Love Your Liver: Food, Herbs and the Organ That Does It All

My name is Rochelle Rocha I'm a pharmacist at Seasons pharmacy and culinaria and this is my friend Kate Reid who is a natural path and we are in Love the North podcast boost here today We're really excited to be here on love the north once again because we are focusing on health For people who live in northern Ontario because northern Ontario is the most special of places we were just talking about our beautiful sun tans and how we've been throwing ourselves in various lakes and rivers in the region and Comparing them all and absorbing massive amounts of vitamin D vitamin D in the sunlight. Yes Vitamin D. Did you hear about the new movie? That's out. It's called the pharmacy of light spelt of pharmacy FAR MAC why and it's all about how the Sun is so powerful and it sends to earth all of these little energy packets called Photons and the plants bring them up and I always thought about the life force being the microbiome You know that what's that life force of of whole foods? But it turns out that there's some science around that You know They are like packets of light and the chlorophyll of the plants converts that into usable energy for us people and animals and all the other things but Pharmacy of light. Anyways, we picked them up. We were dead. We picked up light It's beautiful. It's summer here in Sudbury. It's been 31 to 34 degrees amazing weather. Yes today Kate yes a little bit about you in naturopathy. Yeah. Well here I am back for my second love the North podcast thank you, thank you, Rochelle and basically, I've been busy as a naturopathic doctor for 25 years here in Sudbury(...) and Prior to that I worked as a psychotherapist at the hospital So I really combined my practice into a holistic mind body spirit approach where we really address the needs of the entire person and how all of those aspects of our health interact together to Create health, you know, I love that because you know, I work as a pharmacist and I and I do own this pharmacy and The pharmacy part is very reactive. It's like reactive medicine Crisis you end up at the merge or the walk-in or at your doctor's office and the medicine is there to help us Okay, we're gonna take some medication and it's going to help manage that illness or maybe cure it if it's an antibiotic Things like that, but I love the space of naturopathy because naturopathy whatever I'm gonna say it both ways(...) Because that's playing the preventive space and the pharmacy I built on Lord Street with my friend Lori is all about playing in that preventive space because we have a pharmacy in a culinary area, which is food Which is the food is medicine and how we can treat ourselves With eating better because we all hear that right? You know, I hear that eat better get more exercise. This is the formula for health(...) Yeah, try and do that in our world. It's a little tricky. That's that's a very challenging thing these days In fact, I think we mentioned this last time the nine longevity factors the blue zones So a bunch of scientists collaborated went around the world and basically went to all the places where people lived to over a hundred and they identified the nine factors that led to Longevity the nine things that all of these communities had in common. So what did what were they they were not complicated not rocket science Health factors at all, right?

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Eating to 80% fullness eating mainly a plant-based diet with some animals

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Good animals good animals a clean animals ones that are hanging out in your backyard eating your clean non pesticide sprayed grass

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And food out of your own garden that you've grown yourself Being active every day meaningfully active so not not necessarily slogging it away at the gym But but engaging in meaningful activities, you know walking down the mountain to see your friend

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Pulling food out of your garden swimming in your swimming hole in your backyard(...) Basking in the Sun whatever whatever is a meaningful movement part of your day(...) a sense of belonging a sense of community(...) Faith Whatever the faith is it didn't matter what the belief system was It just that had a belief system but belief in higher power source God However, you wanted to find that it didn't matter

