Love your liver! 19 simple ways to look after this incredible organ, chosen by doctors
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Should you do Dry January? Is any amount of alcohol good for you? And do detoxes work? Experts reveal the tips they live by. Whether or not you have overdone it during the festivities, it is never too late to give your liver some love. Here, doctors share their advice on how to keep the vital organ healthy all year round.
![[Sarah Phillips]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/Sarah-Phillips,-L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“Some of the patients that I look after do Dry January and then on 1 February they go out on a big binge,” says Debbie Shawcross, a professor of hepatology and chronic liver failure at King’s College London and King’s College Hospital. “This is really harmful, because suddenly you’re drinking excessively, causing harm to your liver and undoing all the good of not drinking in January. So while it’s wonderful to give your liver a rest for a month, it is overall a lot better to be drinking sensibly throughout the year than to do things in extremes.”.
![[Xray anterior or front view of human liver 3D rendering illustration]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/43ddfb357b4ae2603efb3d172467a71add476197/0_0_3200_2135/master/3200.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Stephen Ryder, a specialist in hepatology and gastroenterology at Nottingham university hospitals, can see some merit in a January detox: “It’s not a bad thing to do, because it proves social life and everything else can go on without alcohol. And it reduces people’s overall alcohol intake, so that’s a good thing in terms of general health.”.
![[Hands holding a mug of black coffee]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3ea2cea497324197ad1d71114586c62d0c9e8e1f/825_740_4364_3232/master/4364.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“Your liver is a huge factory in your body, with hundreds of production lines that are involved in more than 500 key metabolic processes,” says Shawcross. “When we eat a meal, our food is digested in our guts, then all those nutrients pass directly into the liver for processing. That is when the liver is involved in taking all those different things that we have eaten to different production lines to make lots of things – most importantly, the proteins that are the building blocks of our bodies.”.
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