DR Michelle Mosley: Spider writing means why you have liver disease

Big, rugby ball size, rubber and reddish brown, your liver is not a glamorous organ.

Still, it proceeds peacefully to perform at least 500 important tasks, including removing toxins from your blood and helping to convert the food you eat into conversion, and you cannot live without it.

The bad news is that now one in three of us has signs of fatty liver disease – which, as the name suggests, is the result of fat formation that can lead to scarring and the liver hardens and becomes unable to function. Properly and, ultimately, towards liver failure.

Damaged liver is bad for your health even if you avoid this extreme. And because many of us misbehave with our livelihoods, liver disease is now the leading cause of premature death in the UK.

But it’s mostly a silent killer because most people don’t realize they’re in danger too late.

Signs of serious liver problems include fatigue, confusion, itchy skin and ‘writing that becomes difficult, spider and small’, according to the British Liver Trust. Perhaps this is a sign that the toxin is reaching the brain.

The good news is that your liver has amazing regenerative powers and a recent Swedish study showed that going on a 5: 2 diet, which I have long advocated, is a safe and effective way to slim fatty liver. And restore it to health.

Excessive alcohol consumption was a major cause of liver failure, but these days it is likely to be the result of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) – and in the UK our high rates are mainly the result of our rapidly expanding waist.

This is because when we put on weight, fat is not evenly distributed in our body.

You do not, for example, develop oily legs or oily forehead. Instead, surplus calories are stored in fat cells in your lower back, thighs, abdomen, and under your skin. But beyond a certain point, your body moves to ‘safe’ places to store fat.

So, it starts to fill your liver with some of that fat content. Ideally, this should contain almost no fat. If your liver is more than 5 percent fat, officially, you have a fatty liver.

Not long ago, while making a documentary, I saw a young man, significantly overweight, whose liver was about 60 percent fat.

As there are few signs of early fatty liver disease, the only way that can be reliably detected is an ultrasound scan or blood test, called a liver function test, which considers the enzymes and proteins that make up the blood when the liver is present. Damage. The young man in the documentary had no symptoms, and found out he had a fatty liver with a scan.

If you are over the age of 50, have a waist, or smoke (there are chemicals in tobacco that are toxic to liver cells) you have a higher risk of NAFLD. It is also common in people who have type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or all three. But you do not have any of these and may still have fatty liver disease. Nine years ago, I had an MRI scan as part of a documentary I made, and found that my liver was fatty.

Still, at the time, I didn’t feel overweight, it turned out I was toffee – thin on the outside, fat on the inside. The only sign that I was carrying too much internal fat was my 37in waist, which was relatively large for my height (I’m 5 feet 11in) – my waist is now around 34in.

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

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

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

The researchers assigned patients with alcoholic non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to a 5: 2 diet, a low-carb high-fat (LCHF) diet, or a normal lifestyle advice from a hepatologist (liver specialist).

After 12 weeks, the 5: 2 and LCHF diet averaged just under 16 lbs (7.4 kg), not just three times the weight loss following the standard lifestyle advice, but a significant reduction in liver levels. Fat.

The dropout rate was the lowest in the 5: 2 group, indicating that sticking to it is the easiest diet. It was the only one of the three, which led to a significant improvement in cholesterol and liver inertia, with significant damage.

I think the reason the two dieting groups did better is because they lost more fat overall. For hardening of the liver, intermittent fasting is shown to reduce inflammation, which can be key.

If you are worried that you may have a fatty liver, check with your GP. Talk to you and get a blood test. If it turns out you have problems, then at least now you know what to do about it. Liver damage is reversible, but it is better to start later.

Rinse after brushing your teeth? According to a poll, most people (62 percent) do.

Big mistake: If you do, you’re washing fluoride in your toothpaste. If you spit, more fluoride than that will strengthen your tooth enamel. For the same reason, using a mouthwash after brushing is also no-no.

When it comes to flossing, you should always do it before brushing, suggests a study done by dentists in Iran. They found that the floss-after-brush approach not only removes more plaque but also causes flossing after brushing, it is the food, plaque and bacteria that you keep in your mouth all night long.

I will run soon, but I will curse other runners under my breath!

The road to spring and the fair atmosphere continues, with runners across the country firing their trainers and reluctantly running again.

I say ‘reluctantly’ because a lot of people, myself included, because they feel they want to, not because they enjoy it. And I’m jealous of those who get ‘high’ when they do.

Over the years we have been told that this is due to endorphins, feel-good chemicals produced by your body that mimic the action of ioopoid drugs. In fact, while high is real, it has nothing to do with endorphins, according to a new study from the University Medical Center in Hamburg, Germany.

The researchers took run 63 runners, all of whom claimed to have experienced a ‘high’, and gave them either an injection of naloxone, a drug that inhibits the use of io pioids or placebo.

After 45 minutes of walking, most runners still notice the height, indicating that it is not endorphins. He concluded that it mimics endocannabinoids, chemicals that are thought to play a role in cannabis (and mood).

A few years ago I met Dr. Sa., a physiologist at the University of Nottingham. Sawers did the same experiment with O’Sullivan, where we tested three runners and found a 30 percent increase in their endocannabinoid levels after exercise.

One, who suffers from depression, told me he ran and self-medicated. Dr. O’Sullivan explained: ‘We are mentally and physically healthy when we exercise, so having a reward system for exercise seems like a good evolutionary thing.’

But we don’t all get hummed. Tests show that my endocanna-binoid levels do not increase after exercise. Still, because I believe in health benefits, I continue to run, while happy runners have flooded me in the past.