Pod Insights Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD 106. Siggi Clavien: Why Your Liver is Slowly Killing You (And You Don't Even Know It) About this episode You have brain fog. You're gaining weight faster and losing it slower. You think it's stress, aging, or just life… But what if it's your liver screaming for help?
In this episode of Extend, I'm joined by Siggi Clavien, liver health expert and founder of The Liver Clinic, to uncover the silent epidemic destroying our health from the inside out.
We explore why 70% of liver disease today has nothing to do with alcohol, the actual damage done by Tylenol, and why your "normal" blood work might be hiding liver damage. We also dive into technology that can detect damage years before blood tests, and what might be your key to reversing chronic disease.
Siggi Clavien is a liver health specialist with 28 years in phytomedicine development and founder of The Liver Clinic. He combines ancient Eastern medicine wisdom with modern technology to help people detect and reverse liver damage.
We Also Discuss:
(00:00) Health and Liver Function Discussion
(07:12) Toxins, Diet, and Fatty Liver Impact
(17:13) Liver Damage Detection and Management
(28:27) Toxic Exposure and Health Protection
(37:28) Liver Health and Protection Strategies
(45:17) Understanding Liver Scan Technology and Risks
(56:20) Diet, Exercise, and Liver Health
(01:00:56) Detoxification, Liver Health, and Deliverance
(01:10:39) Liver Health Tracking and Advancements
(01:16:36) Health Care Access and Support
Thank you to our Sponsors:
Timeline: Go to timeline.com/drshah to get 20% off your order.
Learn more about Dr. Shah:
Website: https://www.drshah.com/
Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/
Instagram: @darshanshahmd https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/
Learn more about Siggi Clavien:
Website: https://www.elissagoodman.comhttps://us.loveyourliver.com/ https://theliverclinic.com/
Instagram:
@deliverance.elixir https://www.instagram.com/deliverance.elixir/ @siggiclavien https://www.instagram.com/siggiclavien/
Transcript 15,450 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Dr. Darshan Shah? Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.
0:50 Dr. Darshan Shah? Ziggy, thank you so much for joining us today.
0:53 Speaker 01 Pleasure to be here.
0:53 Dr. Darshan Shah? Can't wait to talk all thing liver with you.
0:56 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah, I love it.
0:57 Dr. Darshan Shah? So I wanted to start off the podcast episode today just talking about what you're most passionate about nowadays. What is, what is the one thing that makes you just light up and want to, want to just scream something from the rooftops?
1:13 Speaker 01 More and more, I get just impassioned and invigorated and emboldened on regenerative health and mostly root cause medicine. And as you said, you said very much at one of your talks I listened to is, you know, functional medicine is getting in front of it. And I think the ability to change and course correct somebody's entire health journey through preventative medicine and knowledge and preventing illness, I think is just a beautiful thing. As opposed to us trying to put the fire out with reactive medicine that we all grew up with, is now actually, let's make sure the house never even catches on fire.
1:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? No, I mean, that's my passion as well. We share a common passion there because it makes all the difference to have that, that mindset instead of the mindset of, let me just live this grandiose, crazy life until I hit a brick wall and now all of a sudden I need a pharmaceutical or a surgery or, you know, you're trying to reverse course makes it, like you said, course correcting early is the key. And I totally appreciate that. So where does the liver fit into all of this?
2:15 Speaker 01 So the liver is, it's a master organ and it's incredibly well-known, respected, and is a focal central point of Eastern medicine, whether it be Ayurvedic, Persian Ayurvedic, Chinese, you know, for 5,000 years of Kapiya, it has such a, it's the general of the body.
2:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
2:31 Speaker 01 And in Western medicine, it tends to be overlooked, not really understood. Most of the public doesn't understand how important it is, what it really does, or even where it is. So, the liver is a master organ, it's responsible for 500 vital functions.
2:49 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
2:50 Speaker 01 Its actual functions are into the thousands when you look at enzymatic responses and all that.
2:53 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I think, you know, my career in medicine, 30 years, I did liver surgery, I did liver transplants, and the one thing I know about the liver is that it's often the last organ to fail because it's such a redundant capacity. And I think because of that, there's not a lot of attention paid to the liver by pharmaceutical industry, for example. There's not a lot of liver-focused medications out there, for example. And also, it's the last thing we think about when we are doing an evaluation on somebody. And that's unfortunately, the wrong way to think about it because I think if you can focus on the liver early in your health journey, you can, like you said earlier, course correct.
3:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? So, what is the one thing most people get wrong when they think about the liver?
3:41 Speaker 01 The, the two things I think we hear the most, and this is from people that are, you know, really relatively fluent in, in medicine or education.
3:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
3:49 Speaker 01 Is they think, oh, well, it's just my detox engine, you know, which, or, the other one is that it has to do with alcohol. Oh, well, I don't drink very much, so I don't need to check my liver. When, as you just mentioned, to do with pharmaceuticals and medicines, that's actually causing more damage.
4:04 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
4:05 Speaker 01 And that's most of the damage that comes from pharmaceuticals that hits the liver first, and then that causes all kinds of downstream effects. 70% of liver disease globally today is non-alcohol related.
4:17 Dr. Darshan Shah? Isn't that incredible?
4:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? Because most people think that the only way to damage your liver is through alcohol. So if, like you said, if I'm not drinking, my liver is probably fine.
4:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? But in reality, most liver damage, severe liver damage is being caused by non-alcohol reasons, which are, what are some of those?
4:35 Speaker 01 Processed foods, ultra-processed foods, preservatives of foods, basically chemicals or things that are synthetic or not native to the human body. When you enter 100,000-plus chemicals into the human, basically, diet in the last 100 years, we haven't hereditarily grown up to that, dealt with that, evolved for that, and the body doesn't know how to deal with it. That's driving a lot of it. Same thing with pharmaceuticals, you know, chemicals to the body, the liver gets overloaded, and then what could tend to happen is the liver will look at what's a bigger threat. And the chemicals potentially in like a diet Coke or more of a threat than sugar or fat would be, so the liver says, okay, I've got a bigger threat, danger coming in, let me
5:18 Speaker 01 store the sugar and fat into glycans in the liver, which is why fatty liver starts exploding, and then let me deal with this other threat, we don't know what it is.
5:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Oh, I see, so that, so that's how some of these chemicals lead to fatty liver is because the liver has a certain capacity for detoxifying, and it shifts its attention towards the chemicals in our food and our, and our drinks, and like you said.
5:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:40 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, that's, that's so interesting because, you know, I think there's a big story to be told here about how liver, your liver fits into the puzzle of metabolic disease as well. And so I think that kind of talk speaks to some of it, but could you talk about how the liver fits into the metabolic disease equation, which, you know, 85% plus people in America have some level of metabolic disease.
6:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, and metabolic, because it all, and it all, we're talking about root cause, come back to the liver.
6:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
6:07 Speaker 01 So as the liver gets overloaded with all the things that are being thrown at it, and you said it right, you said- Most people don't understand or don't have symptoms for liver damage until it's too late. It's why it's called a silent killer.
6:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
6:19 Speaker 01 You start to get symptoms when you're far downstream, like in a blood test, for instance. You're not going to start getting bad liver enzymes on a blood test until you're further down the road.
6:27 Dr. Darshan Shah? Well.
6:27 Speaker 01 But as the liver gets overloaded and stressed, it can get inflamed. It can start to accumulate liver fat, which is thirty eight percent of the US population now.
6:36 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
6:36 Speaker 01 Uh, expected to be fifty percent.
6:38 Dr. Darshan Shah? And your liver's not supposed to have fat in it. That's the, that's the issue.
6:41 Speaker 01 It's supposed to have a, it's supposed to have a little bit. What it does is the liver's besides being in charge and the master of your immune system.
6:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
6:48 Speaker 01 To charge of your skin, your hair, all the vitamins, proteins, minerals, everything that we eat and digest. And it gets into the bloodstream via the small intestine. It goes to the liver and the liver then stores that, organizes that and is the mastermind of how those are released. It will form these little pockets on the liver that are like glikin pockets and those are energy. So if you run, it's going to burn some of those. It's going to release some vitamins. So it starts to store these little packets. And if it gets overloaded or too many of those, it gets fatty, then the liver function comes down. It starts to clog up. Its ability to expand and shrink goes down.
7:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
7:24 Speaker 01 And you start with cholesterol, for instance. Too much cholesterol, it comes to the liver to get processed and managed. And if not enough of it can be absorbed or dealt with the liver, it just keeps floating in the blood.
7:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
7:36 Speaker 01 And as it keeps floating in the blood, you start to build up cholesterol.
7:39 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
7:39 Speaker 01 Which could affect arterial walls. That's going to affect obviously metabolic, but also more importantly to your question is how sugar and insulin and all of that is dealt with. So your main engine that's dealing with that and dealing with insulin resistance and dealing with all of that is shutting down its functionality. And then you start to go down the slippery slope of metabolic syndrome.
8:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
8:01 Speaker 01 Which is a primary cause of cardiovascular disease.
8:04 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
8:04 Speaker 01 Not to mention type two diabetes and all the other things that that happens with.
8:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, that's so true. So you have. Metabolic disease affecting your liver health.
8:13 Speaker 01 Yep.
8:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? You also have chemicals from mostly in our food, right?
8:17 Speaker 01 Yep.
8:18 Dr. Darshan Shah? And I mean, think, we talk about the 150,000 different toxins that we're exposed to now that we were never exposed to prior to 80 years ago. A lot of that is in our food and specifically the food that we're buying and feeding ourselves, ultra-processed food. I think, I think it's a massive cause of the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
8:37 Speaker 01 Yep.
8:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? Which is so funny because, you know, we have this term called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD. But really, it's all still liver disease.
8:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? And whether it's coming from alcohol or the food that we're eating, it causes the same problems in the liver, right?
8:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And we've actually, the nomenclature's changed recently.
8:55 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
8:55 Speaker 01 To get away from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now they're calling it MASSL, so metabolic.
9:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
9:00 Speaker 01 Syndrome. So it's actually, they renamed it because of the effect it has, so that it covers both bases and for a myriad of reasons, there was this, within the hepatology community and the GI community for years, they're coming up with the new acronym.
9:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
9:13 Speaker 01 But it's metabolic syndrome really that it ties to now. And you've got, you know, with toxins, it's not just what we eat. You know, people forget that the largest organ in the body is the skin.
9:22 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
9:23 Speaker 01 The largest eternal organ is the liver. Everything you put on your skin, I mean, your skin, it's precipitous, right? It breathes, it excretes, and it takes in. So we got toxins, we're cruising around LA that we're breathing in, that's coming into the skin, we're touching it, chemicals in the fabric softer that we use in our clothes.
9:39 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
9:40 Speaker 01 The laundry detergents, deodorants, topicals, plus, you know, we're just constantly exposed in many ways, not just what we're eating. We gotta be very conscious of, you know, what are you washing your hair with? The clothes that you're sweating into and coming back, you know, the chemicals that were maybe made in that particular, maybe your workout outfit.
9:58 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
9:58 Speaker 01 That's a big thing, too.
10:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Those, those workout.
10:01 Speaker 01 Endocrine disruption, right? That's a, that's a, that's a big problem as well. That's why hormones getting messed with.
10:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, right. Yeah, people don't realize that those clothes that you wear to the gym, that, you know, Don't allow you to really sweat and they don't get wet. That's because there's a ton of chemicals in it that that makes it, gives it that property. And those are leaching into us through our skin.
10:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're coming in as well.
10:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right. And so then those are then being filtered through our liver, right? And so we're just causing our liver to work extremely hard all the time.
10:33 Speaker 01 And overloading it too. And we, I mean, we even got into microplastics and what that's happening too. But you are getting microfibers of synthetics being absorbed in, especially in porous areas. That's going to get into the, you know, it's going to go through the skin, it's going into the bloodstream, and it's going to end up in the liver.
10:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Now, with microplastics, I know microplastics have been found in the brain. They've been found in blood vessels. Have they been found in the liver as well? I would assume so.
10:57 Speaker 01 They're found in the liver. They've started to actually see it now in aortic valves in the heart.
11:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 01 Recently, it's been, uh, they're starting to see it actually in newborn babies. So it's going in vitro, right? I mean, also, first time ever with fatty liver, you're actually in India, you're starting to see babies born with fatty liver disease.
11:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Babies with fatty liver disease?
11:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, which is, that's a phenomenon that had never been experienced before. That's how much these cheap calories, synthetic calories, and fructosees that are getting into the, the mother's diet is going through to the baby. And then with the children, basically getting cheap formulas and cheap calories, liver doesn't know how to deal with it, and babies are getting fatty liver.
11:33 Dr. Darshan Shah? No, no.
11:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? And that's, that's almost, I mean, I think it's really worth highlighting that the main destructive force to the liver nowadays is not alcohol. It's not hepatitis, like the, the viral infection.
11:47 Speaker 01 No.
11:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? It is definitely our diet and the processed food and the chemicals in the diet and the high amount of, I would say, sugar in our diets as well, right? I mean, the inability of our metabolism to deal with all this sugar that is floating around in our bloodstream that is damaging our liver for the most part.
12:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? So this is a problem that everyone. Needs to be aware of.
12:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, even newborn babies now, that's how bad it's come. And it's, you know, thirty eight percent, I think, is still relatively conservative. So globally, it's about thirty, thirty five percent. The, those very highest in the world is Iran. One of the highest is India. Both cultures have none or almost very, very little alcohol intake.
12:31 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
12:32 Speaker 01 So liver disease is very prevalent there.
12:33 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
12:34 Speaker 01 The lowest is in Japan, which is interesting, but they're still, they're climbing. They're like twenty two percent and, and accelerating as well. South America is exploding, and that's due to cheap calories, processed foods. Um, is a big culprit. You know, for liver damage, interesting example is, um, in UK, it's called paracetamol. Or it's a, a acetaminophen, Tylenol here. It's a really interesting study, uh, the British Liver Trust did. That one dose of paracetamol does as much damage to your liver as six pints of lager.
13:05 Dr. Darshan Shah? One dose?
13:05 Speaker 01 One dose. It dissolves liver tissue.
13:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? So one Tylenol dose is doing the same amount of damage as six?
13:12 Speaker 01 Pints of lager, correct, yeah.
13:14 Dr. Darshan Shah? I mean, more people know that statistic, they would definitely think twice before taking some Tylenol.
13:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right?
13:20 Speaker 01 Exactly. We always, you know, I always tell people, if you do have a headache, first thing to do is drink some water, because most people are chronically dehydrated. And a lot of the time, that's your brain telling you, you know, you're, we're sixty, seventy percent water. Our brain's eighty percent. You need more water. And then that can usually subside it before we go down the route of what analgesic or what reactive to deal with it.
13:40 Dr. Darshan Shah? Now, that, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I think also Tylenol being one of them. Pharmaceuticals in general, whether they're over the counter or, or prescription pharmaceuticals. It's a not known fact that most of them, almost all of them are metabolizing in our liver. Right? And so taking a pill is a massive workload for our liver to process that chemical, to detoxify us from the negative effects of those chemicals.
14:08 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then you you compound that or if you drink alcohol at the same time.
14:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
14:13 Speaker 01 So you you know, if you take a Tylenol and alcohol, it's not two plus two is four. It's two plus two could be eight.
14:21 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly.
14:21 Speaker 01 Cause you compounded the amount of damages happened. That's why they're so to be so particular careful. And I think a lot of people think you don't drink cause it lessens the effect of the drug. The bigger threat is actually the damage that it's gonna do. Cause you you can only deal with so many things at once.
14:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, right. I think a lot of people also after a night of drinking, they have a headache or a hangover, they'll take some Tylenol.
14:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? And in reality, like you said, they're dehydrated.
14:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:44 Dr. Darshan Shah? The Tylenol is now compounding the damage to the liver.
14:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
14:48 Speaker 01 And and they need like they're they're vitamin B deficient and there's other things to do it, but that uh that kind of uh reactive to just throwing more drugs down your throat is not uh not the best. I mean, modern medicine and pharmaceuticals in the right place and the right dosage are miracle of of humankind.
15:02 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely, right.
15:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:03 Dr. Darshan Shah? If they're used for life-saving purposes.
15:05 Speaker 01 Correct, yeah, yeah.
15:06 Dr. Darshan Shah? You know, you mentioned thirty eight percent of people have some level of liver disease, but I agree with you. I think that's an underestimation because we're not proactively scanning people for liver damage um in the general population. So most of these studies are done probably for people at risk already or in the hospital and then we're finding it. And and and I think that the actual number is probably much higher, uh probably closer to where the number of people with just metabolic diseases and
15:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:36 Dr. Darshan Shah? And I think also um a lot of people that get scanned for liver disease, it's for these studies is after they have an elevation of their liver enzymes that we're measuring in their blood, right?
15:45 Speaker 01 Correct.
15:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? So those liver enzymes for the audience and everyone needs to know their numbers of these, their AST and their ALT, right? If these are even slightly elevated, there's some level of liver dysfunction occurring, which can then lead to liver damage, right?
16:01 Speaker 01 Correct. Yeah, it cause with the standard blood panel that you get, you know, with the on the liver liver panel, there'll be about eight things we're looking for. AST, ALT and gammas are the ones that are most kind of pinpointing if you've got liver damage or liver issue. But those are essentially warning signs and enzymes that are showing, hey, there's something bad going on, let's dig dig deeper. But by the time that's happening, you're well down the road of of liver damage.
16:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly.
16:23 Speaker 01 So you've got to get, you know, you've got to get in front of it. I love the analogy or as a metaphor, which is, you know, when did Noah build the ark? And it's like before the flood, it's like, no, before the rain.
16:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
16:35 Speaker 01 So.
16:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's right.
16:36 Speaker 01 Got to get really, really back to do that, to prevent that. And checking your vitals, checking your statistics, all the things you can do, scanning. That's why we really got into scanning because we were seeing ninety percent of our patients and our clients, both through clinical trials, studies, customers, consumer testing, they would come in with perfect bloods. And then we would scan them and be like, whoa, with especially with elastography, which is a second, more advanced than an ultrasound, but below an MRI. But it's very interesting because you can tell exactly what percentage of liver fat is there. And we're saying, okay, you know, eighty to ninety percent of people with fatty liver disease, not showing up on bloods. So what the kind of old school method is, is the doctor will look at your liver panel,
17:18 Speaker 01 he'll look at your cholesterol, he'll look at your BMI, and he'll try to make a guess, you might have fatty liver. Because so many patients that come in, oh, I've been told I have fatty liver. I'm like, oh, how do you know? Well, my liver, my doctor thinks. Well, have you had a scan? No. Have it an MRI? No. He just, it's an educated guess, which if you're a man between forty and sixty-five years old, you're about sixty to seventy percent chance of having it.
17:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
17:41 Speaker 01 So it's an educated guess, guess or a bet.
17:44 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, it's a bet.
17:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? It's like better than fifty fifty odds if you have it.
17:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right? So, you know, these, um, to, to define, you know, we, we keep saying the word liver damage, but to define that really, it's an elevation of liver enzymes, which is a lagging indicator of it, is going to happen more later in the disease process. What are other signs, symptoms that people can use to potentially discover whether they're damaging the liver or not? Can people feel this? Are there other things that they can look at?
