptional properties.
She is first spasmolytic : it slows down or suppresses muscular contractions of the stomach, in other words spasms.
The fumitory also acts on the bile. It has a double action: it stimulates bile flow, but limits excess bile secretion.
It influences digestion by its action laxative and even has a beneficial effect on the heart rate that it calms and regulates. Thus, it soothes hypertension and tachycardia and modulates arrhythmia(4,12).
It would also be indicated to calm the asthma attacks.
Finally, the fumitory is also antibacterial, so much so that it is sometimes recommended for external use, that is to say as a poultice or lotion to counter the effects of eczema, psoriasis, pruritus and scabs.
If you ask your herbalist for fumitory, he will give you dried flowering tops.
He may advise you to take one tablespoon of dried herbs per cup of water.
Boil the water for 3 minutes and let it steep for 10 minutes as with milk thistle.
Again, it’s regarding drinking a cup before each meal.
Naturally yours,
Augustine of Livois
