Thyroid Function and Liver

I associate many negative health symptoms with low energy. Low energy causes depression, anxiety, reduced cognitive function, and certainly carbohydrate cravings. Adequate thyroid and adrenal function are imperative to turn food into energy. Thyroid T3 hormone increases metabolic rate. It increases the sodium-potassium pump, so more ATP is used. You eat food, and it gets turned into energy. The food you eat gets broken down in the digestive tract and ends up in the liver. The liver is essential to metabolize what your stomach and intestines have digested and to rid your body of toxic substances.Enzymes do this subtraction work, and here is one of the many places low thyroid function can make things go wrong. Enzymes are catalysts for chemical reactions that only work at a specific temperature. Low thyroid function means the body often doesn't reach the temperature needed to make enzymes work. Already, a hypothyroid gut won't have enough hydrochloric acid, digestive enzymes, or bile to break down food. With low thyroid function, intestinal mucus is thinner on the intestinal walls. The villi that do the absorbing to send your macros to the liver are shorter, and there are fewer of them. Imagine what can go wrong in the liver without adequate enzymatic action during phase 1! Plenty of things can prevent enzymes from working— heavy metals, drugs like the antidepressant Prozac, and the antibiotic erythromycin reduce enzyme action in the liver. Still, no enzymes work in a low-temperature environment.

Thyroid hormone, T3, regulates all enzymes, hepatocytes, and liver cells, ensuring they get enough oxygen. If there is a disturbance in thyroid function, there can be up to a 50% decrease in bile flow and an increase in conjugated bilirubin. Bilirubin is a yellowish pigment made during the breakdown of red blood cells. High bilirubin makes skin, eyes, and nails look yellow, which happens in jaundice, hepatitis, and liver cirrhosis. Hypothyroidism can cause all the effects of liver disease just by disrupting the liver's healthy function.

Liver congestion is when the liver doesn't metabolize nutrients or work well at detoxification. Low thyroid function slows down all physiological functions, including liver circulation. The way hypothyroidism alters liver function mimics liver disease. Hepatitis, cirrhosis, alcoholic and nonalcoholic liver disease will cause symptoms such as yellow skin, yellow whites of the eyes, abdominal pain, swelling in the legs and ankles, itchy skin, dark urine, pale-colored stool, chronic fatigue, nausea or vomiting, loss of appetite, and a tendency to bruise easily. Liver steatosis, or fatty liver, is associated with metabolic disease, with the usual metabolic disorders of insulin resistance and hyperglycemia.

If hypothyroidism disturbs liver function, you can get a fatty liver without insulin resistance and hyperglycemia. In addition, autoimmune hepatitis, both hepatitis C and hepatitis B, are associated with low thyroid function. Unfortunately, the first line of treatment is interferon-alpha therapy, which has caused hypothyroidism in up to 10%. It can also cause the production of thyroid antibodies in up to 40% of patients with hepatitis C. People with rheumatoid arthritis have become hypothyroid following interferon beta treatment.

Any inflammatory condition will lead to autoimmunity. Turning that autoimmunity dial—the body's cytokine response to inflammation—high is pouring gasoline on a fire. Hypothyroidism can cause ascites and fluid-filled blisters in abdominal, cardiac, lung, and liver tissue. If you've read my other articles, you will remember that hypothyroidism causes liquid accumulation in almost all tissues. Your liver produces, stores, and metabolizes fat. Fat is crucial for physiological function, so your liver makes it. If you never use it, meaning you use glucose for energy, or if you have low T3, as the T3 hormone regulates how much fat the liver metabolizes, the fat will accumulate in the liver. The liver is supposed to oxidize the fatty acids into LDL and HDL for use around the body. But the fat will sit there, causing fatty liver or hepatic steatosis, gumming up the liver and clogging hepatic pathways, leading to liver congestion. The same goes for the amino acids that started as protein and the glucose that began as a carbohydrate, all sitting there, stuck, unused, turning into fatty liver or Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. NAFLD doesn't cause hypothyroidism. It's the other way around. Hypothyroidism, in this case, causes fatty liver disease. It does the same thing in alcoholic fatty liver disease because excess alcohol reduces thyroid hormones. The higher the TSH, the more liver cell damage.

The liver won't be able to detox, either. If liver function slows down, the liver will eliminate toxins at a reduced rate. You can try shocking your liver with flushes and bitter greens to "jumpstart" the liver, but these may end up causing more inflammation. Isn't that like beating someone while they're down? So, how do you do when you're sick and tired, and your drill instructor comes in to force you out to run in the rain? Thyroid hormones are so vital for liver health that they've even tried using them to regenerate liver tissue. Researchers saw that T3 hormone regenerates liver cells without causing hyperplasia, only stimulating healthy growth. However, too much T3 that the rest of the body doesn't need will cause other problems. You can keep your liver healthy by eating a carnivore diet and being anti-inflammatory. A carnivore diet gives the liver and the thyroid all they need to function optimally without kicking anything, especially the adrenals.