18:14 Speaker 01 Absolutely. One of the first symptoms that you have, and is one that's probably overlooked, is brain fog. So there's a direct correlation. Fatty liver leads to impaired cognitive function. Therefore, and I mean, brain fog, your memory recall's not as quick, you're not thinking as fast, just a little, we've all felt a little fuzzy, and that's basically brain fog. And so many people have that, but they can, they can, you know, that could be because of lack of sleep, or it could be because I need to eat more of this, or I'm stressed or whatever. So they're not pinpointing the reason. So brain fog is something to look at first and foremost. Uh, secondary is weight gain.
18:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
18:48 Speaker 01 You will gain weight quicker. And then you will shed weight slower. And that's because the liver is also in charge of helping to metabolize fat.
18:55 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
18:56 Speaker 01 So as your liver gets fattier, its ability and your body's ability to break fats down diminishes. So if you really wanna lose weight and you're trying to keep your into good posture, good, you know, I guess, physical appearance, you really, really need to look at your liver and what's happening there as well. Uh, skin, breakouts of the skin can be a sign of de- of toxification internally. Uh, yellowing of the skin, uh, energy levels, oh, bad sleep. One of the first symptoms of fatty liver, it affects your sleep. So your sleep will diminish as well. I believe that one of the reasons whilst we sleep, the two main metabolic and physical things that happen is, one is your brain starts storing all the memories for the day.
19:39 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
19:39 Speaker 01 So it's like a, if you turn a computer off and the hard drive's caching.
19:42 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
19:42 Speaker 01 That's what your brain does.
19:43 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
19:44 Speaker 01 And the other thing is your liver does all of its regeneration, generally between one to three AM. And the liver will actually grow by up to forty percent while it reconstructs billions and billions and billions of cells. And then it comes back down and it, and it, and it comes back to shape the next day. Because that's such a big energy drain, it does it whilst you sleep. Because in the day, you have so many other demands and the fuel in the body.
20:05 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yes.
20:06 Speaker 01 So I, if that's struggling a lot, your sleep pattern will be disrupted, therefore you won't have as good a sleep.
20:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Interesting.
20:13 Speaker 01 Uh, but those are probably the big first symptoms, yeah.
20:15 Dr. Darshan Shah? Very interesting. And you know, one of the things that most people don't know is liver is one of those organs that can regenerate itself, which I think is extremely important. You just have to give it the chance to do so, right?
20:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? And so sleep is also important for your liver health, because like you said, it's happening at night. So if you're not sleeping, you're not giving your liver a chance to regenerate.
20:35 Speaker 01 Uh, it's the only organ in the human body that fully regenerates.
20:38 Dr. Darshan Shah? No.
20:38 Speaker 01 You can have up to ninety percent of your liver damaged and it will grow back.
20:42 Dr. Darshan Shah? No.
20:43 Speaker 01 If, let's say, God forbid, if you need to do liver transplant, we had a genetic match, we would take, it's called a live liver transplant. We'll take a third of my liver off, put that into you, and within a month, that'll grow back to a fully double-lobed organ, and mine will grow back.
20:56 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
20:57 Speaker 01 No organ in the human body fully regenerates.
20:59 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
20:59 Speaker 01 And to do, you know, sleep, probably the most important thing for health is sleep. We do, we work a lot with cancer patients and chemo patients, the people that are really trying to get, you know, through something horrific and onto a better path. And now we say the most damaging thing to your he- health is lack of sleep, two is stress. Then you get into things like smoking, nutrition, all those things too. But sleep first and foremost is the most important.
21:22 Dr. Darshan Shah? I agree, it's definitely top of the list. You know, I used to do liver transplant surgery, believe it or not, at UC San Diego. So one of the things I would notice in liver transplant is that people's livers, like you said, will regenerate. By the way, that's one of the most complicated surgeries you can do is take a piece of someone's liver. Because you know, you have your portal veins, you have your arteries, and you also have your regular venous system. So you have so many different vessels coming off of it. Anyhow, it was beautiful surgery. And people's livers, like you said, will regenerate. The transplanted one would grow. But it always blew me away how much damage people do to themselves with alcohol and with diet. And it's usually a combination of both. You know, the alcoholics would eat garbage.
22:04 Dr. Darshan Shah? And then they all had metabolic disease as well. And the combination of those two would lead to what we call end-stage liver disease, where it's the end. They've damaged 100% of the liver, they're about to die. And that's when you would do a liver transplant. And there were other reasons for doing liver transplants. You know, removing a tumor, hepatitis from an infection and a lot of damage from that. But mostly it was alcohol and metabolic disease. And then the tide turned from alcohol to metabolic disease being the main reason. Somewhere in the 1980s, and I think that happened because of the massive overabundance of ultra-processed food in our diet.
22:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. It is incident timing that it was the late 70s, early 80s, that high-fructose corn syrup came out. Because the Japanese technology, they said, we all this excess corn, what can we do with it? And then the Japanese technology, well, we can extract basically a mimic sugar out of it. And then all the big soda companies said, wow, well, let's pull sugar out of Coke. Let's pull sugar out of Pepsi. Let's put corn syrup in. Body does not know how to deal with that. I mean, the timing is pretty coincidental.
23:14 Dr. Darshan Shah? I'm so glad you mentioned that. I didn't even realize that, but you're absolutely right. Is when, is when fructose, high fructose corn syrup entered into our diet.
23:22 Speaker 01 Is it everything? Bread, french fries, sodas, drinks, all, especially for children.
23:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
23:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, all the cereals. Yeah, body just does not know how to deal with that.
23:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, and the reason we use high fructose corn syrup is because it is infinitely cheaper than sugar, right?
23:36 Speaker 01 And not only is it's cheaper, but it's also heavily subsidized by the government.
23:39 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, corn.
23:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:40 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
23:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? And it can be produced anywhere, whereas sugar needs to be extracted in certain parts of the world and shipped everywhere, whereas corn is just everywhere.
23:48 Speaker 01 Like if you, if you wanna get a, like what a real Coca-Cola used to taste like, you have to go to get a Mexican Coke, because it's actually a sugar.
23:55 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, real sugar.
23:56 Speaker 01 And here, because US, the US produces so much corn that the government pays corn farmers not to farm. So the price doesn't drop anymore. That's how much corn's produced, it's astronomical.
24:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
24:07 Speaker 01 And another way to squeeze some more money out of it was to create corn syrup, basically.
24:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? And so why do they not use high fructose corn syrup in Mexico?
24:16 Speaker 01 I believe because they produce a lot of sugar there as well. So it's a sugar growing country, and they don't have the government subsidies. So it's a totally different, because it does, the technology to extract it isn't cheap, but it's not as heavily subsidized by the government. You know, whereas, um, South America, Mexico, those are sugar producing countries. US doesn't produce a ton of sugar.
24:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
24:36 Speaker 01 But it produces a huge amount of corn.
24:38 Dr. Darshan Shah? How is fructose different than glucose?
24:40 Speaker 01 So fructose is, is, well, it's manmade, and it's a chemical version of it, whereas glucose is sugar. But they call, in the UK, they don't call it fructose syrup, they call it glucose syrup, but it's basically high fructose.
24:51 Dr. Darshan Shah? Hmm, interesting.
24:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:52 Dr. Darshan Shah? And from my understanding of the science of fructose, it causes more damage to the liver than sugar does.
24:59 Speaker 01 Correct.
25:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Because it's absorbed directly through the portal vein into the liver.
25:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and how to, and the only thing that does worse than that is like the chemicals in a diet soda. I was actually just, just talking to Dr. Specter yesterday about this, and the, the liver damage from a diet soda versus a regular soda.
25:16 Dr. Darshan Shah? Why is that?
25:17 Speaker 01 And how the, well, once again, it's all these chemicals that the body doesn't know how to deal with, and aspartame, plus all the preservatives in there, and then all of the, um, the functional chemicals that are used in the manufacturing. All those things are leading to it, whereas, you know, sugar is bad.
25:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
25:30 Speaker 01 But the farther you get away from nature with anything, the more problems you have with the body.
25:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
25:35 Speaker 01 Like, let's take aspirin, for example, right? The white willow bark that in its natural form is a very good analgesic and has been used for thousands of years. And probably has eighty eighty percent efficacy rate to get rid of a headache. You know, Bayer was able to synthesize it in the, I think it was the thirties or forties, made into synthetic aspirin. But the actual efficacy rate of that now is about fifty five percent. So it's it's cut by a third how many people it works for. Farther you get away from nature, the more chemicals you have, the less chance and the more problems you have.
26:05 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, for sure. And I think this speaks to a very controversial topic, seed oils, right?
26:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:10 Dr. Darshan Shah? I think a lot of people argue benefit versus risk of seed oil. A lot of studies showing that it can actually, you know, help some people lower cholesterol levels, lower inflammation. But my my thought is that seed oils are highly processed. There's a lot of other chemicals that our liver is dealing with. And why use seed oils if we have like olive oil or avocado oil, which is much closer to nature? What are your thoughts around seed oils?
26:38 Speaker 01 Well, seed oils in their nature of just how they're manufactured and made, or once again, so processed, you've killed a lot of the goodness in them.
26:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yes.
26:45 Speaker 01 So the polyphenols, antioxidant, all that's been crushed.
26:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
26:48 Speaker 01 Or squeezed or boiled or processed out of it as well. They're inexpensive, they're cheap to be made, and they have a higher smoke point, and they can be used over and over and over at a restaurant. So I have like a biohack that my wife taught me and that we do now whenever we go out is when the waiter always asks you, are you have any food allergies? First thing we say is seed oils. Please cook my food in butter or olive oil.
27:10 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's a great hack.
27:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? I love that.
