It’s pretty clear that most who boost this line of thinking, based on faulty analogous thinking such as this, are thoroughly resting their brains.
Actually, you can also include another term from above, "fast food,"a word that by itself makes some people quake with loathing, and causes the holding up of signs and the creating of petitions. It’s another one of the words that probably has no specific definition but has many connotations, few of which would be useful in any substantive discussion of physiology or anatomy.
Well, I think a case can be made that most of what’s called “fast food” is nutritionally questionable in fat, sugar and salt content and serving size. I don’t think a McD’s hamburger is inherently unhealthy on any level, but the calorie, fat, cholesterol and sugar levels in a typical McD’s meal are excessive.
Other than on that basis, I’d argue against any real difference between a Big Mac and a hand-grown vegan meal’s nutritional value and “toxin” level.
“Fast food” is food sold in a fast food restaurant. Nothing more and nothing less.
As a segment it tends to be inexpensive, low in fiber, higher in refined carbs, fat, and salt. Beverages there tend to be of the added sweetener sort. As a segment it tends to market by “value sizing” with supersizing and combo deals and markets. The balance of fatty, salty, and sweet in many of the foods in the segment tend to hit hard on the “palatibility centers” and lightly on the “satiety” ones.
None of those “tends to” however are part of the definition. Just like “home cooked” does not equal any particular nutritional distribution either. One can eat a meal high in real vegetables and fruits, high in protein, low in fat, in a fast food restaurant, and a crap nutrition meal you’ve made from fresh ingredients at home. But one still can associate certain tendencies and predict with some fairly high degree of reliability that one location of eating will facilitate one sorts of nutritional pattern and another a different one.
Right, but the doctor in ** JohnClay’s** cite was railing against the alleged toxic chemicals in fast food salads. And everything said about fast food meals as a segment is true about restaurant meals in general as a segment.
Actually, it’s more complex than that. A surprising amount of “fast” food is relatively simple ingredients that are not highly processed (just heavy on the stuff not good for you in large quantity).
A hell of a lot of restaurant food is premade, pre-prepared, portion-controlled food engineering with as much ‘processing’ in the nastiest sense of the term as any cheap Swanson’s frozen dinner or canned food. This is true up the spectrum - you’ve paid $40 for Chicken Tetrazzini and Eggplant Parmesan that was little more than heated, plated and served. And it’s got as many questionable ingredients (including gratuitous additions of fat, salt and sugar, and preservatives) as anything people would avoid in a grocery store.
“Toxic chemicals in fast foods” raises my woo-meter.
Can we all agree that there is no such thing as a food that is actually toxic (besides poisoned or contaminated food) but that a particular diet, over time, can be harmful?
No, not if we’re including preservatives, stabilizers, enhancers, sweeteners and colorants and substitute ingredients that are at best on the GRAS list. And where would you place known carcinogens like those in grilled meat?
As long as it’s a recognized food item, even one considered terribly unhealthy, yes. But when you get into the highly engineered glop that fills grocery shelves, there are ingredients that are unhealthy in and of themselves.
(Not that fasting or “liver resting” will do the slightest damn thing about them.)
Okay.
So, the people who DO die from liver failure such as alcohol or a liver stressing diet. Is that because not only that they taxed the liver, but kept taxing it right up till it failed?
Or, in other words, if they shape up, do they draw back from the brink a decent bit?
Though, I would suspect even if that were true, there would be some borderline cases where the liver didn’t quit fail outright, but still never managed to come back much even though the abuse has quit.
In an OP related vein, are there things that help a liver recover/repair itself. Or modest changes in lifestyle that make it easier for the old fella?
I do a LOT of end of life care, and see a lot of death from end-stage liver disease. It’s a lot more common than it used to be.
But having said that, it’s almost entirely due to either infectious hepatitis C, or alcoholic hepatitis, or both. Even most liver cancers I’ve seen lately have been in patients with Hepatitis C. Very few people are dying of liver disease caused by failing to maintain your liver’s health by omitting fasting, detoxing, and other woo.
So if you avoid IV drugs and excessive alcohol, your chance of having significant liver disease is quite low, as Habeed notes.
Hm, I was under the impression that there’s a lot of liver damage due to paracetamol overdose.
Or maybe those people get liver transplants, whereas they tend to not waste good livers on alcoholics.
Dietary choline/methionine appears to be protective:
I’m not at all asserting that ‘old’ research is bad or irrelevant, or in any way less worthy of consideration.
But, the paper you cite is 65 years old. If choline/methionine was protective in any meaningful way to the human liver, there should be, by now, a body of work demonstrating its effectiveness. Beyond that, given the paucity of effective treatments (and protective regimens) for liver disease, choline/methionine would be getting a lot more air time - real world clinical use - if it really did work. Not that I’m the final arbiter, but I’ve never heard of it being recommended in any clinical situation.
Again, I’m not saying there is, or isn’t a body of data out there, so I ask: are you aware of anything along those lines?
It’s true, there is a lot of liver damage done by acetaminophen (paracetamol), particularly when you compare that drug to damage caused by other drugs in common use. But it’s still a pretty small portion of the of the people dying of liver failure, and it’s seldom a cause of end-stage liver disease, since you either die from the overdose or recover from it, with your liver also recovering.
There are quite a few Dopers who might benefit from resting their spleen now and then.
Just an occasional venting of that organ seems to do wonders.
In terms of billfish’s question, the answer is yes. Liver failure occurs when the liver is damaged beyond its ability to recover, which is substantial.
One way of getting a sense of how substantial the recovery ability of the liver is to follow what happens to living donors after they have given their right liver lobes to those in need of transplants.
Yes, you read that right. The donor’s remaining liver has regenerated to twice its mass by 7 days out and keeps growing more after that.
As to special things to help that amazing regeneration occur? Just avoiding alcohol and medications (including herbal and other alternative sorts) that might have liver damaging impacts.
I’ve wondered at how the liver’s ability to regenerate could be employed in cirrhosis patients. My (probably flawed or at least simplistic) understanding is that cirrhosis happens when an over-stressed liver has so much scar tissue replace functional tissue that liver function is compromised. If one were to excise half of such a liver, would it grow back to around its original size, with the new portion being healthy tissue? Or is is just that the patient couldn’t survive that process?
The latter. The cirrhotic liver has been damaged, yes literally scarred, enough that it is unable to regenerate to repair itself, let alone to replace more taken out. The damage has gotten to a point that the liver’s attempts to regenerate merely causes more disruption of normal architecture and more dysfunction.
Choline-deficient diets have been used to induce fatty liver disease in animal experiments for decades. A good summary of the research is available here: