Transcription
Today we're going to talk about the liver. For a lot of people, they have this slow liver death. The cells become fatty, inflamed, and then they develop scar tissue, and so that kills these tiny cells. But what is the cause? Well, I'm going to show you, and this is going to not only shock you but it's going to really piss you off.
So I'm going to cover the seven early signs of liver damage. These are weird symptoms that you might not connect to your liver, but they're so important to identify because the problem with the liver is that by the time you find out you have liver damage, sometimes it's too late. Simply because the first signs of a liver problem are basically no signs; you don’t know what’s going on until sometimes up to 90% of that liver is destroyed.
I have a lot of experience with this because I had liver damage early on in my 20s, and so I want to tell you what happened. Nowadays, alcohol is not at all the cause of liver problems compared to what it was long ago. I would say if we took alcoholic fatty liver disease and compared it with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, alcohol-induced fatty liver is roughly about 4%. Okay, that's 1/12th of this other fatty liver problem.
But before I get into the root cause, I want to talk about these early warning signs.
The number one symptom is kind of a fullness or a tightness, or even it could be a pain underneath your right rib cage. That sometimes can refer to the right shoulder or even down the arm or on the back part by the scapula. I didn’t know what it was; it was my liver. The liver swells up and it puts pressure on these little tubes that go to your gallbladder. At one time, I thought it was my gallbladder, but it really was my liver, since the liver controls the gallbladder.
The gallbladder is just this little sack that stores and concentrates fluid called bile, which is made by your liver, and bile, of course, helps you digest fats. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I will say that that pain radiates up to the right side through this little nerve—it’s called the phrenic nerve—up to the right side of the shoulder. So you're going to feel it right here, okay? Like a tightness. I don’t care how many times someone massages you; it's just going to be tight.
Sometimes it can refer in the back and to the rhomboid around your scapula on the right side, but that's all liver issues. What eventually happened to me is the vertebra of my neck—these are not bones in your neck, but in my neck—okay? All this tension on the right side was pulling these vertebrae to the right side, and that pinched a nerve that went down my arm. I had all sorts of referred pain down my right arm. I had no idea it was connected to my liver. I thought it was a problem in my neck, and I had massages; it never got better. There’s nothing like treating the wrong problem that just keeps that problem there. I did not connect the dots.
Okay, all right. Number two is a loss of energy. Now, you might not feel like a noticeable fatigue, but you’ll notice that you can't go a long period of time—like your endurance is suffering—especially if you were to do exercise or exert yourself. You kind of run out of gas a lot sooner. In fact, you might need to go to bed earlier because you don’t have the endurance and that full energy that you should have.
You might get tired after you eat. You don’t have this solid good endurance; it kind of comes up and down like that. Now, this fatigue can also roll over into weakness, so you just lose that vitality, that strength. I mean, I know some people with liver problems that getting out of a chair is difficult, or if they're sitting on the floor and getting up, it’s like it's taking them more than they should to get up.
Number three is itchiness, and it could be in the bottom of your feet. For me, it was the bottom of my foot, right by my arch, but it could be anywhere in the body. This is the bile salts backing up into your tissues. A lot of times, you’ll notice these in your extremities, either your hands or your feet. For some reason, people notice this more at night than during the day when they’re moving around, probably because the circulation kind of pushes the bile salts through the body. But if you’re just in one position for a period of time, you might notice more itchiness in the bottom of the feet backing up into the blood, into the tissues.
Number four is these little red dots or spider veins. Okay, this really is coming from higher levels of estrogen. For men, they might have extra breast tissue; for women, there’s a whole series of problems with estrogen dominance. Too much estrogen is not good for the body. Okay, it can actually lead to cancer. With men, as they get older and their liver becomes more damaged, if you notice their skin becomes softer because they have more estrogen, which is interesting. Estrogen kind of gives the soft layer around a female body.
Also, when you have more estrogen than you do androgens, you’re going to lose your hair on your skin. This is probably why older men start losing their hair on their lower legs as well, and then the skin gets very, very soft and shiny. That's usually a liver problem and the accumulation of estrogen.
All right, the fifth symptom relates to your thyroid. The thyroid is dependent on the liver for the activation of the thyroid hormone. With a liver problem, you’re going to notice the thyroid is going to start to go downhill. Now that can give you a lot of different symptoms—from fatigue, loss of hair, loss of energy, higher cholesterol, the skin gets dried out—it could be a lot of things, but it's specifically a lowered functioning thyroid.
All right, number six: low vitamin D situation. Now, you might already have a deficiency of vitamin D because most people do, but with liver damage, it becomes a lot worse. Why? Because when you actually consume vitamin D from foods or you take vitamin D from a pill or you get it from the sun, it actually goes into the blood and eventually goes through the kidney and becomes an active form of vitamin D3.
