Liver Health Herbs - How Herbalists Support Natural Detox Pathways Without “Cleanses”

Your liver is working every minute to filter toxins, balance hormones, metabolize fats, and support over 500 functions in your body. But here's what most people get wrong: your liver doesn't need a "cleanse" or punishing detox. What it needs is ongoing support through the right herbs at the right time.

In this episode, you'll discover how to think like an herbalist when choosing liver-supporting herbs. Learn why bitter herbs stimulate digestion, how cholagogues and choleretics improve bile flow, and which hepatic herbs protect and regenerate liver cells.

Whether you're dealing with skin issues, digestive struggles, hormonal imbalances, or simply want to support your hardest-working organ, this episode gives you the practical herbal wisdom to nourish your liver.

What you'll learn

• Why the liver works 24/7 and why "cleansing" language misses the point
• The liver's role in fat metabolism, hormones, bile, and blood sugar
• How bitter taste receptors kickstart digestion and bile flow
• The difference between cholagogues vs choleretics
• Key herbal actions for liver support: hepatoprotective and trophorestorative herbs
• Practical ways to use bitters and Milk Thistle seeds daily

If this episode helped you think about liver support differently, come say hi. Message me on Instagram or Facebook at The Herbalist's Path and share what your liver needs this season.

For full show notes, resources, links and transcript: https://www.theherbalistspath.com/blog/liver-health-herbs-natural-support

Ready to go beyond surface level herbalism, and learn to think like an herbalist?
Learn more about the Community Herbalist Certification & Mentorship Program here https://www.theherbalistspath.com/community-herbalist-certification

If you’re ready to learn more about the taking care of your liver, check out  Beyond Detox - Herbs For Liver Support here https://www.theherbalistspath.com/beyond-detox-herbs-for-liver-support 

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Chapters

• 3:27 Rethinking Detox And The Liver
• 5:24 What The Liver Does Daily
• 8:29 Fat Metabolism And Bile Basics
• 12:04 Regeneration And Immune Roles
• 14:50 Bile Flow And Waste Removal
• 18:02 Blood Sugar, Proteins, And Clotting
• 20:44 Choosing Herbs By Action
• 22:34 Bitters: How Taste Triggers Digestion
• 26:54 Cholagogues And Choleretics
• 29:29 Hepatics And Liver Repair
• 32:39 Milk Thistle Deep Dive

