While plenty of people like to drink, too much can take a toll on the body. One area in particular that both drinking and pill abuse can hurt is the liver. A healthy liver is important for your all-around health. Therefore, it’s important to know how you can avoid health issues…
Healthy Liver: Avoid Health Issues
The liver’s role
In order to understand why it’s important to have a healthy liver, it helps to know what it does. The liver is a pretty big organ; in fact, the only one’s that bigger is the skin! At any given time, the liver can be holding around one pint of blood, or 13% of the total in your body.
That’s because the liver’s main job is to filter our blood. Any blood coming in from the digestive track has to pass through this organ first, before being sent out to the rest of the body. While it does this, the liver also makes bile, which is an important component of the digestive process.
Liver and alcohol
Alcohol is one of most common reasons as to why some people don’t have healthy livers. As we drink, the stomach absorbs the alcohol and places it into the bloodstream. As this blood passes through the liver, the organ has to then filter out the alcohol (about 90%) and break it down. Usually, it takes one hour to process one alcoholic drink.
Still, there’s only so much alcohol the liver can process. The rest remains in our blood, which is how we get intoxicated. Constantly drinking too much and straining the liver can eventually damage it. This might start with something like scarring, before developing into liver disease or even cancer.
Liver and pills
Prescription pills can harm a healthy liver in a similar manner. Certain ingredients in pills can cause damage to the liver in too high amounts. These can be both over-the-counter pills (such as Tylenol), or prescription ones such a opioids.
As with alcohol, one has to be careful about how many pills they take in a time span. If not, then they could cause damage without even being aware of it. As an extra safety measure, you should also avoid any alcoholic drinks when taking pills.
