I have a new article on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease appearing in the outgoing issue of Wise Traditions, and the online version just went up on the web site:
Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease — A Silent Epidemic of Nutritional Imbalance
The article contains a lot of information that I've already posted on this blog, but it also contains quite a bit of additional information, and pulls everything together a little more succinctly.
In the article, I argue that fatty liver is essentially the consequence of several independent nutritional assaults. These include 1) nutrient-poor refined foods, 2) choline deficiency, and 3) polyunsaturated oils. Fatty liver can basically be divided into two stages, the first involving the accumulation of fat, and the second involving the progression of inflammation. The first, I argue, results from too much caloric energy entering the liver without sufficient nutrition to process it, while the second results from any type of oxidative and inflammatory insults, with excess dietary linoleic acid making a special contribution.
I point out that none of the animal models, whether they are high in fructose, high in fat, or deficient in choline, actually look like human fatty liver until they are combined together, emphasizing that human fatty liver is likely a result of a combination of insults.
I also point out that the liver plays an enormous role in our overall health, from regulating blood sugar and blood lipids to filtering bacteria and their toxins to regulating hormones and vitamin D, and that fatty liver is a much more powerful predictor of heart disease risk even than “metabolic syndrome.”
For those of you willing to support the Weston A. Price Foundation, I would highly recommend subscribing to the journal. My articles contain a lot of sidebars, and there is really no pleasant way to arrange them online. Reading the article in print is much more enjoyable. Nevertheless, I believe most of you would find the information valuable, so I invite you to hop on over and read the article online.