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:15

Welcome to the Herbalist Path! If you love learning about the power of plant medicine and how to use it in your life, this show is for you. I'm Mel Mutterspa, clinical herbalist, herbal educator, and your host. In each episode, you're gonna hear me sharing herbal insights and knowledge from my 25 plus years of working with and learning from the plants. Plus, I'm gonna share interviews with some of the most amazing herbalists, educators, farmers, and healers out there, all bringing their herbal wisdom here for you. Really, this show is all about continuing this movement to put an herbalist in every home and a healer in every community. Again, thank you so much for listening and welcome to the herbalist path. Enjoy the show. Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode on the herbalist path. Today's episode, I really want to dive into the liver and what's its whole mission on earth and in your body, and how can you use herbs to best support your liver and why that's so important? Because here we are in the new year at the time of recording this, and this is when everybody's all about the detoxes, right? Anywhere you look, you're getting ads and people like detox, detox, cleanse, cleanse. But I want to slow that conversation down a bit because the liver isn't dirty. You're not dirty. It's not something that you need to cleanse or flush or punish two times a year. Your liver is a living organ that's doing this work every minute of the day all throughout your life. Liver is actually a really, really cool organ and it weighs over three pounds. Wow, that's pretty, pretty heavy. It's the second largest organ in your body next to your skin, and it has over 500 different functions that are there to keep you alive and keep your body functioning in the best way possible. So those are just a few reasons why the liver is so important. And obviously, you know, this is a podcast. We are not going to go over all 500 functions of the liver because I don't think we have like four years to study together right now. But I really wanted to bring this up because so often people only think about the liver when something feels wrong or the beginning of the year when it's time to cleanse and detox. And we want to support it all of the time. And as herbalists, we also usually look to the liver anytime somebody's coming to us with a skin condition, when there's something happening within the digestive system, whether they're dealing with chronic constipation or diarrhea or cramping or IBS or all kinds of things. We're really looking to the liver. And there's a lot of reasons for that, because everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through the liver. Over 75% of all of our toxins, whether they're pharmaceutical drugs, recreational drugs, herbicides, pesticides, whatever you're breathing in through the air, if you're going to the nail salon all the time, that's getting in through the respiratory system. Your liver is filtering all of that stuff. It's even filtering the hormones that we make in our bodies. So you can pretty much bet if it's going on your skin, a lotion, or what have you. So your makeup. Think about what's going in your makeup, whatever you are eating, whatever you are drinking, whatever you are breathing in, your liver is helping make all of the good things, or actually all of that waste, not even the good things, all the bad things get out of your body. So super important, right? We also know that the liver is really in charge of fat metabolism. Really important here. So your liver has a very specific job before anything can leave the body. So all of the fats, the fat-soluble toxins, the fat-soluble hormones, all have to be processed in your liver. The liver chemically changes them down into a water-soluble form. So then the kidneys can do their job to excrete those wastes as well. It's really a beautiful system when you think about it all together. It's it's absolutely incredible. So we have these lipocytes, which are fat cells basically, and their main job is to store energy and store fats in these big old droplets that are really there for energy balance, insulation, they help cushion the organs throughout your body, and they help with hormone production. Not only that, they help to store our fat-soluble vitamins. So think of vitamins like vitamin A, D, E, vitamin K. So when herbalists are thinking about these things and somebody comes to us and says that they found out they're deficient in those vitamins, we're not just immediately thinking, hey, are you eating enough uh kale in your life? Because maybe you need more of those vitamins. But what we're really thinking about is what's going on with your liver. Is your liver able to properly process and store and move these vitamins throughout your body and your blood in the proper way? Right. So that's pretty important to think about when somebody says, hey, I've got this liver issue, or hey, I've got this digestive issue. We're looking to the liver, right? If they're deficient in nutrients, we are looking to the liver all the time. It's such a powerful, powerful organ. I want to also mention, like we talked a little bit about the lipocytes. The liver also has hepatocytes. So hepato, we know we're talking about the liver. And these are cells that are responsible for about 70 to 80% of the work that your liver is doing. So they help to make bile, they help to process all of those nutrients, they help to detoxify all of the chemicals coming into your body through the respiratory tract, through the skin, through your foods and whatnot. And what's really cool about these hepatocytes is they