Round-the-Clock Detox

Hopefully, you are very careful about
what you put into your body. Yet every
day your body has to get rid of poisons.
In fact, you can’t eat without producing
poisons that should kill you. It sounds
like a catch-22: don’t eat, and you starve
to death; eat, and your body makes poisons
that could kill you. How are you
still walking around?

The answer lies in one of the most
important organs God put in your
body—your liver.

The liver is practically a chemical
factory, which does hundreds of jobs
that keep you alive. It makes bile and
sends it to the intestines to help digest
fats. It manufactures cholesterol for
building the membranes of cells. It also
makes most of the plasma proteins
that float in the bloodstream and help
blood to clot properly.

In addition to making molecules, the
liver disposes of chemical messengers,
called hormones, after they complete
their tasks. Furthermore, it helps break
down worn-out red blood cells. In addition,
it regulates blood sugar and stores
iron, as well as fats and vitamins, making
them available to the rest of the
body at a moment’s notice.

But one of the liver’s most amazing
abilities is neutralizing poisons.
The liver is the body’s great detoxifier.
Many normal internal bodily processes
produce toxic byproducts. For example,
when your body burns proteins for
energy, it breaks them down into their
basic building blocks, amino acids. In
the process of producing energy from
these amino acids, the reaction also
produces highly toxic ammonia as
a byproduct. Liver cells convert this
deadly ammonia into nontoxic urea,
which can travel harmlessly to the kidneys
to be excreted in urine.

The liver also protects you from the
harmful side effects of helpful chemicals.
For instance, after certain antibiotics
finish battling bacteria, the liver
needs to remove the excess from the
body. Some mild pain relievers also
produce nasty byproducts that need to
be removed. (That’s just one reason to
limit your dosage—too much of some
medicines can overtax your liver.)

Not all toxins in our bloodstream
are byproducts of metabolism or medicines.
We consume some chemicals that
are toxic even before our metabolism
begins to break them down. One well-known
example is alcohol. The liver limits
the amount of damage alcohol can
do to cells by breaking it down before it
travels to the rest of the body. However,
drinking too much can still overwork
the liver and damage it permanently.

This three-pound master chemist
near the bottom of your rib cage uses several specialized chemical processes
to work its wizardry. Since chemical
reactions can be complicated, the liver
needs to intervene at multiple steps.
Sometimes the chemical reactions
that render poisons harmless need
help getting started. Sometimes they
don’t do the job fast enough on their
own. So the liver produces enzymes
to move things along—it can produce
many different enzymes to catalyze
each lifesaving reaction.

Not only does each reaction need
the right enzyme, but each enzyme
needs the right conditions to function
properly. The temperature, the
level of acids in the surrounding fluid,
and the amount of oxygen are but a
few of the things that have to be just
right. Without these conditions, the
enzymes won’t function properly or at
all. So your liver constantly provides
the right enzymes for the job—under
just the right conditions—to keep your
bloodstream clean and healthy.

Deactivating deadly poisons to
keep you alive—it’s all in a day’s work
for this marvelous example of the
Creator’s meticulous design for the
human body.

https://answersingenesis.org/human-body/round-clock-detox/

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