What are the symptoms of Fatty Liver, what foods to avoid for fatty liver and what is the treatment for fatty liver?
What is Fatty Liver?
Fatty Liver Disease is a condition where fat builds up in your liver. It is broken up into two main groups - alcoholic fatty liver disease and non-alcoholic liver disease. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a very common condition in clinical practice. It affects about 20% of people in the world.
What does Fatty Liver do to the body?
The presence of extra fat in the liver can cause chronic irritation of the liver cells and subsequently can cause further liver damage. If it is not treated it can cause liver failure, liver cancer, and eventually the need for a liver transplant.
What causes Fatty Liver?
Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease only happens in people who are heavy drinkers of alcohol. Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) has three common causes:
* being overweight
* patients with diabetes and
* patients with high cholesterol.
Some people with normal body weight can have fatty liver disease.
What are the symptoms of Fatty Liver?
Early on, many patients have no symptoms. However, once scarring and inflammation of the liver happens, people may feel tired or have discomfort in the upper right side of their abdomen.
How is Fatty Liver diagnosed?
Your doctor may suspect that you have Fatty Liver if you get abnormal blood results on liver tests that you had for other reasons.
Imaging modalities can confirm the diagnosis, usually this is done with ultrasound, CT scan, MRI, or fiber scan. Occasionally, patients might need a liver biopsy to work out how much damage has been done to the liver.
What are the treatments for Fatty Liver?
Fatty liver disease in the early stages is completely reversible.
However, there is no specific treatment for fatty liver disease. I advise my patients to control high cholesterol and blood sugars with medication, and to lose weight especially if they are obese. The most important part of treating alcohol-related fatty liver disease is to stop drinking alcohol.
What can happen if you don’t treat Fatty Liver?
Too much fat in the liver can lead to complete scarring of the liver, or what we call sclerosis and subsequently liver failure. These can lead to complications such as liver cancer, and the need for liver transplant.
What foods should you avoid with Fatty Liver?
The most important foods to avoid are foods that are rich in refined sugars, such as:
*bread
*rice
*potatoes
*corn.
Also I recommend that patients eat lean meat and increase the amount of vegetables and salads in their diet.
What about Coffee?
Studies have clearly shown a benefit of drinking coffee for patients who have liver disease. There have been some suggestions that drinking two or three cups of coffee a day will prevent liver cancer, and liver scarring in patients with fatty liver disease.
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