actually regenerate themselves every five months. Like a new cycle of hepatocytes is coming through constantly on a five-month cycle. And the other cool piece about this is our liver, that's that's the liver cells regenerating right there. Our entire liver regenerates itself. You could damage and lose up to 70% of your liver, and it's still going to be able to regenerate itself. That's cool. That is such good news. That means we can do a lot of things to help repair the liver. Another thing to think about here is that the liver plays a key role in our immune function. So some of our key immune cells live in the liver, like our cup for cells. These are macrophages, and they are like little Pac-Man cells. And what they do is go around and they eat all the bad stuff. They eat all of the pathogens. So these are the toxins, these are leftover dead debris and waste, these are viruses and bacteria that might be trying to invade the body and get you get you sick. We also have our natural killer cells that like to hang out in the liver as well. And these are more like little, little punk rock cells I like to think of. One of my teachers, Tammy Sweet, has always put that visualization in my head. And they have basically like these little punk rock mohawk spikes, and they're going around and they're poking holes in all of the bad guys. And then those macrophages, the cupfer cells, can come back through and they can eat all of the things that the natural killer cells, the punk rock cells, have poked holes in. So it's a really cool process and too much to cover inside of this lesson. I really do want to focus on the primary things with the liver and ridding the body of waste since detox is such the thing these days. And one of the primary ways that the liver is able to do this is through the bile, right? I know you've heard about bile. It's that yellow stuff that comes up when you're really sick and maybe you know haven't been able to eat in quite some time, and then you have to vomit and it's icky and it's burns and it feels horrible. But the bile is also really, really important. And you actually produce about a quart of bile a day. Bile is a waste product, but it has this ability to help digest fats. It also helps to carry cholesterol, all of those hormones, your bilirubin, and the other toxins that have been brought through the body to be filtered by the liver. The bile helps to get those, those waste products out of the body. So important, important stuff. Uh, other things, and we'll talk more about the bile and how you can use herbs to improve bile flow and improve the digestion and breakdown of fats and proteins here in just a minute. But I also want to talk about how important the liver is in nutrient metabolism and blood sugar regulation, because we know that the liver stores glucose as glycogen and then it releases when the body needs that energy spike and push, right? We also know that our excessive carbohydrates can be converted into fat. This is why, if you know, people go on those low fat diets, but they're not losing fat or losing weight. It's because they might be taking on too many carbs and that can be converted into fat. Of course, there's many other variables to this picture as well. But we also uh want to know and focus on the fact that the liver makes uh blood proteins. It also makes the blood able to clot. So uh, really important if somebody does get cut or injured and we don't want them to bleed out. We want that blood to do its clotting job. It helps with um vitamin K absorption. We already talked a little bit about that. There is really so much going on with the liver. Again, as I started in this episode, there's over 500 different functions that the liver has. So we really, really need to think about that when we are trying to help somebody with some type of issue within their body. And what I like to think about is like, hey, if the liver has this much responsibility in my body and is so important in breaking down fats and proteins, in regulating my hormones and my blood sugar and my immune function and and and is the key to healthy, radiant-looking skin. How in the heck can I support my liver in doing its job more often? And this is where herbs can come in. But again, they're not going to be, well, I don't know if I said it in this episode, but if you've heard other episodes with me, you know that herbs are not instant fix pills, but we can choose herbs based upon what we know needs to happen in the body once we understand how the body works. So um we dive deeper in the anatomy and physiology and functions of the liver and beyond detox, um, which is all about herbal support for liver health. That is also a part of the community herbalist program. Because it's really important to understand how these different systems and structures work and how they work together to create the entirety, the whole ecosystem that our incredible body is. And that's how we are able to choose herbs in the best way, shape, and form. But before I bore you and like drive you nuts with how many incredible things that the liver does, I want to start talking about different herbal actions and categories you might consider when it comes to choosing herbs for liver function. And I think one of the first ones I love to share with people are bitter herbs. You probably heard me talk about bitter herbs before, but they're really important because, well, one, they have this bitter taste, right? And here in the United States, we hate bitter. We just want sugar, sugar, sugar because it's so addictive and that's what we're given all the time. And yay, sugar, right? But when we start to love or respect that bitter taste, which you