What should you know?
This topic is of interest to at least 35% of the population, because so many people have already produced a fatty liver. We have therefore decided to deal with the topic extensively in several parts.
Part 1
Just recently, Ärzte Zeitung reported on a new publication: More and more people have a fatty liver and don’t know it. But what actually is a fatty liver, where does it come from and where does it lead?
The causes
The causes for the development of a fatty liver are actually to be found in our lifestyle. We eat too much, we eat the wrong things, we exercise too little and we drink too much alcohol. That is why even overweight people with a BMI of 28 or more are already at risk of developing a fatty liver. Diabetics very often develop a fatty liver. Alcohol consumption also leads to the development of a fatty liver. From 40 g of pure alcohol per day, you can almost assume that you can be diagnosed with a fatty liver. Is that a lot of alcohol? For example, 1 bottle of beer (1/2 liter) with 5% alcohol has 20 g of pure alcohol. A bottle of red wine (0.75 l, 12% alcohol) has 71 g of pure alcohol. You can calculate your values yourself, they are in any case higher than you would expect. So if you drink two bottles of beer a day, you are already at risk. And two bottles of beer are really not very much. Even a BMI of 28 is not yet obesity, i.e. pathological overweight. Many of us have a BMI of 28.
The development of the disease
You must not think of fatty liver as something static, unchangeable. Fatty liver is only a first step towards really damaging diseases. First of all, fat is stored in the liver, so this is the fatty liver. If you continue to maltreat the liver it swells. This is then another stage, which science calls NASH, and which is called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (the ending -itis always means inflammation, and that is where the swelling comes from). Then follows fibrosis as the next stage, which means that the inflamed areas scar. This is when it becomes really dangerous for the organism. The final stages are necrosis (death of inflamed or scarred cells), cirrhosis and liver cancer, although liver cancer does not necessarily develop in a linear fashion from the previous stages. In the case of liver cirrhosis, it is already a matter of life and death.
Diagnosis
Most of us do not even realize that we have already reached the stage of fatty liver, because the symptoms that occur are normal everyday symptoms such as fatigue, reduced drive, and in very rare cases, pain in the abdomen. Some doctors do not consider fatty liver to be a disease, although official medicine now agrees that it is the first stage of progressive destruction of the liver. You can have certain blood tests, you can use ultrasound or magnetic resonance, you can also have a biopsy, which is a tissue sample taken from the liver.
For most of you, it should be enough to examine your own lifestyle, because then you can easily assess for yourself whether you are at risk of developing a fatty liver. Patients with the so-called metabolic syndrome (= the combination of disturbed carbohydrate metabolism, high blood pressure, a disturbed ratio of lipoproteins in the blood and overweight) have also very often developed a fatty liver as a consequence, as have diabetics.
In Part 2 we cover what to do about it if you’re worried about developing or have already developed a fatty liver.