27:12 Speaker 01 And they'll have to do it because they're always so petrified of, you know, the case you do. And it does cause all kinds of problems. I mean, and molecularly they're different. Extra virgin olive oil, good fat. Regular olive oil, not as good. Extra virgin coconut oil, very good. You know, four or five times pressed coconut oil, not as good. Grass fed butter, totally different molecularly than dairy butter.
27:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
27:34 Speaker 01 Really good. So once you start to squeeze all those things out of it and destroy a lot of its natural properties, it's bad. And you lose all the benefits. I mean, olive oil is so good for you. Extra virgin, incredible.
27:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
27:46 Speaker 01 Topically, to eat it, you put it in your hair. It's all kinds of health benefits as well.
27:51 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, no, it's so true. What are some of the other foods that people need to be concerned about as far as their liver health goes? We've talked about high fructose corn syrup. We've talked about seed oils, ultra-processed foods, this is a big general category, the chemicals in ultra-processed food. What are some other ones?
28:07 Speaker 01 Preservatives always, obviously, you gotta look at those as well. Because if you think about a preservative, it's a lot of the times in packaged foods, it's a processed chemical mean to take organic matter and keep it past its natural lifespan.
28:21 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
28:21 Speaker 01 So what's that gonna do inside of your body when it's sitting there? It could be similar effect as well. One of the things they hide stuff with is natural flavorings. That's used a lot and abused as a term. You'll see a, you know, I always tell people, whenever you eat anything, just flip it around, look at the back. But when you see natural flavorings, a lot of times, that could be a myriad of different things as well. So then you kind of have to use a little intuition, what's the integrity of this brand?
28:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
28:46 Speaker 01 What's integrity of this company as well? Unfortunately, as much as I love it, fish, you know, there's a lot of microplastics in fish, not to mention you get the heavy metal issue as well. I was getting a full in-depth blood panel done and I came back with my mercury levels were off the charts. And I had been in Solana Beach and I'd been eating swordfish a lot. And once, I mean, it came right through there as well. But the microplastics, you know, that's, that's, that's a big, big problem and a lot of that is in the fish. You're not gonna get that as much as beef or pork or chicken, but specifically at fish because of all the plastic in the ocean.
29:20 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, right. I think, I think people, you know, fish are in the ocean. And like you said, you're having swordfish, these fish live in the ocean for a long time. They get really big, microplastics are going through their system, all the contaminants from, you know, just humans throwing heavy metals and other chemicals in the ocean, these are all accumulating in the fish. So when you eat fish, even ocean fish unfortunately is, it's, it's a problem because of our polluted oceans, right?
29:47 Speaker 01 Because even the teeny weeny little fish, they get it inside of them. Then the fish bigger than that eats it, then the fish, and it goes up, and then by the time you get to an apex fish, like a swordfish or tuna, it has consumed all those other, basically downstream and species of fish that are all absorbing. Because it might have eaten 50,000 little fish to get to the size before it gets on your plate. And it's picked up all those microplastics.
30:09 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to get your head wrapped around the effects of. What we're doing to our oceans until you put it in that way. That, um, you know, all of, all the things that our fish eat, we're eating and then now they're accumulating in us as well.
30:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. Grass fed, grass fed beef, much healthier.
30:27 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
30:28 Speaker 01 Where you're getting chicken, like a lot of chicken is just stuffed with antibiotics.
30:31 Dr. Darshan Shah? For sure.
30:32 Speaker 01 And that's, that could affect the eggs. You're taking that in. Tap water, you know, the water that we're drinking. Just cause it's, I mean, most of the water, even here in California, it'll say on the warnings that don't put it in a fish tank. Right. There's so much chlorine and chemicals in there. Plus, especially in London, what you see, and I'm sure that's the same here. Anywhere you've got a lot of recycled water. You've got a lot of hormones in there, especially birth control.
30:53 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
30:54 Speaker 01 So birth control gets, you know, obviously it goes in the toilets, it gets in the water system. It gets filtered and processed, but it's still in the drinking water.
31:01 Dr. Darshan Shah? Hmm.
31:01 Speaker 01 That's why we're getting all these weird hormone issues and endocrine disruptors and everything. And that's because the hormone is coming back in. So you want to drink spring water if you can. I mean, the best is spring water out of glass.
31:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
31:12 Speaker 01 If not, you got to do the plastic and you get the microplastic risk. And if you've got a filtration to your house, you get most of it, but then you've got fluoride. So I mean, we're just, I mean, we're getting it from all ends. You don't want to run around being paranoid.
31:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
31:23 Speaker 01 But you could make little choices along the way.
31:25 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
31:26 Speaker 01 But those are things that are very bad on the liver.
31:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? No, all of it. Uh, my advice on water is to get a reverse osmosis system for where you get your most of your water from.
31:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? And if you can't do a reverse osmosis, they're like five, $600 and get some sort of filtration system. You know, you see a lot of kitchen sinks have one main faucet and a secondary faucet. The secondary faucet needs to have some sort of filter, preferably reverse osmosis.
31:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, before it. I mean, we do. Cause my, my wife had her, we had our second little, uh, baby at home. Yeah. Covid, we had a home birth. And as our first son was born in the bath, we said, okay, we want to have a, a, a bath birth. And we're like, okay, well, I can't have my baby born into.
32:05 Dr. Darshan Shah? Tap water.
32:05 Speaker 01 In a bathtub, because you remember you're absorbing through on your skin.
32:08 Dr. Darshan Shah? Skin.
32:09 Speaker 01 So we did a whole house system. I know it's expensive, but it's a phenomenal investment for your family. That way. If you're cooking vegetables or washing vegetables or boiling pasta or showering or bathing or washing. On your plants, right? It's good to get a whole house. They're a couple grand, but it is an investment in your health and your family's health. And we do that and then we have a reverse osmosis. And then we take it a step further. We have a Kangen.
32:32 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
32:32 Speaker 01 Which is this Japanese technology which alkalizes it and does all that, but it's uh. Yeah, water is probably a big place that people don't think about and that's where you're getting a lot of toxins into.
32:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
32:42 Speaker 01 Um, driving around the city uh with your window open.
32:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
32:45 Speaker 01 You're breathing in toxins all the time there, you know?
32:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, having a good air filtration where you spend the most time, maybe your office and your bedroom at night where you sleep. I'm a big advocate of putting a good air filter there if you're in an environment where the outside air is not great. Um, and then just changing your air filters in your home HVAC system is also very important.
33:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:06 Dr. Darshan Shah? Um, yeah, I try to break it down for people because it can get overwhelming, right?
33:09 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
33:09 Dr. Darshan Shah? It's air, water, food and skin. Those are the four big places that you need to really um mitigate your toxic exposure and the Pareto principle, which is, you know, take the few small actions that have the biggest effect.
33:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Air filters, uh, water filters, changing out all your cosmetics, like you mentioned, like.
33:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:29 Dr. Darshan Shah? You know, a lot of us put chemicals on our skin every single day. I think women use an average of fourteen different products and men use an average of nine on their skin. You could scan those products with apps that'll tell you if, what level of toxins you're putting in your body. And then replace them because you only need to replace them one time.
33:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Once they're replaced, you go years and years going in the right direction, right? So I think that those are all very important, important pieces of advice for people.
33:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely, and you know, a lot of people's reaction how it's expensive. It is more expensive than, you know, maybe the, the normal product, but how expensive is getting sick? How expensive is getting cancer?
34:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? How expensive is liver disease?
34:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, or missing work or, or just, we spend so much time and money and energy and focus on feeling good. They got, how much, it doesn't cost that much to not feel bad.
34:21 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's a great point. I love it. I love that point. So, okay, you have all this advice for us on not to damage our liver, obviously. Oh, we need to talk about alcohol. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about alcohol. What are your thoughts on alcohol?
34:33 Speaker 01 So, you know, alcohol, in essence, while there are positives to it, it's not just all bad. You know, it does, it could de-stress, it can make, let people let their hair down and, and relax, and it's very culturally important. It brings people together, get through the social anxiety. I'm a big, and I come from a wine-growing family in Switzerland, which, coincidentally, when you used to do liver transplants, one of the tests that they give you after a liver transplant is called a Klaviyan-Dido test.
34:58 Dr. Darshan Shah? Oh, that's you?
34:59 Speaker 01 That's my cousin.
35:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Ah.
35:00 Speaker 01 So my first cousin, Pierre-Alain Klaviyan.
35:02 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
35:03 Speaker 01 So the Klavians in Switzerland are known for two things: winemaking and liver health.
35:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? Ah, interesting.
35:08 Speaker 01 It's a small world, but it is family, my family, our fathers are first cousins, very much, you know, wine's important. And I think wine in small doses, because it can lower stress, it can be, there's vascular positives to it. I've seen studies on both sides. I think it has some positives as well. But once you get into excess, it's like anything, right? Sun's really good for you. Too much sun is bad for you.
35:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? The doses are poison.
35:31 Speaker 01 Exactly. Too much of it, spirits, obviously, so, you know, vodkas and things like that. I tell clients, if you're going to drink, wine would probably be the best in moderation. If you're gonna drink alcohol and you really wanna have spirits, the probably cleanest is something that's distilled four, five, six times, because every time it's distilled, impurities are removed.
35:50 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
35:51 Speaker 01 And the probably healthiest cocktail to have would be like a five-times-distilled vodka with soda water and lemon.
35:58 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
35:59 Speaker 01 The worst is when you take a cheap alcohol and you mix it with chemicals like a Red Bull or a Diet Coke or soda. Then you're compounding it. Then you're hitting somebody with sugar and chemicals and toxins and alcohol.
36:11 Speaker 01 Right?
36:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? It's a disaster.
36:13 Speaker 01 Disaster. So if you're gonna do it.
36:15 Dr. Darshan Shah? Red Bull and cheap vodka, right?
36:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, some of the.
36:17 Dr. Darshan Shah? It's a disaster.
36:18 Speaker 01 Some of the children we see teenagers with the worst liver disease, which is usually worse than the parents.
36:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
36:23 Speaker 01 It comes down to processed foods, fast food and Red Bull diet soda with alcohol.
36:29 Dr. Darshan Shah? Energy drinks, right?
36:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, so bad for you.
36:32 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, and these are like, these are all daily choices that we make.
36:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:36 Dr. Darshan Shah? And so, um, you know, it's not all bad in one moment, but doing this over and over every day. I think it's important to, once again, highlight the fact that's not just alcohol. It's also the energy drinks who have a ton of high fructose corn syrup and, and sugar. Um, also the, the dietary choices we make, the toxins we're putting in our skin, all of this builds up. And thank goodness our liver is an extremely resilient organ. It can keep us alive a long time being exposed to all this. But when it fails, it fails. And like you said, as it's failing, you're experiencing brain fog, skin conditions. You're just not feeling great. You don't know why. And it's because your liver is not healthy. It's actually screaming for help. You're just not listening.
37:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
37:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
37:19 Speaker 01 Another tip I always say, if somebody does have a drink is drink a glass of water with every drink.
37:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
37:24 Speaker 01 Because you're diluting it, you're getting hydrated.
37:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
37:27 Speaker 01 And you're gonna, it's gonna really help as well. Plus you'll drink less because you're filling up.
37:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
37:31 Speaker 01 So it's a, it's a little hack you can do. So you maybe just have one drink, you know, with the colleagues up to work or on a night out as well. But the, uh, yeah, we say love your liver. That's why we, we, our, our URL is loveyourliver.com.
37:43 Dr. Darshan Shah? Wow.
37:43 Speaker 01 Cause we're trying to, I mean, and let's face it, the liver's not really sexy organ. So we're trying to make it more appealing to people and understand it. And that's why we say love it and it will love you back. It protects you. It take care, it takes care of you and it's responsible for so many things. And it's so complex. It's one of the few organs that we cannot replace with technology.
38:03 Dr. Darshan Shah? No.
38:03 Speaker 01 You can dialysis machine for kidneys, you know, artificial hearts, lungs, all those, but the liver's constantly regenerating. You, we can't replace it with technology or. Or you can come close to replicating it. This, I find this fascinating. I just learned this recently. The average age of your liver, whether you're ninety five years old or five years old is three years. The average cell age of a liver is three years.
38:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Really?
38:27 Speaker 01 It's very rare that any of your liver cells be more than ten. It regenerates so much, you're basically cruising around with a three-year-old liver.
38:33 Dr. Darshan Shah? Three-year-old liver, right.
38:34 Speaker 01 No matter how old you are.
38:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? So interesting.
38:36 Speaker 01 When we get older, it does shrink in size, but it's still about the same age because it's just, you know, constant regenerating, just, you know, miracles of nature.
38:44 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's three years.
38:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? It's such a miracle that our liver can regenerate itself every three years completely. And that's mind blowing.
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40:01 Dr. Darshan Shah? Okay, so we've learned how to protect our liver. And now, say, you just want to know where you're at with your liver right now.
40:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:08 Dr. Darshan Shah? You get, you have some blood tests we talked about, AST, ALT, GGT. But those are like, you know, the last thing to change, right? So how can one look at their liver and understand, what is the current status of how my liver health is doing?
40:20 Speaker 01 First is always anecdotal, which any of us can do that for free. How are we feeling? Start paying attention to that.
40:25 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
40:25 Speaker 01 Um, I'm a huge proponent, and one of the reasons we started the liver clinics and getting as much scanning out there as possible
40:31 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
40:32 Speaker 01 is to do what's called elastography or the shear wave scan. And You know, we used to have ultrasound and ultrasound will tell you, okay, is there a tumor? Or is it fatty or not fatty? And it just says yes or no. Sheer wave is a lot more advanced, takes about 10 minutes. You lay down, you pull your shirt up to about here, put the probe in and we shoot a sound wave through your liver. And the softer your liver is, the squishier it is, the healthier it is. So we're measuring how soft and squishy it is. And in that, we can pick up, is there any fibrosis, which is scarring?
41:03 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
41:03 Speaker 01 Is it starting to get stiff, is there inflammation? So we can pick up stiffness. And the other thing is fat. We can pick up exactly what percentage of liver fat you have. How much of the liver is showing fatty change? So if you combine that, then you could go a step further and even through an ultrasound aspect in that one exam. And you can see if there's any tumors, are there any cysts? What's happening? You take that and then you look at your liver, uh, blood, liver test on a blood panel. Plus your cholesterol, plus A1Z, which is sugar, right? Cause that's all affected by the liver.
41:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
41:34 Speaker 01 That's gonna give you a much, much better picture as well.
41:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
41:37 Speaker 01 Scanning is probably the, is, is the most important of that, but then you need to marry that with those other things. And a lot of people, the old school mentality of cholesterol is, oh, well, if you have high cholesterol, you're gonna get cardiovascular disease. Right? So.
41:50 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
41:51 Speaker 01 Seventy percent of cholesterol is genetic. So only thirty percent of our cholesterol is based off environmental factors. So, A, we wanna know what's happening, but what's happening within the liver, but most importantly is, and I know you, you're a big proponent of this and, and I am as well as with, is a cardiac CT scan.
42:08 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
42:08 Speaker 01 And doing a clearly through it as well.
42:10 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
42:10 Speaker 01 And then you're gonna pick up what's happening, cause if you, you might just have not native cholesterol cruising around. But what you wanna worry about is they call it, we call it the little lipids, the little cholesterol that gets into the arterial walls and starts to fill the plaque. And calcium buildup, and that's why a calcium coronary score is important.
42:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
42:28 Speaker 01 So, taking care of your liver is very much important, the defense. Of cardiovascular disease and how we deal with cholesterol.
42:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an important point to highlight is your liver is your organ that's really dealing with the cholesterol that's floating around your bloodstream. And so so a lot of the medications that we use to fight high cholesterol, if you're at risk for cardiac disease, have an effect primarily in your liver.
42:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:51 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right? Okay, so this this scan, the shear wave, it's using sound waves, so it doesn't hurt. It's not like we're putting anything inside your body, it's just done on the skin. And it gives you different scores of how much fat you have and how much fibrosis you have. And just for the audience, fibrosis occurs after more damage to your liver. So it starts off with fatty liver disease, and then it becomes fibrotic, which means actually replacing good liver tissue with hard, non-functional liver tissue, right?
43:19 Speaker 01 Correct. But you can have scarring and fibrosis, but have normal liver fat.
43:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
43:24 Speaker 01 And we've had that, and that tends to be pharmaceutical induced.
43:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? Interesting.
43:29 Speaker 01 Like, we had a client that came in, everything was perfect, golf fit, low body fat, you know, looked really good on paper.
43:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Makes sense, right.
43:36 Speaker 01 But then we scanned him, liver fat was low, but his fibrosis was called an F4, which is serious scarring.
43:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
43:42 Speaker 01 And we're like, oh, dear. So we then go to MRI for confirmation, then you have to go to biopsy, which we try to avoid at all costs. And what we figured out was is that he had been on a antacid drug for 25 years at a double dose. And that had been slowly scarring and creating more scarring and has really messed up his liver. We're able to, to, I think, course correct him before he went into, you know, liver failure.
44:06 Dr. Darshan Shah? Wow.
44:06 Speaker 01 But it's sometimes, it's not always with liver fat, but generally you are correct. As the liver gets fattier, you get more collagen buildup, those collagen starts to go in and create these, it looks like little veins or channels, and then those could harden, turn into scars, then you've got that. And then with the next step, that's kind of like NASH.
44:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
44:24 Speaker 01 And then after that, those veins will connect. And then they'll trap all this healthy liver tissue. That liver tissue will then die because it's starved of oxygen and blood and energy. And then you get what's that cirrhosis.
44:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's cirrhosis.
44:38 Speaker 01 And that's what it looks like leopard spots and that's because it's those spots are dead tissue. Because that scarring started to connect. So you want to try to catch that scarring early and prevent it.
44:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, right, right. No, that's and that's scarring, you know, it can be due to fat or like you said, it can be due to pharmaceuticals. But basically scarring is your body's attempt at repairing areas that are under that have been damaged, right? It's just like you get a scar on your skin, you get scarring in your liver. And what's really incredible about the liver is that even those damaged, even those scarred, there's a potential to reverse this damage because of the incredible regenerative capacity of the liver.
45:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:18 Dr. Darshan Shah? And I think that's that's really mind blowing to me that you if you just give it a break and you just change your habits, you could potentially reverse this process.
45:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. And that's where I keep saying that over and over, love your liver, love your liver. I mean, you should love yourself. Right? Love your liver and you start to put that positive energy into yourself and you start paying attention and you can start to reverse that, make more conscious decisions and prevent that and undue damage. Like the, you know, there's a lot of negatives that we discussed to do with, you know, type 2 diabetes and liver disease. But the great thing about fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes is they're reversible with lifestyle change.
45:55 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
45:55 Speaker 01 So that's the silver lining. You know, you can you can totally turn that around.
45:59 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh. Yeah, and I would even say that cardiac disease is reversible as well with lifestyle changes. We see massive studies that we can reverse cardiac disease. So basically, all the diseases that humans are dying of, we just have to do lifestyle changes to reverse them.
46:15 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, you know, I listened to one of your talks recently and listening to your story and your testimony of your path, you were headed right into the side of the mountain.
46:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
46:26 Speaker 01 And you would have had cardiovascular disease, but you you course corrected and totally took yourself out of that. And now you're the opposite, besides being incredibly healthy. You're teaching other people how not to go down that path.
