Posted on 05/02/2008 2:40:30 PM PDT by blam
Fast-Food Liver Damage Can Be Reversed, Experts Say
Diets high in fast food can be highly toxic to the liver and other internal organs, but that damage can be reversed, says one of the country's leading experts on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, who offers four steps to undo the effects of a 'super-size me' diet. (Credit: iStockphoto/Marketa Ebert)
ScienceDaily (May 2, 2008) — Diets high in fast food can be highly toxic to the liver and other internal organs, but that damage can be reversed, says one of the country’s leading experts on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, who offers four steps to undo the effects of a 'super-size me' diet.
It was probably enough to make many Americans lose their appetite: A recent study from Europe showed that eating too much fast food – a diet high in fat and sugar – could cause serious damage to your liver.
Yet for those who overdo it with too many trips to their favorite burger joint, there’s good news. You can likely reverse the damage to your liver and other vital organs if you simply give up the unhealthy lifestyle, according to a leading liver specialist at Saint Louis University who conducted a similar study with mice.
“There’s strong evidence now that a fast-food type of diet – high in fat and sugar, the kind of diet many Americans subsist on – can cause significant damage to your liver and have extremely serious consequences for your health,” says Brent Tetri, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the Saint Louis University Liver Center and one of the country’s leading experts on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
“The good news is that most people can undo this damage if they change their diet and they keep physically active,” Tetri says. “If they don’t, however, they are asking for trouble.”
Particularly alarming, says Tetri, is that physicians are starting to see children and teenagers with cirrhosis, a serious liver disease once seen mostly in adults with a history of alcohol abuse or hepatitis C. Tetri suspects this is because many kids today eat far too much fast food or junk food and get far too little exercise – the kind of behaviors that can lead to liver damage.
“The fact we’re starting to see kids with liver disease should really be a wake-up call for anyone eating a diet high in fat and sugar and who’s not physically active,” Tetri says.
Tetri last year studied the effects on mice of a diet that mimicked a typical fast-food meal. The diet was 40 percent fat and replete with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener common in soda and some fruit juices. The mice were also kept sedentary, mimicking the lifestyle of millions of Americans.
The result: Within four weeks, the mice displayed an increase in liver enzymes – a key indicator of liver damage – and the beginnings of glucose intolerance, a marker for type II diabetes.
Similarly, in February researchers in Sweden published the results of a study in which 18 healthy and slim adults ate fast food and restricted their physical activity for a month. The result: an average weight gain of 12 pounds and, within as little as a week, a sharp rise in liver enzymes.
Tetri is quick to emphasize that fast food per se doesn’t causes liver damage. Rather, he says, the harm comes from eating too many calories and too much fat and sugar – which happens with a steady diet of burgers, fries, sodas and most other items on the typical fast-food menu.
“The big issue here is caloric content,” says Tetri. “You can put away 2,000 calories in a single fast-food meal pretty easily. For most people, that’s more calories than they need in an entire day.”
For adults and children who’ve repeatedly indulged in fast food, Tetri urges four key steps to help reverse the damage they’ve done to their liver.
Limit yourself to no more than one fast-food meal a week. For some people, that’s going to be a major downshift. But for the sake of your health, a visit to a fast-food restaurant should be considered a treat – not a regular event. When you do eat fast food, eat as healthfully as possible. Try the burger without mayo and cheese, and avoid fries and sugary soft drinks. Better yet, go for a grilled chicken sandwich, a salad with a lower-fat dressing and bottled water or a diet soft drink. Get active. If you don’t already exercise at least three times a week, start now. Regular exercise helps keep your weight down and helps your body better metabolize and process the food you eat. Ask your doctor to do a blood test to check your level of liver enzymes, a key measure of the health of your liver. Many doctors now order test this routinely when doing blood work on adults, but kids who eat a lot of fast food especially need to have their liver enzymes checked. “Even for those people with the worst kind of diets, it’s not too late to start exercising and eating right,” Tetri says.
Adapted from materials provided by Saint Louis University Medical Center.
That's what my wife kept telling me on our wedding night.
I slowly cooked a pork roast today, but I ate it fast. Not all of it, though. Leftovers are yummy.
Next time I order a burger and fries I’ll eat it slowly so it won’t be fast food. I’ll eat it all though, because it is too expensive to throw away and leftovers taste bad.
hmmmm... Maybe the government should demand that the prices of fast food be lowered dramatically instead of taxed additionally, so people won’t feel obligated to finish the fries even when they aren’t hungry any more.
Yes! Government intervention is the answer to a poor diet!
I’m fairly skinny so I can eat anything that sounds good at the time. My wife can smell food and gain five pounds, but I’ve been within 5 lbs of my high school graduation weight for 35 years.
It’s no credit to me. I think it’s just genetics.
Milk Thistle is great Liver Detox, and I use it myself.
