DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: Why complicated writing can mean you have liver disease

Large, the size of a rugby ball, rubber-colored and reddish-brown, its liver is not a glamorous organ.

Still, it silently performs at least 500 vital functions, including removing toxins from your blood and helping to convert the food you eat into energy, and you certainly couldn’t live without it.

The bad news is that about one in three of us now has signs of fatty liver disease – which, as the name suggests, is the result of an accumulation of fat that can cause scarring and make the liver stiff and unable to function adequately and eventually to liver failure.

Even if you avoid this extreme, a damaged liver is harmful to your health. And since many of us treat the liver poorly, liver disease is now one of the leading causes of premature death in the UK.

But it is a silent killer because most people don’t know that they are at risk until too late.

Signs of severe liver problems include tiredness, confusion, itchy skin and, according to the British Liver Trust, “writing that becomes difficult, complicated and small”. Perhaps it is a sign that toxins are reaching the brain.

Good news is that your liver has incredible powers of regeneration and a recent study from Sweden has shown that following the 5: 2 diet, something I have long advocated, is a safe and effective way to slim down a fatty liver and restore it to normal. health.

Drinking a lot of alcohol used to be the main cause of liver failure, but it is now more likely to be the result of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) – and the high rates we have in the UK are mainly the result of our rapidly expanding waists. .

This is because, when we put on weight, the fat is not evenly distributed throughout the body.

You do not, for example, develop fatty feet or a fat forehead. Instead, the excess calories are stored in the fat cells in the buttocks, thighs, stomach and under the skin. But beyond a certain point, your body runs out of ‘safe’ places to store fat.

Then he starts to put some of that fat in his liver. Ideally, this should have almost no fat. If your liver has more than 5% fat, officially you have a fatty liver.

Some time ago, while making a documentary, I saw a young man, significantly overweight, whose liver was almost 60% fat.

Since there are few signs of early fatty liver disease, the only way to reliably detect it is with an ultrasound or a blood test, called a liver function test, which measures enzymes and proteins that accumulate in the blood when the liver It is damaged. The young man in the documentary showed no symptoms and only discovered that he had a fatty liver with a CT scan.

You are at an increased risk of NAFLD if you are over 50, have a large waist, or smoke (there are chemicals in tobacco that are toxic to liver cells). It is also more common in people with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or all three. But you can’t have any of these and still have fatty liver disease. Nine years ago, I did an MRI scan as part of a documentary I was doing and found that my liver was stained with fat.

Although I didn’t seem overweight at the time, I found out that I was a TOFI – thin on the outside, fat on the inside. The only sign that I was carrying a lot of internal fat was my 37 inch waist, which was relatively large for my height (I have 5 feet 11 inches) – my waist is now around 34 inches.

Ideally, your waist should be less than half your height. The NHS recommends losing weight if your waist is 37 inches or more for men and 31.5 inches or more for women.

At that time, I also discovered that I had type 2 diabetes, and the two were almost certainly related. I put myself on the 5: 2 diet (cutting my calorie intake to about 600 a day, twice a week, then eating normally on other days) and in a few months I lost almost 20 pounds and reversed my fatty liver disease and Diabetes type 2.

So I was not surprised by the results of a recent study by the world famous Karolinska Institute in Sweden on 5: 2 and the fatty liver.

The researchers randomly allocated patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to the 5: 2 diet, a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) diet, or received general lifestyle advice from a hepatologist (liver specialist) .

After 12 weeks, those on the 5: 2 and LCHF diets not only lost an average of 16 lb (7.4 kg), three times more weight than those who followed standard lifestyle advice, but there was a greater drop in your liver fat levels.

The school dropout rate was lower in the 5: 2 group, suggesting that it was the easiest diet to follow. It was also the only one of the three that led to significant improvements in cholesterol and liver stiffness, a measure of damage.

I suspect that the reason the two diet groups did better is because they lost more fat overall. As for liver stiffness, intermittent fasting has been shown to reduce inflammation, which can be critical.

If you are worried about having a fatty liver, talk to your doctor and maybe get a blood test. If it turns out that you have problems, at least now you know what to do about it. Liver damage is reversible, but it is obviously better to start sooner rather than later.

Rinse after brushing your teeth? Most people (62 percent) do so, according to a survey.

Big mistake: if you do this, you will be removing fluoride from the toothpaste. If you spit, more fluoride will stick around, strengthening your tooth enamel. For similar reasons, using a mouthwash after brushing is also prohibited.

As for flossing, you should always do it before brushing, suggests a study by Iranian dentists. They found that flossing after brushing not only removes more plaque, but flossing after brushing means that the food, plaque and bacteria you have released remain in your mouth all night.

Soon I will be running, but cursing other runners softly!

Spring is coming and the weather is good, runners from all over the country will be dusting off their sneakers and reluctantly running again.

I say “reluctantly” because many people, including me, run because they think they should, not because they like it. And I am jealous of those who get ‘tall’ while doing this.

For years, we have been told that this is caused by endorphins, chemicals that make you feel good, produced by the body and that mimic the action of opioids. In fact, while the cheap is real, it has nothing to do with endorphins, according to a new study by the University Medical Center in Hamburg, Germany.

The researchers took 63 runners who claimed to feel ‘cheap’ and gave them an injection of naloxone, a drug that blocks opioid uptake, or an injection of placebo.

After a 45-minute run, most runners still reported getting high, which suggested it was not the endorphins. It was found to be due to an increase in endocannabinoids, chemicals that mimic the actions of cannabis (and are believed to play a role in mood).

A few years ago, I did a similar experiment with Dr. Saoirse O’Sullivan, a physiologist at the University of Nottingham, where we tested three runners and detected a 30% increase in their endocannabinoid levels after exercise.

One, who suffers from depression, told me that she self-medicates while running. As Dr. O’Sullivan explained: ‘We are mentally and physically healthier when we exercise, so having an exercise reward system seems like a good evolutionary thing.’

But not all of us understand tinnitus. Tests show that my levels of binoid endocanoids do not increase after exercise. However, because I believe in the health benefits, I continue to run, while cursing the happy runners who run past me.