Your liver, a master at multitasking, carries out numerous vital functions each day to maintain your health and prevent disease, including processing foods and drugs, storing iron, producing bile, manufacturing proteins and disarming an array of environmental and metabolic toxins. Helping your liver do a better job for you may be as simple as emphasizing foods that provide it with the nutrients and phytochemicals it requires for its various jobs.
Fresh and Raw Foods
Fresh raw vegetables and fruits make for a happy and healthy liver, says Rhody Lake in the "Liver Cleansing Handbook: How to Keep Your Liver Happy." Drink eight to 10 glasses of fresh vegetable juice along with raw foods and eight glasses of water for a day or two in advance of any type of liver flush. Raw foods and vegetable juices lighten the digestive load on your liver and help it function at peak efficiency.
Beets and Carrots
Avoid liver-damaging foods such as fried meats, high-fat snacks and starchy foods, such as cakes and other baked goods, advises Mikhail Tombak, Ph.D., author of "Can We Live 150 Years?: Your Body Maintenance Handbook." Spicy foods, such as vinegar, pepper, mustard and radish, don't sit well with a liver that is unhealthy. Likewise, coffee and tea are stressful for an already-stressed liver. To strengthen your liver, drink a juice made from one part beets to four parts carrot juice. Vitamins A, C, B-complex and K are particularly useful to the liver. Good food sources for these include egg yolk, cottage cheese, squash, cauliflower, grapes, watermelon, apples, wheat sprouts and currants.
Diverse Diet
A diverse diet that includes protein from grains, raw nuts, seeds, legumes, eggs, seafood and free-range chicken is recommended by Sandra Cabot, M.D. Eat broccoli liberally for its high content of sulphoraphane, a necessary component of the liver's detoxification process. Also load up on tomates; they contain the antioxidant lycopene -- the most powerful carotenoid antioxidant. Cooking tomatoes makes the lycopene more absorbable, and adding oil further improves the usability of this nutrient. Beets top the list of liver-friendly foods for their high levels of anthocyanins, which provide antiviral and anti-tumor activity. Similarly, red and green peppers, red onion, paprika and cranberry provide anthocyanins, though to a lesser degree.
Vegan Diet
A vegan diet may provide all nutritional components for a healthy liver cleanse, says Cherie Calborn in her book, "The Complete Cancer Cleanse: A Proven Program to Detoxify and Renew Body, Mind and Spirit." Calborn advocates a seven-day program that excludes all animal products, as well as gluten from grains such as wheat, rye, barley and oats, and sugary foods. Eat a 50 percent raw and 50 percent cooked diet during this time. Drink three to eight ounces of fresh beet juice per day, to which you can add carrot, cucumber, celery and lemon.
References
- "Liver Cleansing Handbook: How to Keep Your Liver Happy"; Rhody Lake; 2000
- "Can We Live 150 Years?: Your Body Maintenance Handbook"; Mikhail Tombak; 2003
- Liver Doctor: Vital Principles -- The Liver Diet
- "The Complete Cancer Cleanse: A Proven Program to Detoxify and Renew"; Cherie Calbom; 2007
- American Association for the Study of Liver Disease: Liver Facts
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