Men's Health: The Liver Guide
Sept. 28 -- Your liver receives 25 percent of the blood your heart pumps — more than two quarts a minute. It can crank out two cups of fat-dissolving bile per day. Without it, you'd be unable to digest a meal or process fat.
Your blood would run thick with sewage, and your cholesterol reading would break sensitive laboratory measurement devices. And yet your liver grabs none of the recognition that big-name organs just inches away enjoy — until something goes wrong.
Yours may already be in trouble. Like most men, you probably damage your liver almost daily and don't even realize it. Knock back a few too many on the weekends? Pop acetaminophen for every ache and pain?
Keep it up and you could find yourself in a new battle — with liver disease, a condition that affects twice as many men as women and is more likely to kill us than high blood pressure.
You can do something now to take care of the one you already have. Here's a plan to protect it from its scariest natural enemy — you.
Stop at Six Drinks
You're trying to avoid "fatty liver," a condition that occurs when you flood your liver with more alcohol than it can process. First, your body's beer filter swells with fat globules, and then it turns a sickly yellow.
Let your liver rehab for a few days and it'll usually recover, but keep bingeing and scar tissue will develop, which could lead to cirrhosis.
"A man's liver has an alcohol threshold of about 70 to 80 grams, or about a six-pack of beer," says Dr. Koff. "Drink less than that at one sitting and it's very unlikely that you'll get fatty liver."
Lose 10 Pounds
That cummerbund of fat you're wearing may be squeezing your intestines in such a way that you aren't able to digest everything you eat. When this happens, bacteria will cause the leftovers to ferment, creating a homemade still in your colon, which can result in fatty liver.
"Eating a daily cup of yogurt has been shown to have an antibacterial effect in animals, and it could minimize humans' chances of developing fatty-liver disease," says Mae Diehl, M.D., a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
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