What you need to know is that you need your liver to be able to work in this process of storing and utilizing vitamin D. If the liver is not able to put that protein on that vitamin D, you’re going to be vitamin D deficient. The specific type of vitamin D that’s going to be low is something called 25 hydroxy vitamin D. That is the type of vitamin D that they check in your blood.
So here’s a person taking all this vitamin D; they’re getting more sun, but they can’t seem to get their levels very high. Why? Because their liver is damaged.
All right, what are some of the symptoms that would show up with that? Inflammation somewhere in your body, probably more in your lower back area, but you can have inflammation anywhere in the body. Your inflammatory markers are going to be much higher; your immune system is going to be weaker. You’re going to have a problem with calcium, so you may notice that you have problems with muscle spasms, tight muscles, muscle knots—all of that. Vitamin D is so important in the body; it influences 10% of all of your genes. You’re talking like 2,500 different genes it influences.
So the function of vitamin D goes way beyond just inflammation or calcium regulation or muscle.
And number seven, your urine's going to be a little darker than it should be. You’re also going to notice a weird smell with your urine, like “what the heck just happened” when I urinated. That is a liver problem.
But now let's dive into the actual root cause of a liver problem. There’s a lot of confusion. When you look at Wikipedia, it’ll tell you it’s associated with this or associated with that, and all you need to do is focus on losing weight because obesity has a higher incidence or it's a risk factor, blah blah blah blah. It’s all very, very confusing.
I'm going to show you a real cause of not just a fatty liver but an inflamed liver and a liver that turns into cirrhosis. This goes beyond the alcohol cause. So check this out; we're going to talk about the root cause of not just a fatty liver, but liver disease in general.
Obesity is associated, type 2 diabetes is associated with it, as well as something called metabolic syndrome. So basically, we're dealing with high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and obesity—all are responsible for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Now, of course, we need to make these sound very scientific, so high blood sugar is going to be hypoglycemia or type 2 diabetes. High cholesterol is hypercholesterolemia—sounds a little more scientific. Then we have high blood pressure, which is usually essential hypertension. Then you’re given these medications: men are given Forin, Lipitor for cholesterol, Lisinopril for high blood pressure; you’re also given a diuretic called Hydrochlorothiazide, which is going to thin your blood, and maybe some OIC.
Now all this treatment has been normalized for people, okay? It’s very scientific; it’s normalized. And when you get into causation, you know it’s always this association—you talk about risk factors—all of these right here.
And the reason why you’re treated—in other words, we have sugar, starch (which is sugar), and seed oil. These three ingredients are the root cause, and even more of a root cause are these guys right here who fund the dietitians and have a very cozy relationship with the FDA.
Now, recently I did an interview with an influencer on TikTok and Instagram—a fantastic basketball player; he’s only 22 years old. I wanted to interview him because I wanted to see if I could change his diet and increase his performance.
So, come to find out, he eats at fast food places like McDonald's and eats pancakes with syrup for breakfast. He eats a lot of junk food, and so I asked him, “Do you have any health problems?” He goes, “Well, I’m a little bit tired. Oh yeah, and I don’t sleep at night.” I go, “Well, we’re going to change that.”
So I recommended what he should do, and then he says he has high cholesterol. His doctor wanted to put him on statin drugs to lower his cholesterol. He’s 22 years old! What? 22 years old? Yeah, the doctor made this slight omission—what he was eating, right? Why don’t we change the diet?
But I think a lot of younger people, because they're not overweight, think that they can get away with eating junk food. But it causes a lot of other issues. If a 22-year-old was put on statin drugs, first of all, they’re going to have a lot of damage with their muscle, okay? Not to mention energy and eventually, you know, your cognitive function and even testosterone too because the raw material for testosterone is cholesterol, and what they’re doing is they’re blocking it with this drug right here.
What’s really happening? We’re omitting this huge cause. Big Food is responsible, but it’s been normalized; it’s been hidden. You are an ATM for Big Food and Big Pharma. I am considered a quack because I’m recommending something like keto, which basically is getting people on lower amounts of sugar, starches, and seed oils. And, you know, they’re going to put doubt in people's minds where, “Oh, keto might work initially for weight loss, but we don’t know the long-term effects.” That is such a disinformation campaign, but keto is the way to go.
The junk food industry does not like keto, okay? So this is why you hear some bad things about keto, and then sometimes I’ll get that, “Well, Dr. Berg’s not a real doctor,” right? A doctor that prescribes scientific medication, that does the proper diagnosis, does the proper treatment, standard of care, and puts people on medication. I don’t want to do this; I never wanted to do this.
So they can call me a quack or whatever, but I’m going to keep telling people to get off these three ingredients right here, and what’s going to happen is you’re going to turn around a lot of these symptoms right here and eventually this thing right here.
Now that I told you what not to eat, the next question is, what do I eat? For that information, you should watch this video right here.