My last post on gut health and SIBO crushed it with 5k+ views. I went deep into the science of SIBO and the connection between bacterial overgrowth and a host of issues like autoimmunity, cardiovascular issues, and liver health.
I would be remiss if I didn’t make a post, a series really, on liver health. After suffering from 10 years of chronically high liver enzymes like bilirubin and alkaline phosphatase, identifying liver dysfunction was a major component of my healing.
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After “managing” the pain of Crohn’s with 6 Tylenol a day, being prescribed countless rounds of antibiotics, corticosteroids, every drug under the sun, and just the sheer damage from severe Crohn’s, my liver took quite a beating over the years.
After I lost my colon, my skin began breaking out with a horrible autoimmune condition called Hidradenitis Suppurativa. It took me a lot of trial and error before I really started focusing on healing my liver in order to heal my skin and health as a whole.
Healing my liver moved the needle like nothing else had. One person who changed my healing journey was the legend Dr. Chris Shade of Quicksilver Scientific, who helped me understand what was driving my skin, gut, and inflammatory issues in the first place.
The Liver Is the Missing Piece
The body is a beautiful and incomprehensible creation. Despite modern science, there is so much we can’t understand and never will.
Modern practitioners have boiled the body down to pharmaceutical drugs. Got autoimmune? Take immunosuppressants. Got gut problems? Take antibiotics. Got inflammation? Take corticosteroids.
The focus is rarely on what really matters: the terrain.
The signals we give our body: the light environment that controls our internal clock, the air we breathe (however contaminated or clean), the food and water we consume, and the electrical signals we are exposed to.
Depending on these signals, the body will react favorably or just flat out freak out to the signals it receives. The terrain of the body is what a vast majority of people are missing in their health journeys.
It’s no different from maintaining a garden. The type of soil, light, water, and fertilizers matter. No matter how good your seeds are, if those things aren’t aligned, your crop isn’t going to grow all that well.
This is what root cause health is all about, and toxins play a big role in it.
Curious how your own liver is holding up?
Visit Littlewaycoach.com and take the free root cause quiz with my free AI assistant, ask it anything about bile flow, liver detox, or hidden triggers behind your symptoms.
Modern Life Is an Assault on the Liver
According to the World Health Organization, more than 160 million chemicals are known to humans. Roughly 40,000 to 60,000 of them are in active commerce, and the chemical industry is now the second-largest manufacturing industry on the planet.1
Chemicals that our parents and grandparents were never exposed to.
Irrespective of whether these chemicals are all bad or not, the truth is: our bodies have never been exposed to such an unnatural terrain, and many of us live and breathe with these chemicals daily.
Over time, the liver, which acts as a blood filtration system, among many things, becomes bogged down with these chemicals. Whether they enter through the gut, skin, or lungs, the liver eventually has to process them in one way or another.
A healthy liver processes toxins in three distinct steps:
Phase I — Activation: Through the CYP450 enzymes, toxins are oxidized into a more reactive compound.
Phase II — Conjugation: The highly reactive toxin is attached to a molecule like glutathione, making it water-soluble (most toxins are fat-soluble before this) and transportable out of the cell.
Phase III — Filtration and Excretion: Bile “pushes” the conjugated toxins out of the liver into the gut, where they’re excreted in the stool.
Through these three phases, the body is well equipped to handle toxins, yet paradoxically, an overload of these toxins can actually impair this detoxification process.
Even from birth, some of our livers are taxed, inheriting heavy metals from our mothers, then drinking baby formulas that have tested positive for arsenic and other heavy metals!!23
It is like our liver never gets a break from its job, working overtime on a 24/7 basis. This is what I call LIVER BURNOUT.
Heavy Metals: The Detox Saboteurs
Much of my own experience with heavy metals has shaped how I view them in the context of health. Whether it be autoimmune, cancer, gut health, or cognitive health, heavy metals seem to be a major root cause for a lot of these issues. 4
The Cleveland Clinic notes that mercury, lead, arsenic, and cadmium can seriously damage organs like the liver, and signs of exposure can show up through elevated liver markers: bilirubin, alkaline phosphatase (ALP), ALT, and AST.5
What’s funny is that those were exactly the markers that were off the charts in my own bloodwork for a decade. Years of bloodwork screaming liver damage, but it wasn’t until deeper testing revealed heavy metal toxicity that I connected the two.
For the two autoimmune conditions I dealt with, Crohn’s and Hidradenitis Suppurativa, high liver enzymes are a common occurrence. Could that be from the accumulation of heavy metals?67
I would bet so, and I would bet a decent portion of folks with autoimmune carry a larger heavy metal burden than someone without autoimmune. After all, metals have been linked to these diseases.8
And it’s not that uncommon to accumulate metals; we really accumulate them daily:
Mercury — dental amalgams (”silver” fillings), large fish (tuna, swordfish, king mackerel), some vaccines, broken CFL bulbs
Lead — old paint, old plumbing, contaminated soil, some imported spices, cosmetics, and unfiltered drinking water
Cadmium — cigarette smoke, conventional chocolate, refined grains grown on contaminated soil, and industrial exposure
Arsenic — rice and rice products, well water, conventional poultry, pesticide residues
And when it comes to metals and autoimmunity, glutathione sits pretty high on the totem pole.9
Your liver depends on it for Phase II detox, as it binds to metals, making them water-soluble, and helps control inflammation by scavenging free radicals. Recall, toxin excretion requires the toxin to become MORE reactive in Phase I detox.