Natural substances offer healthier lives, and some fast food if chosen wisely will not really hurt you. Cleanse the body regularly for parasites, toxins, and drink two cups green tea daily for getting rid of free radicals, IMHO
Start by eliminating the mayo OR the cheese for a while. One normally won’t miss one of them if the other is there.
Don’t eat the fries. Most of them are nasty anyway.
Usually the beverages are colored fructose anyway, carry water with you.
If you feel you must have the mayo, go to a place like Subway and ask for “half mayo.”
Only until you shoot it. After that it tends to slow down right quick.
I'll try the veal. Will you be here all week?
the only caveat would be the mom and pop burger joints - they fry them in shortening and let em get crisp.......Ive only had 3 orders since Oct - cut out sodas and fell in love with iced water - especially seltzer water....lost 30# and avoided diabetes for the time being
Outstanding article! It informed the reader of the dangers of a high fat/high caloric diet and it gave advice on how to fix it.
The article didn’t threaten lawsuits against fast food companies although I’m sure those human parasites have stored this article in their database.
Yours truly,
The Woim
Mom and pop places, definitely.
I mean McD, BK, Wendy, etc. Garbage fries, the lot of them.
What ever happened to the crinkly-cut?
I quit drinking takeout soda about a year ago...except for the occasional raspberry iced tea.
And the fries? Not only garbage, but a serious ripoff.
” Milk thistle is good for reparing the liver “
Yep - I learned that from Dr. Weil’s book 8 Weeks To Optimum Health . I gave up fast food many moons ago . Had to make a choice - give up beer & sake - or give up FF . The choice was easy ! Glug glug ...
Ok, so if I buy a hamburger at a fast food place that’s bad; but if I buy the same hamburger at a slow restaurant well that’s better ..... huh?
The bottom line to this stuff is that our livers are too efficient. However, the solution is not to starve or exhaust ourselves, but to add supplements to our diet that limit how our livers work.
For example, both diet and genetics create an overabundance of cholesterol in many Americans. Even if you eliminated cholesterol from your diet completely, and consumed lots of unpleasant foods known to reduce cholesterol, and exercised a lot, you would STILL have high cholesterol, if you had a genetic preponderance to it.
Well, like ‘em or not, we now have statin drugs that will block the enzymes your liver uses to make cholesterol. The problem solved with a little pill, instead of all sorts of masochistic and self-abusive behavior and self-denial.
Other drugs are in the research pipeline, to take care of other problems. Cirrhosis is caused by a protein that makes too much fibrin, that scars the liver. But now YET ANOTHER PILL may be available that will block this protein, so your liver stop producing excess fibrin, and heals itself.
Yet another drug is a type of fat that might someday be eaten as a supplement. It fools your body into thinking you have been exercising, and tells it, it needs to convert fat to muscle. It even fools the muscles into toning themselves a bit.
But all of this has in common: You don’t *have* to do with less. You don’t *have* to suffer and starve yourself. And you don’t *have* to exhaust yourself with exercise.
The funny part is even if you don’t have a problem, they would still want you to starve, exhaust yourself, suffer, and eat cruddy tasting food. Why? Because they hate seeing others have pleasure. Pleasure bad. Pain and denial good.
No way pizza is a fast food. And if it is I don’t care - there are quality of life issues to consider here.
or steak fries......
Im starting to grow fond of sweet potato fries with gravy though
I ham sure.
Let’s see... cigarette companies need to be taxed to death, not because of public health, but because Newt turned the former Solid South Pubbie in 1994. Fast food has been under Demwit attack for years because, hmm, they employ too many minority citizens? Too many illegal aliens? Or because they don’t offer the same opportunities for off-the-books income as traditional restaurants? Or, perchance, it’s because smoking is off limits in fast food chains? Next, manufacturers of umbrellas will be under attack because people get killed by lightning while golfing.
"Super size me" is a separate idea altogether. That suggests overeating not a particular type of food. Obviously overeating is going to lead to some kind of problem no matter what you eat.
Further into the article they introduce a third component of the liver damaging diet. Sugar. Not everything on any fast food restaurant's menu has a lot of sugar in it. In fact it is the soda pop they sell which has the lion's share. IMO the sugar is worse than either saturated fat and/or overeating. Get all three, saturated fat, sugar saturated soft drink and more than you need to eat and you have a liver toxic formula. But even then only if you eat that regularly.
Eliminate just the soft drink (which contains other undesirable compounds like citric acid, caffeine, phosphoric acid and CO2) and you have reduced the potential for damage a lot. Eat a reasonable amount and the negative effect is rather small. Especially since most food chains have voluntarily removed trans-fats from their ingredients.
When people point to a Big Mac or a Whopper and call that junk food you have to ask yourself why. It's beef, wheat, lettuce, cheese, pickle, tomato, onion and mustard. Sounds like the food pyramid to me in just about the proper amounts of each.
I guess I'll ignore that then considering where I found it. ;^)
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