Geek Out: 10 Reasons Why We All Need To Be Much, Much Kinder To Our Livers!
Hepatic:
This word meaning “related to the liver” seems to have both Latin and Greek origins, who knew?!
Most of the cholesterol:
Pretty much every resource you’ll find (including these links below) will suggest that 75-80% of our blood cholesterol is from our liver, not our diet.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/how-its-made-cholesterol-production-in-your-body
https://www.heartuk.org.uk/cholesterol/what-is-cholesterol
Probably:
Even after what seems like for ever, the science is not totally clear on the topic of cholesterol but it does seem that it’s not so much the amount of cholesterol that you have in your blood, rather how it’s combined with other molecules such as proteins:
https://www.cdc.gov/cholesterol/ldl_hdl.htm
The Pill:
This idea of synthetic estrogens or modified versions of them being excreted (lost) from the body in the urine has lead to the incorrect notion that the measurable levels of estrogens in our water supply are from women using this form of contraception.
Whilst no one is excluding a very small contribution of these pills to the problem, the overwhelming evidence points in other directions such as our overuse of plastic!
For example:
You might be interested to know that other mammals excrete modified estrogens in the same way i.e the urine and for a long time, one of the most widely used HRT pills for women during the perimenopause was made of horse estrogens, excreted in the urine of pregnant horses!!!
https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i25/Premarin.html
Are likely to be toxic/characteristic colors:
Think of each hemoglobin molecule as having 3 parts: an iron ion, a heme molecule and four globin chains (I know that technically makes 7 parts but I’m counting the 4 globin chains as one item!) We mentioned the iron can be recycled, so too can the globin chains – these are proteins which can be broken down and made into new proteins.
The problematic part is the heme molecule. Firstly, it’s turned into something called bilirubin and the liver can then tconvert this into those yellow and brown molecules that will leave the body, via the toilet! If bilirubin levels build up, because the liver can’t keep up its rate of modifying the bilirubin into the excretable yellow and brown forms, that’s when people start to look yellow from too much bilirubin in the skin, the whites of the eyes etc.