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What have I forgotten well wine right but wine what it's not about the wine It's about the antioxidants that the wine brings in and here we go talking about food being Vibrant and full of light and here we come full circle back to the light and the the vitality and the Life force that that that light brings in because we are essentially light I mean Einstein knew that you know, we're pocket we're massive collections of photons Even though this is sought this appears to be solid. Yeah, we're actually like we're beings of light and that that is that's established science What's interesting so I've had the fortunate opportunity to visit Europe a few times and visit a lot of churches because you know if you go to Europe you're gonna visit castles and churches It's part of right and I was noticing Do you remember do you remember those pictures of Jesus and Mary and there's like the flaming? Yeah, right. Yeah flaming hearts and Right,(...) and I just came out from a trip to Poland to visit my son and I took on purpose many photographs of the different Images of that life force in the heart One really spectacular memory is of the salt museum and crack out. So this is a salt mine Well, we're gonna talk about all kinds of things here. Why is salt so important? They've been mining it For 800 years and crack out and the miners in those days they asked it was a privileged job actually to be a miner It was very dangerous. It was well paid But they had enough time in their work day to do art And so there are 138 chapels or something like that below ground in in these over 800 Years of mining miles and miles and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of miles of like tunnels(...) one of the most beautiful areas is this Gynormous cavern where they do weddings and things but in the walls They had these beautiful statues and there were two of Mary and Jesus and there are different sort of places But the heart is glowing Anyways, this is what I'm thinking about this life force. I've been thinking a lot I don't know why I've been thinking a lot about this but you know this life force and this what is the life force? You know, how do you explain that? I used to think about well the microbiome is part of our life force because they have a little light in their little bodies and That becomes part of our light force also, but it's interesting to see in art You know the things that we need come from science, but they're also informed by art and culture And all of these other things right you think about that like how many thousands of years ago that they were Depicting those energy fields before they could even measure a quantum field or a photon or a quark or anything like that Now we've we've quantified it. We've measured it We know that what those structures are but they actually depicted it so they knew yeah They knew they never insight they had and there it is and all different kinds of art Yeah So now I I love I love that about visiting and sort of paying attention, right? Like you don't you're not really maybe paying attention in the moment But after when you get home you're digesting what that I learned on that Was(...) very interesting so what life force so today let's get into our topic so I want the topic today to be about our liver Whoo, which where's our liver Kate's on my upper quadrant here we go right upper quadrant right under the rib cage right here Right here, and why would we want to talk about the liver? Well job about the little well is it important well there's there's There's more than one job that the liver performs the main job And this the one that we typically think of is that it's a filtration system or a detoxification system Detoxification being the neutralization of toxins that come into the body through respiration breathing through our skin(...) We consume them we inhale them so all of the all of the entry routes of any exposure

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Will will Ultimately well sometimes not because we were talking about first pass and the pharmacist is going to talk to us about first pass today but but the liver basically takes the blood from the gut and filters it(...) And neutralizes toxins that that we've somehow Now the toxins can come from the outside, but they can also be generated inside of our body as well for example(...) Estrogen I see a lot of women who have estrogen dominance estrogen toxicity Which which you wouldn't think that we would be poisoned by our own estrogen But what's happening in our environment today is that many chemical compounds from our environment act like estrogen? They bind to estrogen receptors and stimulate our body and produce too much estrogen. What does that do it grows things? Yeah, we don't want extra things growing

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And it produces headaches hormonal turbulence mood change all of that so so the liver If it's working well takes that estrogen or the estrogen at compounds compounds from our environment They're acting like estrogen and it conjugates it so it does a chemical reaction on on the on the compound neutralizes it and Passes it through to be eliminated So that's just an example of one job that the liver does in metabolizing hormones And the fact that it metabolizes everything in metabolizes the good stuff too It does because it takes the good stuff in and it's like okay. I'm like the triage unit. Do I need this right away? Yeah, I'm gonna use it right away. I don't need it right now. Let's package it up Can I package it up the way it looks or do I have to do something to it? Right? Yes This part of this how this functions. I gotta package it a certain way and store it somewhere Safely and then when I need it I can pull it out again So the liver it puts things away and it takes things out. It's like a super smart

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So,(...) yeah, that's one

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It's involved in blood sugar metabolism, right glycogen and glucose So the liver stores glycogen which is a storage form of energy and then when our body needs it It spits it out to give us give us energy. That's interesting. So glucose so we all think Oh sugar Diabetes, but listen glucose is the energy of the fuel of the body the fuel of the body It can be used by the brain with no trickery. It doesn't need anything. You just go straight into the brain We need it in the brain. It's gonna just pass that actually goes there first Because your brain is the most important part without this everything else shuts down for this. Maybe well, yes. Yes

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Very very important and into your muscles too Yeah, so that glucose will go straight into your muscles and if you don't have enough glucose like you're sleeping(...) And you still need to run your brain to run all your dreams You need to have that glucose in there to run your dreams And if you don't have sugar because you're not eating while you're sleeping your glivers gonna make some yes You do glucose neogenesis. Yeah, I'm gonna create some new glucose and we can create new glucose from a few different tissues in the body We can take fat stores and we can turn that into glucose And if we don't have enough fat stores, which I have enough fat stores But if you did it it could take it from muscle Yeah, and it could break down amino acids from your muscles. Yeah, and it could turn also that into sugar. So glucose is very very very important now in our diet And Gates and I have a show and it's all about the oasis because you know There's fructose is a sugar and lactose is a mammalian gland. That's your baby formula sugar, right lactose This comes from the mammary gland lactose glucose