When Gavin Owenby was rushed to the hospital, he was complaining of sharp, stabbing pains in his stomach.
His liver was swelled with fat. It was the kind of damage doctors typically see in alcoholics.
Except Gavin was only 11 years old.
But what Gavin was suffering from is fast becoming the norm for millions of American kids and adults – a serious condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
NAFLD was practically unheard of 30 years ago, but it’s an epidemic today. One third of Americans have the condition, and it can lead to liver transplants, cirrhosis and even death.
Big Pharma is rushing to develop and repurpose dangerous meds to treat the condition. Hospitals are performing transplants in record numbers.
But the real way to beat NAFLD is to avoid it in the first place. And all that takes is removing two simple – and incredibly toxic — ingredients from your diet.
The lab rat diet
“[NAFLD] is the face of liver disease in the United States,” said Dr. Shahid Malik from the Center for Liver Diseases at the University of Pittsburgh.
And once you have NAFLD, things can quickly spiral out of control. It often leads to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver fibrosis and cirrhosis – and the only cure may be a transplant.
In fact, Loyola University Medical Center and other hospitals around America are reporting that they’re performing record numbers of liver transplants – sometimes nearly twice as many as they performed in previous years.
Surgeons are warning that so many people need transplants that we could soon be facing a massive liver shortage – and even the livers being donated are often filled with fat.
A Canadian research team is looking for ways to “defat” donated livers. And Novo Nordisk is hoping to recycle its risky diabetes med Victoza to treat NAFLD.
But with all the research going on, there’s something else scientists have discovered about fatty liver disease — something that’s even more important.
It’s what causes this deadly condition in the first place.
Because if you really want to know how fatty liver disease develops, just watch what researchers do when they intentionally give lab rats the disease.
They pump them full of fructose and trans fats!
When researchers at Saint Louis University wanted to study a potential drug for NASH, they developed and fed rats a high-fructose and trans fat diet so they could “mimic…the liver disease people develop.”
But it looks like we’re lab rats, too. Only our diet includes ingredients with names like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), fructose, fruit sugar and partially hydrogenated oil.
Experts, in fact, are calling HFCS the single biggest cause of fatty liver. And now there’s even a new, super-potent version on the market called HFCS-90, that’s 90 percent fructose!
“Unlike glucose, which serves as fuel for the body, fructose is processed almost entirely in the liver where it is converted to fat,” said Dr. Michael Goran, a researcher at the Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles.
Worse still, Keck researchers found that fructose triggers our brains to keep eating.
Trans fats are the second half of the “fatty liver diet” – and you’ve probably heard plenty about them. You know that they’re bad for your heart and that the FDA has proposed banning trans fats – in the form of partially hydrogenated oil – from foods.
But so far, not so good. Because trans fats can still be found all over the supermarket. Even in healthy-sounding foods.
And like the fructose fable, trans fats have their own special lie, too. As long as a product contains less than 0.5 grams of trans fats per serving, it can be labeled as having none.
It all boils down to Big Food putting us on a crash course to fatty liver disease — and Big Pharma rushing to “fix” us with some of its most dangerous drugs.
That’s why it’s essential that you be a careful shopper and ditch food products that contain:
- High fructose corn syrup;
- Fructose;
- Crystalline fructose;
- Corn sugar and fruit sugar; and
- Any processed food that contains partially hydrogenated oil, even if the nutrition facts label says it has zero trans fats.
But don’t stop eating fruit. It’s good for you – and the natural fructose in fruit is bound with fiber and other nutrients that allow it to be metabolized naturally, unlike that 90 percent HFCS made in a corn-refining plant.
Sources:
“Novo’s liraglutide works in diabetes and obesity. How about NASH?” Damian Garde, May 18, 2015, FierceBiotech, fiercebiotech.com
“In lab research, SLU team halts NASH liver damage” Saint Louis University, slu.edu
“Fructose increases cravings for high-calorie foods: study” NewsMax, May 4, 2015, newsmax.com