Metals like mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic love sulfur-containing thiol molecules (like glutathione). Eventually, these vital molecules get overwhelmed with the metal load and can no longer carry out their functions like Phase II detoxification.1011
Then something called the Fenton reaction takes place, where metals react with hydrogen peroxide in your cells to produce hydroxyl radicals. These are some of the most destructive free radicals: they shred DNA, rip apart cell membranes, and damage proteins in the cell.
Sounds kinda like an epigenetic cascade taking place, i.e., your environment shapes what genes you express (cancers, autoimmunity, or chronic health issues).
An easier way to picture this might be:
Phase I detox makes toxins more unstable and reactive
Reactive metals bind and overwhelm sulfur-based compounds used in Phase II detox
Phase II detox stalls, reactive metals from Phase I have nothing to bind to, and create free radicals
The circle goes round and round, inflaming and damaging the liver every round
A really cool Chinese study looked at heavy metals in 322 participants over three years, with a total of 958 blood draws. They measured chromium, cadmium, vanadium, manganese, and lead, five markers of liver function, and hsCRP (a common inflammatory molecule).12
The conclusion?
Cadmium drove ALT (a liver enzyme that leaks out when liver cells die) up every year, while tanking albumin (a key protein the liver produces).
Manganese pushed globulin up, a sign of chronic immune activation.
Vanadium worsened the albumin-to-globulin ratio, meaning the liver was making less of its “healthy” protein (albumin) while the immune system was pumping out more of its “inflammatory” protein (globulin) at the same time.
hsCRP, the most sensitive marker of systemic inflammation, accounted for nearly 28% of cadmium’s damage to liver enzymes.
In plain English: liver enzymes climbed, liver damage set in, inflammation spiked, and the inflammation then drove even more damage. A truly nasty feedback loop.
Sounds very much like my own autoimmune issues: progressively more intense and more severe inflammation.
Think heavy metals might be part of your story?
They were for me, and I lived a decade with elevated liver enzymes before connecting the dots. I’m giving away a full Heavy Metals + Liver Panel (~$320 value) plus a free 35-min consult to one reader in this series.
Want to dig deeper into your own health? Visit Littlewaycoach.com to learn more about working with me 1-on-1.
How Heavy Metals Block Bile Flow
Bile flow is vitality. If you follow me on X or Substack, a good bit of my posting is talking about bile.
What is bile? It’s a green fluid produced in your liver, which is delivered to the small bowel through bile ducts. Bile ducts connect the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and small bowel together.
Many are starting to pick up on how important bile is, particularly in the gut health space. People recognize that bile is essential for digesting fats and keeping bacteria in the small bowel at bay.
What most people brush over is the fact that bile is the primary route for “pushing” toxins out of the liver and into the gut to be excreted through stool. This is Phase III detox.
Without adequate bile flow, toxins clog the liver and create issues like fibrosis (scarring), fatty liver, and, more severely, cirrhosis and liver failure.
Regarding heavy metals, bile is one of the main ways the body excretes heavy metals, and bile samples in humans have been shown to contain heavy metals.13
Yet because the body respects the laws of thermodynamics and tries to be as energy efficient as possible, bile is usually recycled after dumping into the gut — and 90-95% of heavy metals are reabsorbed via enterohepatic circulation, while only 5-10% makes it out through stool.
This is also why a multi-spectrum binder is CRITICAL in detox — but more on that in Part Two.
This creates yet another oxidative stress loop in the liver. The more damaged the liver becomes, the less efficient it is at all three phases of detox, which slows bile flow even further. A truly vicious cycle.
This is also why gut protocols can often be short-lived if you don’t address the root cause, like heavy metals, as metals have been shown to cause gut dysbiosis.14
Interestingly enough, I knew my bile flow was stagnant from looking at years of high bilirubin. Bilirubin, the breakdown product of hemoglobin from old red blood cells, is processed through bile.
When bile flow is insufficient, bilirubin doesn’t get cleared efficiently and shows up high on labs. It took a heavy metals test to reveal a high mercury load.
Considering this was an issue from day one in my Crohn’s journey, and I really took note of it when my HS flared, my guess would be metal toxicity was a MAJOR root cause of my autoimmune issues.
Stress was also a major contributor to my autoimmune disease, especially when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s. Turns out stress blocks bile flow, as bile is inherently parasympathetic (rest, digest, relax) in nature.
I also had heavy use of pharmaceuticals and Tylenol (6 a day for a year straight), which are known liver stressors.
Point being: my liver was always under stress, and it sure didn’t help my autoimmune situation. This is why I teach clients the importance of liver health in the “hidden triggers” section of my programs.
If the liver is impaired, detox will suffer, inflammation jumps, and gut dysfunction increases, among many other things.
Conclusion
Liver health is vitality. And not enough emphasis has been put on how foundational it is for everything else: gut, skin, hormones, energy, and inflammation.
Something as simple as a comprehensive metabolic panel with liver enzymes can tell you a massive amount about your hidden triggers. Most people walk around with elevated ALT, ALP, GGT, or bilirubin for years without knowing. I did, for a decade.
So I’m doing my first-ever giveaway as part of this Liver & Hidden Triggers series.
The Giveaway
One winner gets a complete liver + heavy metals lab panel (~$320 value from Quest Diagnostics) through Fullscript, plus a free 35-minute consult with me for general health education and guidance.
And even if you don’t win, everyone who joins my Fullscript gets 25% off all supplements, access to discounted lab testing, and the ability to request labs directly through me.