46:39 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
46:39 Speaker 01 Here's what we can do. That's why I really like the next health model and functional medicine and and integrative medicine is bringing what's in best to create, create wellness.
46:49 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yes, yes, at a root cause and you know, I think when you create wellness at a root cause, not only do you avoid chronic disease and you turn around chronic disease, but you also feel great.
46:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:58 Dr. Darshan Shah? Which is the, the best side effect ever, right?
47:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:01 Dr. Darshan Shah? Is feeling incredible. Okay, let's go back to that scan. So you have the scan that can detect fat and fibrosis and there's different levels. And can you describe those levels and what they mean?
47:12 Speaker 01 So there's a general scaling method that's used whether we're in London at UCL or you're in Tokyo or California and it's you go F zero, which is normal fibrosis, which is zero.
47:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Mm hmm.
47:23 Speaker 01 You don't have any. And then it goes F one, F, which is they use a color code system. So it goes from green to yellow.
47:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? Mm hmm.
47:29 Speaker 01 To orange, to red, to almost purple as far as the severity of it.
47:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
47:34 Speaker 01 And we do that for liver fat as well. Stage one steatosis is what a lot of people have. That's technically not fatty liver disease. That's just a fatty liver.
47:42 Dr. Darshan Shah? Hmm.
47:43 Speaker 01 When you go to what's called stage two and stage three, that's fatty liver disease. And that leads to all kinds of problems. The more people, and I'm very strong proponent of this, and I even convinced the head of cardiology at one of the most prominent universities in UK, more people will die of cardiovascular disease because of fatty liver than will die of liver disease because of fatty liver. So fatty liver is driving cardiovascular disease because of metabolic disease, metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes.
48:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
48:13 Speaker 01 As well.
48:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
48:14 Speaker 01 But those, so that's the grading system. Sorry, I digressed a little bit, but those are the grading systems that we can look at and it's the color coding, same thing for the fat as well.
48:22 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
48:22 Speaker 01 Think of the green, uh, the stoplight.
48:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
48:24 Speaker 01 Green through red.
48:25 Dr. Darshan Shah? Green through red, right. And so I got my liver scan done with you and you know, I've been medicine for 30 years in this field and I've never had a, a liver scan done. I've had a full body MRI, which does look at the liver, but is different, doesn't grade your levels of fibrosis or, um, or fat in what? I believe is just like the coronary calcium score, this liver scan is one of the most underutilized tests in preventative medicine. And so, you know, everyone should really have one. There's really very few people that should not have a liver scan because you always, you never know, right? You never know how much, like you said, you, there's people that are super healthy that are taking an antacid, for God's sake, and they're about
49:07 Dr. Darshan Shah? ready to lose their liver. And so, why not screen for this, right? And then, the other great thing about it is, there's no radiation in this scan. You could do it every day, and it's not going to change or harm you in any way. And it's a great tool to follow your liver health over time, right? And so, if you have an abnormality, you want to aim to go from like an F1 to an F0, right? That's the aim. And you can aim for that goal with life cell changes.
49:34 Speaker 01 Absolutely. We, you know, we believe in evidence and data, both in our phyto-medicines and in our screening as well. So, we want to, we track progress, or decline. Generally, what we're using it for is to make people aware, baseline them. But it should be once a year event. You know, you go get a physical once a year, you should have your liver screen once a year. It's so safe that it's approved throughout Europe and the US. If you're pregnant, if you have a pacemaker, it's essentially sound and ultrasound and mathematics with some AI in the background, and we can tell exactly what's happening, without having to, you know, zero radiation.
50:11 Dr. Darshan Shah? Game changer. Absolute game changer. It's, you know, I always tell people, get your blood test and look at your biomarkers. But your biomarkers are sometimes a little late in helping you understand where you truly are at this moment, right? And so, I think using scanning technology gives you a much clearer picture of what's actually going on in the anatomy, which is, which is critical information for people to know. So, I agree. We're going to be doing it in Ex Health Now for all of our patients that are on a membership program on a yearly basis. I think it's a great idea. And I think people want to do it more if they have some level of liver damage, because they want, who wants to live with that, right? And you definitely don't want to, you definitely don't want to continue the same course, right? I mean, you have to turn this around, for sure.
50:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely. We advise once a year. But if you do have a condition, and we want to track the progress or the reversal of it, then you'll do another one at six months, or maybe you had a car accident or a major surgery, right? Anesthesia causes a lot of liver damage. You want to check and see where you're at, because we might need to. Put the customer on to maybe a different diet. Or potentially on to, um, you know, take the patient and then put them on to deliverance or other modalities to, to repair that damage quickly and see where it's at. Because you might not think you have liver damage and you do. And that can be a byproduct of general anesthetics after a, could be anything from plastic surgery to a hip replacement to what have you. See where you're at and then you can adjust.
51:33 Dr. Darshan Shah? For sure. Yeah, it's a really good point. Having anesthesia for surgery is damaging to your liver because your liver is detoxifying you from a lot of the anesthesia. So as far as diet goes, so we know sleep is important for your liver because that's when your liver heals. We know that diet is important. So we've already talked about all the foods that you should avoid.
51:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:52 Dr. Darshan Shah? Are there specific foods that promote liver health?
51:56 Speaker 01 So always, uh, like most things, leafy greens, things that are high in chlorophyll, high in vitamins as well. Those are very good. Water is obviously keeping yourself really well hydrated. Coffee is really good for your liver. You have a forty-four percent less chance of developing liver disease if you drink two to three cups a day of coffee.
52:14 Dr. Darshan Shah? I love that news.
52:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So coffee is very good for your liver. The other stat I read, I think it's sixty-six percent if you drink four cups a day. So obviously Italians probably very good for liver disease perspective, but coffee is really good because before you do a scan by, mind you, the only thing you have to do is fast for three hours, water only and no coffee. The reason no coffee is because it brings all this blood into the li- uh, to the liver. And it could, it could throw off the stiffness level. But that's also one of the reasons coffee is so good because it's bringing so much blood into the liver. It's staying really healthy as well. So coffee, water, leafy greens, sweet potatoes. There's a whole list on our website of kind of what we recommend to do as well. Seed oil is bad, which we discussed.
52:57 Speaker 01 Those are probably the ones that, you know, basically a really healthy, well-balanced diet of vitamins and nutrients as well.
53:03 Dr. Darshan Shah? What do you think about certain diets causing harm to the liver with the keto diet? Or the carnivore diet, you know, there's a lot of talk around. People using these diets, and I had to use them myself with certain patients for interventions. And when they are having massive food allergies, for example, we need to do a complete elimination. But what are your thoughts on mainly meat only, zero fiber diets?
53:28 Speaker 01 And there's a lot of positives to carnivore diets, but one of the negatives is the lack of fiber.
53:32 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
53:32 Speaker 01 And that's why you've got to do supplementation with certain supplements if you are doing that as well. I think personally a keto diet is much healthier because you can balance it out with a lot of veg.
53:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
53:42 Speaker 01 And supplement, I mean, it's even dogs, you'll see dogs eating grass. And that's because they're trying to pick up some minerals that they're not getting in their food.
53:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly.
53:49 Speaker 01 So it's a natural thing to take in vegetables and minerals via plants and in with your meat as well. So what we do see, which is interesting, is people that are fasting on really heavy carnivore diets, we're seeing big spikes up of liver fat. I think that has to do with the starvation mode. Your body's starving for that period, so it starts to store some extra fats. Once again, if they are doing a lot of meats, what, how is the meat cooked? What types of oil is it cooked in as well? That's really important. We do see really high levels of fatty liver disease on certain vegan diets.
54:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
54:25 Speaker 01 And a lot of that's to do with when they're eating super processed vegetarian or vegan food.
54:30 Dr. Darshan Shah? Dirty vegan diet.
54:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, I mean, the amount of oils that takes to make like a Beyond Burger or those big meats is off the charts.
54:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly.
54:38 Speaker 01 That's got all kinds of hidden boogaboos in it that aren't good. Or, you know, natural vegetarian with lots of fresh veg and fruit, incredibly good for you. But once you start to get into this kind of manmade manipulated vegan stuff, you run into problems.
54:54 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
54:54 Speaker 01 I think it is important, incredibly important, if you do eat a lot of plants and vegetables, is are you washing that, those properly before you cook them?
55:02 Dr. Darshan Shah? Hmm.
55:03 Speaker 01 Because the amount of pesticides that are sitting on top of those veg and those fruits is astronomical sometimes. If you let, we always let it soak. We'll get like, we have like a little alkalizer you put in the sink with the water.
55:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
55:13 Speaker 01 And it'll pull that off or a, you could do an alkaline or acidic water bath. And you'll see a lot of these oils come up because just because this field of broccoli is organic, it doesn't mean that the field next to it isn't. And those pesticides are going to blow over and get onto the food. So. And once you start to consume more in mass of vegetables, you get more chance to get those chemicals as well and pesticides.
55:35 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
55:35 Speaker 01 We were driving here from Arizona. And you drive through kind of the El Centurio area.
55:40 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
55:40 Speaker 01 We were watching the, uh, which was cool to watch, but you're watching the pesticide planes, the crop dusters.
55:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yep.
55:46 Speaker 01 And I was just thinking, I'm like, oh my God, just all those manmade chemicals and Monsanto and Roundup just being sprayed on all that food. And most people don't know, they take it home and they give it a quick rinse and then they're eating it. That's a big problem.
55:59 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's, I'm glad you highlighted this. So the proper way to wash vegetables and fruits is, like you said, an alkaline bath. So that's like taking the baking soda, basically, and putting it in water, right?
56:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:10 Dr. Darshan Shah? Okay, so water, baking soda. Some people put a little bit of apple cider vinegar in there, which also creates, and I agree with you. I mean, that's, that's key is, even if you're buying organic, is wash your own produce, right?
56:23 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And that's one of those hidden, I guess, a hidden, hidden way that it's getting into the food system is we're not really thinking about that.
56:28 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
56:29 Speaker 01 We just give it a quick rinse and then do that. Just soak it for a couple of minutes.
56:32 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
56:32 Speaker 01 You know, so those salad spinners are good because you put it in there. We put also some salt gets rid of the bugs. And then they'll, they'll rise to the top, give it another rinse and then take, carry on.
56:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, yeah. Great advice, great advice. So we're modified our diet. We've, um, drinking a lot of water, right? Preferably filtered and in glass bottles, of course. Uh, we've changed our, um, habits around our toxin exposure. What else can we do to ensure that our liver is not?
57:00 Speaker 01 Exercise, obviously, is paramount.
57:02 Dr. Darshan Shah? Talk about, let's talk about that. Why?
57:03 Speaker 01 So one of the healthiest things that we can do is, is, is walking. So just walk, getting a good walk in, getting some fresh air, getting the blood moving, cardiovascular health, getting everything kind of pumping and moving. Sedentary lifestyles are huge cause of fatty liver disease. Cause when you're sitting and you're stagnant, I mean, your energy's not moving, right? Your Qi, your prana, your blood flow, everything's just kind of like stagnant. So getting around and moving has a lot to do with it, um, especially with like yoga, um, getting the lymphatic system going, uh, dry brushing, uh, is incredibly good. My wife just got one of those little trampolines.
57:36 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
57:37 Speaker 01 That's really good for the lymphatic system.
57:38 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
57:39 Speaker 01 Really good. And you look a little silly, so it's fun.
57:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
57:41 Speaker 01 To do it as well. But I think exercise is paramount, fresh air, uh, sunshine.
57:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
57:46 Speaker 01 Digital detox.
57:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
57:48 Speaker 01 As well, you know, stress and dopamine, basically addiction and dopamine overdose by being on your phone too much or gamifying too much and stress, that causes a lot of liver damage too. You know, because you're overloading your system.
58:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, stress hormones.
58:01 Speaker 01 I like some of the wearables you could do. Some people like Apple Watches, some people, um, I like Oura Ring.
58:06 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
58:06 Speaker 01 They're all good. As long as you don't become obsessive with them.
58:09 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
58:09 Speaker 01 But what they do do is they allow you to start tracking your sleep, tracking your oxygen level, your stress. And you could also start to say, ooh, maybe I need a little more rest. I need to calm down a little bit. These are all part of, I mean, this is all for healthy lifestyle regardless. These are all things we should all do.
58:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right, absolutely. So, you know, there's a lot of talk around detoxification and, you know, juice cleanses and different cleanses and detox supplements. And I just want to get kind of your, your feedback or your thoughts on cleanses and detoxification as far as taking products.
58:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:44 Dr. Darshan Shah? For certain things like that. What are your thoughts around that?
58:47 Speaker 01 So, so I've been in phyto medicine development for 28 years now.
58:51 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
58:51 Speaker 01 Right. And a lot of it, it's always been around detoxification and body cleansing, liver health. I used to think, which was erroneous, I realize now, which was trying to actively get the body to go into detoxification. And I think, and I've realized that sometimes that can actually be, there's a risk factor to that as well. Putting your body or trying to push or trick your body into detoxification, if it's not ready, can be damaging. And another way that can be really damaging is if you mix the wrong type of fasting with that. Because if your body goes into detoxification, it's very caloric intensive. So it needs lots of fuel to do that. What happens is some people will go into this heavy detox diet or this heavy detox program, and they're not getting the right nutrients or food or calories.
59:36 Speaker 01 And it's like running an engine really fast with no oil. You can actually cause damage, liver damage. By doing that as well. We don't, in Deliverance and the current products that we make and the future of our products, we use more of a passive approach. We give the body what it needs to do its thing. And so we optimize the liver's function. And if the body feels that you're going to detoxification, it will take you into detoxification and do that. I'm not a proponent, even though I used to be, but now that I know more and know more than science and we've evolved in medicine, I think pushing somebody to detoxification has its risks. I think it's better to give the body what it's need and let the body do its thing.
1:00:15 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, yeah, it's so funny because after Christmas and New Year's, a lot of my patients ask me like, I'm gonna go on a detox cleanse juice program that I'm gonna buy and I'm not gonna eat anything except this eight-week program. And exactly what you said, it's actually very unhealthy for them.
1:00:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? And they can cause more problems. So I agree with you. I think, you know, detoxing is better done with avoiding the toxins in the first place and then letting the body do its thing. But there are certain compounds that can help the process, right? Like you're saying. And so I started taking Deliverance, your product, about six months ago, and I love it. Even though my liver scores are normal on my liver scan, I still take it because I feel that day to day, we live in the most toxic environment humans have ever been exposed to. I travel a lot like you do. I'm, you know, just like many people, when you travel a lot and you have a career and you have kids, you are stressed. And so I'm exposed to stress hormones a lot as well. So I use it for maintenance and I'd love to hear from you, because I've done the research
1:01:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? as well, but I'd love to hear from you. How does this product work? What's in it? What are the benefits to Deliverance?
1:01:25 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And a lot of, nature gives us pretty much all the medicines we need. And it's a very basic, always say, if you don't have anything, milk thistle's good, or dandelion's good, artichoke's really good as well. We used to use those in other products. The formulation for Deliverance took 18 years to develop. And it was based off of, and I just learned about this about 15 years ago, eastern medicine, traditional Korean and Chinese medicine. And what I love about it is you've got four, 5,000 years of capia and knowledge about the liver health. And we looked at the body holistically. So this, we came across a formulation that was developed over thousands of years for hepatitis. And making the liver function and repairing it and doing that as well. And we took all that knowledge and then ancient wisdom.
1:02:09 Speaker 01 And we combined that with modern technology.
1:02:11 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
1:02:12 Speaker 01 How, what's happening molecularly, what's happening from bioavailability? How's it being absorbed? How's it going into the bloodstream? How's it being expelled? What happens when these two compounds mix? What happens if you do it in powder versus in liquid? And we did that to develop this product.
1:02:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
1:02:26 Speaker 01 And with Deliverance, it has three pillars that it stands on. One is the mental clarity, which I love. And that is when you take Deliverance, you'll start to feel the mental clarity in minutes. And that'll last about six to eight hours. And that's because we're increasing neurotransmission in the brain.
1:02:42 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh.
1:02:42 Speaker 01 So it's kind of like going from watching regular TV to like 4K.
1:02:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
1:02:46 Speaker 01 In your brain, everything's clearer and crisper and it's more signal. That's basically what makes HGTV or 4K versus is how much signal is going. We're increasing that signal in the brain. We put that in originally to counteract brain fog that fatty liver people have. But we realized that's just on its own, a lot of people love the product for that. Then you combine it with its second pillar, which is its strongest one, which is based off of liver regeneration, liver function and making the liver operate really well. And just as the human body is, you have to look at it holistically or, you know, people ask me, what's the best, what's the key ingredient? Well, there is a one, it's like a symphony.
1:03:22 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
1:03:22 Speaker 01 But a wonderful symphony isn't necessarily the violin or the cello or, or even the conductor. It's everything congruently.
1:03:29 Dr. Darshan Shah? How they work together.
1:03:29 Speaker 01 Synchronization together. So we're working on things from oxygenation in the blood, spleen, bile production, kidney function, how is it affecting your energy, your chi? What's happening with this molecule and this molecule to invigorate this mechanism of action in the body? How are you metabolizing liver fat? So it's increasing your liver's function so that your liver's functioning in its most optimal state. That's what our key is, is we use passive approach to help the body do what it does. And then thirdly, most people in life, besides being dehydrated and a lot of things, are under constant inflammation. And inflammation feeds oxidative stress. And oxidative stress feeds inflammation.
1:04:10 Speaker 01 So we get stuck in this vicious circle that, you know, one's feeding the other and we're in this constant state. So we put in, some of the herbs and plants that are in there, or they're specifically these anti-inflammatories, but also off the charts high with antioxidants to go off the free radicals. Mm-hmm. That's why we do a lot with cancer patients, or repairing alcohol damage, or drug damage, but is getting rid of it. So feeding your body with antioxidants that are bioavailable and that are being absorbed. And, you know, we looked at this thing called the ORAC score, which is like an FDA, US, you know, very kind of a global way to look at is how many antioxidants are in the product. Oh, okay. And that was interesting. We're off the charts, like four hundred to fifty percent higher than lion's mane. And lion's mane's amazing. Hmm. We're much more molecularly complex than Resveratrol.
1:04:55 Speaker 01 But then we took it a step further. We did this assay called Able Rack. And what that is, is that's not just looking at how many antioxidants are in the product, what's happening in the cells post-metabolization to post-consumption. Because, you know, just because you take a lot of nutrients, doesn't mean you're absorbing them. What's happening in the body afterwards? So we actually go very deep in the science to see not only how the formula is constructed, how it's processed, but how it exited, but also what's happening in the body afterwards. So we spend millions and millions of science and studies and clinical observations to further the science, to constantly be innovating. And that's what the product does. And I keep it in a liquid because when you're in a liquid, you have a lot more of the bioenergy
1:05:36 Speaker 01 and the way that the plants deal with each other and the plant essences and the compounds and the molecules and the polyphenols. When you go with the powder, you lose a lot of that. And so we keep it in liquid. We use nanotechnology both in extraction, refinement. One of the key ingredients comes from this type of sea kelp that only grows in one place on the planet. And it has this molecule in it that's just super, super high antioxidant. We have to take a thousand kilos of that. We harvest it down to one kilo, so size of this room, down to basically a block this big. Then we distill that four times. Wow. And we get one gram. So we'll actually go to one part per million to pull that super molecule out to put it here. And that's just one of seventeen ingredients. Yeah. So we're really passionate about.