might get from something like arugula, um, like dandelion greens, we know that that bitter taste can stimulate appetite when needed. We also know that it stimulates the excretion of our digestive juices from the liver and the pancreas. We know that it is imperative for um that bile production, right? So it's going to help the liver process all of our waste and therefore do the natural detoxification process that it is doing every minute of your life. We also know that it regulates the release of hormones from the pancreas and can do so many incredible things. Now, there are times in life where bitters aren't appropriate. And it is also important to think about those kinds of times. And I don't have an exhaustive list for you, but you can think about times like if there are um kidney stones happening, if there's gallbladder disease, if you're dealing with GERD, you may not want to take those bitters. I would use caution during pregnancy and make sure you're working with your practitioner. And there's there's so much more to talk about here. So do not come to this podcast and think that this is an exhaustive list of contraindications for um herbs and the liver. I just want to give you some guidance and some understanding of the actions that you can choose for the liver. So back to the bitters. What happens when you taste bitter is that it stimulates these um TAS, TAS2R bitter taste receptors on the back of your tongue. And when that happens, it creates this basically a cascade of reactions. It tells the brain to tell the digestive system, hey, we've got food coming in here. We need to start getting ready to release those those digestive juices and start this process. And then those start to get squirted out, the enzymes get squirted out, and this thing called peristalsis begins within the digestive system. So that's like the the smooth muscle tissue makes these waves almost like you would imagine a snake digesting a rabbit or something like that. That is the body's process of churning and breaking down all of our foods and moving them through the intestines and a whole beautiful, beloved process. Okay. Now, bitter herbs. What herbs can you think of? I already mentioned a couple. Dandelion is great. The dandelion greens act as a fabulous bitter. Um, chamomile is another one. I love chamomile so much for all things digestive health, but it definitely has that bitter property to it. If you've ever made a cup of chamomile tea and let it steep for too long, you found the bitter properties of chamomile. I also have good news for you: chocolate, real chocolate. I'm not talking a Hershey's bar here. I'm talking cacao, raw cacao. That is strongly bitter. Coffee, also strongly bitter. Now, when you're adding all your sugar and your creamer, we're definitely taking away those properties for sure. So think about that. Um, hops. Hops are another very potent bitter. There are many, many bitters. Actually, I was just the other day creating more bitters after eating an orange. So you can use the orange peel, mostly the inner white pith of the orange peel is also a bitter. You could make that into a tincture or a vinegar, or I love to do uh orange cacao bitters together. Sometimes I'll make a tincture and like a brandy or something along those lines, and that will be fabulous. And you could take those tinctures or the bitters uh just before you're about to eat andor just after you eat, and it will stimulate digest that digestive process for you and get your body ready to break down all the fats and proteins and get all of the wastes out of your body. Of course, we don't want to put tons of waste in our body, but it does seem to be inevitable in our society. Okay, we also have cholagogs and choleretics, which are pretty big herb nerd words. And we know that colagogs are herbs that actually increase the production of bile in the liver. So when we get cholagogues on board, the liver is like, oh man, let's make some more bile, which you already make about a quart of bile a day, I want to say. I think that's it's a day. Yeah. Um, and then we have our coloretics. And sometimes herbalists will put them both in the same category, but technically, what coloretics do is stimulate the excretion of bile from the gallbladder. So the gallbladder is like, okay, let me squeeze more bile out. Let me squeeze more bile out. And these are going to be really important as general body tonics. They're going to improve that fat digestion process. They can also act as a natural laxative because we're getting that digestive process moving on through the body. Therefore, it's helping the body to naturally cleanse itself and the system entirely. So we're always detoxifying. We are always, quote, cleansing our bodies. And when we choose to use certain herbs in those times, it just improves the process. So we can turn to something like artichoke. Artichoke leaves are a great kolagog or coloretic. The dandelion again. This is where you could use something like burdock root or yellow dock root. Those might be really helpful in these times. Again, as I'm going through all of these things, you know, look into contraindications for any medications you may be on, um, and any other health ailments that you or whoever you're working with may have, because that is very, very important. Um, yeah, okay. So a lot going on with cholagogues and choleradics. There's quite a few that you can choose in that realm. And then I do want to talk about the bigger category of herbs that work on the liver. And these are our hepatics. Remember moments. Ago, I talked about hepatohepatics. That means we're talking about the liver, hepatitis, those kinds of things. So hepatics are herbs