Optimal liver health: 24/7 it's keeping you alive--time to give it some love.(liver health tips )

We can condition our hearts with cardio training, protect our skin with the finest lotions on Earth and fuel our minds with books and culture. But when it comes to liver health, we're essentially at the mercy of our diets. With one in three Americans classified as clinically obese--due in part to poor diets, which put a strain on the liver--this is far from promising.

Here's another way to look at it. In the unfortunate event that your liver decides to take a vacation, the outcome would be disastrous. Apart from being rendered metabolically helpless, you'd be riddled with an unthinkable number of toxins and chemicals. This would spark a menacing chain of events guaranteed to lower your survival rate.

We rely profoundly on this complicated, hard-working organ--not only to do its job, but to do it flawlessly, 24 hours a day, without reward. Sadly, tar too many individuals never give a moment's thought to the liver's unceasing list of tasks. But when you take time to consider what a weighty role it plays in virtually every aspect of our lives, that moment seems long overdue.

Back to Basics

To better appreciate the significance of supporting the liver, it's wise to have an understanding of what it is, what it does and how serious the consequences can be if it's neglected and deprived of the nutrients it needs.

Nestled in the upper-right portion of the abdominal cavity, the liver is a large, reddish-brown, multitasking metabolic gatekeeper. As the largest glandular organ in the body, it spends its days carrying out hundreds of crucial metabolic functions. Two, however, are of foremost importance.

The first is to synthesize bile to aid digestion. Every time you eat, your gall bladder releases its reserve of bile through ducts into the digestive tract. This allows semidigested food to pass from the stomach to the small intestines.