Column Chronicles: Your liver wants to live

Your liver wants to live

Frank Cotolo
November 10, 2016

One thing is for sure: a human cannot live without a liver. Have you ever noticed that the first four letters in the word liver spells the word live? That could be a coincidence but it is also true. A person without a liver cannot live. They don't just lose the "r" in the word liver, they lose their life.

You may be wrecking your liver now, even as you read this, and not know it, so I asked specialists, dieticians and fortune-tellers to list the products we all normally consume that help to destroy a liver.

Sugar ... These sweet crystals can cause a fatty buildup in your body. I don't mean the silent-movie comedian Fatty Buildup, I mean gook fat, disgusting globs of fat that can wreck the liver.

Monosodium Glutamate ... This bastard substance sounds bad and makers of food products that use it know that, so on labels they put the name "hydrolyzed vegetable protein." Like sugar, no matter what you call it, this crap leads to liver disease.

Comfrey ... People use this to keep their skin healthy and reduce swelling but while it is performing those chores the chemical in the leaf that produces it sneaks into your liver and begins to eat it alive. Perhaps that is not true but it may as well eat it alive because it is no good for a liver.

Kava Kava ... This is an herb and most people think herbs are all great. Well they are not. Some herbs, like Kava Kava, can interrupt liver functions. A liver does not like to have its functions interrupted.

Vitamin A ... Oh yeah, a vitamin that can harm your liver is Vitamin A. It is in vegetables, eggs and milk and too much of it is toxic to your liver. Imagine that? Staple foods of breakfast, lunch and dinner can poison your liver.

Soft drinks ... Carbonated soda can ruin a liver. People who drink more than two sodas a day - with or without sugar - can line the liver with the kind of crap only seen in science fiction movies when aliens explode.

Those are just some of the things we ingest that can affect a liver. There may be dozens more. We are all in danger of death by liver failure or liver cancer and certainly of liver diseases yet to be named if we eat a lot of the stuff that can harm our liver.

I didn't mention alcoholic beverages because I was drinking one while I wrote this and wanted to deny the fact that if I drink too many alcoholic beverages my liver will turn black. A black liver can not survive inside of a human body and when the liver gives in, the kidneys are not far behind and the pancreas stops working and the lungs stop and the heart doesn't get oxygen and I don't mean to make this depressing but that is the truth and we all have to know what we are doing when we eat and drink because the liver wants to live and most of the time when it dies it is because of the person who owns the liver.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.