1:06:22 Speaker 01 Efficacy and we, you know, a lot of supplements, they say, science is this supplement's really good, so you should take it, right? We take it a step further. We actually test you before and after.
1:06:32 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
1:06:32 Speaker 01 I was talking to this great formulator and he said, I put this fantastic formula together and it's gonna do this. I'm like, amazing, how do you know? So, well, he's like, what do you mean? Well, how do you know what it's actually doing when somebody's consumed it? He's like, well, but it, but it does all this.
1:06:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
1:06:46 Speaker 01 We're like, yeah, but what happens afterwards?
1:06:48 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:06:48 Speaker 01 We, we look at the afterwards.
1:06:50 Dr. Darshan Shah? Sure.
1:06:50 Speaker 01 So we're looking at both sides. I wanna see what's happening to your blood, your cells, your liver, your tissue, your skin.
1:06:56 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:06:57 Speaker 01 But you gotta, you wanna track the data to make things more efficacious, cause you know, improving somebody's health and preventing somebody from getting ill is like an incredibly noble, important thing to do. And you better do it with, with love, with passion, with science, with facts, with data.
1:07:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly. And when people would take, say someone comes in with a, with a fiber score of like three.
1:07:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:19 Dr. Darshan Shah? How long, if they take the product as recommended, how long would it take them to kind of reverse that?
1:07:24 Speaker 01 So, the mental clarity thing, I told you, you'll feel right away.
1:07:27 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:07:27 Speaker 01 Which is, I was just with this, you know, I was at the incredible event and the host of the event says, why I love Deliverance is I can feel it right away. Very good supplements you can feel. In the first couple of weeks, you'll start to notice sleep improve, hair skin improves, you know, mental clarity. But then, as soon as three months, we wanna scan you again or run bloods.
1:07:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Uh huh.
1:07:48 Speaker 01 You know, we used to say six months, but I think at three months, we're gonna see so much that we'll then track it. So if somebody's got, let's say, an F2 or more scarring or severe fatty liver disease, it might be two bottles a day, but once we get you to the green, you come down to one bottle a day and you stay there. You never wanna give somebody more of anything than they need.
1:08:06 Dr. Darshan Shah? Hmm, uh huh.
1:08:07 Speaker 01 Um, and we track that. So I would say you'd wanna come back at three months or six months. And then, once you're healthy, stay just once a year. Same thing with cholesterol. We have a lot of clients that are their, we call them statin hesitant.
1:08:18 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yes.
1:08:18 Speaker 01 Which is where they've been told to go on the statins, they don't want to.
1:08:21 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:08:22 Speaker 01 Or they're on statins and they wanna come off.
1:08:24 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:08:24 Speaker 01 And, and once your liver's functioning really well, we had a lot of clients have come off of statins or don't go on. And just by keeping the liver healthy as your baseline, as your most important organ, you don't need as many of the things as well.
1:08:38 Dr. Darshan Shah? So with people that are statin hesitant, you know, but they need to be on a statin or some form of cholesterol lowering, do you suggest taking it once a day, twice a day, three times a day?
1:08:47 Speaker 01 Uh, once to twice a day, depending on it as well. We, and I've done this for myself and I've actually experienced it with Next Health and with, you know, some of the best, if you have a high cholesterol, go get a coronary CT scan.
1:09:00 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, that's what we do, right?
1:09:01 Speaker 01 Get your score, run it through Clearly, and, cause we have so many patients, the doctors that need to be on a statin. We're like, well, how do you know? What will my cholesterol sign?
1:09:08 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
1:09:09 Speaker 01 What's happening with, which is ECR score? What's Clearly saying?
1:09:12 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
1:09:12 Speaker 01 Check that before you do, do that as well, cause you might need a statin.
1:09:15 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
1:09:16 Speaker 01 But I could definitely tell you that the future of medicine, and what should be, is also very bespoke medicine.
1:09:21 Dr. Darshan Shah? Mm-hmm.
1:09:21 Speaker 01 We should do is run a pharmacology DNA test, where they take your DNA and they cross-reference it against all the other known drugs. I have a good buddy that I was with last night, he was on a statin for 16 years, then once he did this test, he realized he wasn't doing anything.
1:09:34 Dr. Darshan Shah? Doesn't do anything, right?
1:09:35 Speaker 01 But now you can look at your DNA, that's the future, right, of medicine?
1:09:37 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely.
1:09:38 Speaker 01 Matching your DNA and your genetics to the compound that will give the effect and the result.
1:09:42 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:09:42 Speaker 01 One size does not fit all with medicine.
1:09:45 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely, you know, it needs to be hyper-personalized, for sure. And that's kind of, like you said, you know, treating something that's just a number, you want to make sure you're actually trying to achieve a specific trackable effect. And so, the calcium score, the liver scan are great ways to track, what is the effect that you're actually having on someone's biology by doing this, by lowering their cholesterol, by whatever you might be doing?
1:10:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, there's both, there's, some people are very left-brained, right? So they're very much, I want to see the data, what am I having in my scores? Some people are very right-brained, and how am I feeling? Some people, both are more important. The ultimate is both. You want to see your data getting better, you want to be feeling better, and as you said earlier, waking up and feeling great is like, I mean, how important is that? Most people run around in life doing everything they can to feel better, whether that's how they dress, or they go to the gym, or they laugh with their friends, or they read a book, or they go to school, like, we're all looking to be happy.
1:10:41 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:10:42 Speaker 01 And if you're waking up feeling good? You're you're already halfway there.
1:10:46 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah, exactly.
1:10:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:47 Dr. Darshan Shah? Exactly. So what's next for you, Siggy? What are you gonna, what's, I know you're, you know, we're doing the liver scans at Nex Health. We're using your product and also lifestyle change. It really changed people's lives by getting their liver health in order. I think it's a massive foundational part of health. And what are you gonna do next with your company? How, where are you taking it?
1:11:11 Speaker 01 Well, trying to make the liver famous, letting people know about it. You know, curating, I think, the best medical and health and practitioners and such as yourself and your clinics to help spread that word by places that are known, liked and trusted. And that they've got that integrity.
1:11:26 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:11:27 Speaker 01 Partnering with those, those people and those organizations to spread that word. Continuing, educating, innovating. There's some charity stuff that we want to do. You know, you go into these Hispanic communities, especially along the border and stuff where maybe 80% of them have fatty liver because they're eating cheap calories. They can't afford this level of healthcare to do it. Doing some outreach programs, we'll cruise up in a, you know, in a sprinter van in a tent and do some scans and try to get people knowledge and direct people, maybe here's some dietary changes you can make. I'm a huge proponent of stem cells, both for, for health, for longevity, for regeneration. Between diagnostics and stem cells, that's really the future of medicine and bespoke it. The common theme is that cirrhosis is irreversible and I say nay to that.
1:12:11 Speaker 01 I think we, in the future, we're already starting to work on protocols and go down the road. I think we'll be able to go in to a cirrhosis patient that was maybe gonna get a transplant. I may not make it. Half the people on the liver transplant lifts don't make it.
1:12:23 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right.
1:12:24 Speaker 01 Because they're too sick and they don't live long enough to do that. Is going in with like ultrasound guided stem cell therapy right into where the fibrosis is to start to regenerate those dead cells, open up those pathways and reverse liver health. For me, that's like really exciting future stuff to do.
1:12:40 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah. That's exciting. Exciting times for sure. Exciting times for sure. Well, I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast. This has been great. Great conversation on liver health. I agree. When you make the liver famous, it needs to be, you know, we talk about the heart all the time and the brain. We talk about the liver.
1:12:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:12:56 Dr. Darshan Shah? Absolutely. Thank you so much. And where can people find you and find Deliverance and the Liver Clinic?
1:13:03 Speaker 01 So, URL is loveyourliver.com, which I love the tag because it's a great name in it. Liverclinic.com is where we do the scanning and then through partners such as Next Health. So, next week, we're going to be training the LA staff. Then we're flying to New York to train the New York staff to get them as part of the protocol. And as, you know, we're London-based, but we're now moving to the US. So, we're, you know, we're going to be expanding. The website's the best for now. Where your providers, healthcare, ask your functional medicine doctor, ask your integrative medicine doctor, write us an email, you know?
1:13:33 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah.
1:13:34 Speaker 01 Happy to help. Get a consult. You know, we're here to help on any level, whether it be just some good and positive advice, all the way up through if we need to hold your hand up through an MRI to a liver specialist.
1:13:44 Dr. Darshan Shah? That's fantastic.
1:13:45 Speaker 01 We have clients that, everything from advice to a transplant, we'll help guide if we can.
1:13:50 Dr. Darshan Shah? Yeah. And I'm really happy to have joined your scientific team.
1:13:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:54 Dr. Darshan Shah? And, you know, I'm so impressed with the level of knowledge on the team and the doctors that you've brought on the team.
1:14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:01 Dr. Darshan Shah? And I think, you know, you have a huge amount of expertise there. And it's great that you're opening that up to people out there that are suffering and don't have answers on their liver. So, thank you for that.
1:14:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. It's beautiful work.
1:14:13 Dr. Darshan Shah? Right. Well, can't wait to have you on again. And thank you so much for joining me today.
1:14:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, thank you very much.
1:14:18 Dr. Darshan Shah? Awesome. Thank you, man.
1:14:19 Speaker 01 Thanks, buddy. Thank you.
1:14:20 Dr. Darshan Shah? Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially If you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best. And it's always important to seek their guidance.
1:15:01 Dr. Darshan Shah? You
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