that act on the liver in a lot of different ways. That's going to include our bitters, that's going to include our colagogs and coloretics. They come in to help tone and strengthen overall function of the liver. Oftentimes they are going to be the herbs that do stimulate the flow of bile or the production of bile. And they're really essential for overall holistic body health. And there's a few categories of our hepatic herbs. Like we have hepatoprotective, and as it sounds, may protect the liver from damage and disease. We have anti-hepatotoxic. These are going to be herbs that can come in and actually counteract the toxic effects of various toxins in on the liver. So they can help reverse liver damage. Remember how we talked about how the liver restores itself with those hepatocyte cells. These antihepatotoxics are going to be really helpful there, as are our hepatic trophorestoratives. Now, trophorestorative herbs, especially our hepatic ones, are going to really promote the regeneration of those hepatocytes of those liver cells. They help to enhance liver metabolism and they really help in the restoration of overall normal liver structure structure and function. So you can imagine that they're really, really powerful. And as I talk about all these herbs and these herbal actions, one comes to my mind very, very strongly that is in all of these categories of herbal actions we've talked about, and that's milk thistle, silly bulb marianum. You may have heard of it before because it is very, very highly studied. It is rich in this cool compound of three main uh chemicals, silly dianin, silly banin, and uh gosh, silly, I forget. Silly, silly, not silly bum, silly dianin. I don't know. I forget in this moment, but they all come together and create this compound that is commonly used and put into isolation, sillimarin. And we know that silimarin is phenomenal for all of these things to protect the liver, to regenerate the liver, to counteract liver damage from alcohol, pharmaceutical drugs, recreational drugs, uh, coffee, whatever you're breathing in, all of these kinds of things. It can also be really helpful in the case of the toxicity that may come from medications when people are on chemotherapy. It's going to improve the metabolic liver functions. It's going to reduce scarring from chronic hepatitis or alcohol abuse. There is so much that goes on with milk thistle. And we know that the silimarin is mainly within the seeds of milk thistle, especially the outer layer of the seeds is how you can extract that. Um, but when you're working with that whole seed and whole uh plant, plants are really beautiful. Like we as humans want to extract the compound that we know does the most because science says so, right? But these plants are brilliant and really dance together in miraculous ways. That is so important. You can't necessarily get all of the benefits that these brilliant plants have put together when you're just taking the isolated versions of things like sily marine. So I really love eclectic herbs, milk thistle capsules. They do the whole seed and do this freeze-drying process that puts them into the capsule. So you're getting that fresh sily or milk thistle seed. Another way you can use milk thistle that I always thought was cool. Some of my first teachers taught me about is like put your milk thistle seeds in like a pepper grinder and crack them over your salads, over your meals every day. And that's just going to give you that extra liver-loving boost. It's a really, really great way to go. And I actually just did a whole podcast episode on milk thistle over at my other podcast. By the way, do you know I'm doing another podcast? It's Eclectic Herbal Wisdom, and it's in collaboration with Eclectic Herb, which is a company I have known and loved for many, many years. They were founded by a naturopathic physician, Dr. Ed Alstadt, back in 1982 at the Naturopathic College of N U N M, excuse me, National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, is where eclectic started. And they freeze-dried the more majority of their herbs. And they also have some really cool extraction processes for their glycerides and their alcohol tinctures. And anyways, I'm doing a whole nother herbal podcast where we're kind of dancing astroherbalism. We're talking about the history of herbal medicine and the many different benefits. So I did a whole episode on Milk Thistle over there. I will be sure to link to that in the show notes. I will also link to their capsules in the show notes as well because they're really primo and hooray for milk thistle. So there's one other category of herbs that I think is really important when we're thinking about liver health and they're alternative herbs. And truth is, the the verdict is still out on exactly what alternatives do. Like there's no clear line here. We do know that they are known as blood cleansers or blood purifiers, and they help to restore overall health by enhancing enhancing your body's elimination processes, right? Um, this is something I forgot to mention in the beginning in talking about the liver, is like the liver is an elimination pathway. We also have our skin, our respiratory system, our bowels, our bladder, all of those are how we eliminate waste and excrete waste from the body. But all of those things must go through the liver first. And this is why when somebody has a chronic skin condition, we're like, whoa, what's going on with the liver? How are they able to process things? Let's see how we can help them best and address it there. Same thing with digestive issues and so on and so forth. You can't catch my drift there. Um, so this is why alternative herbs can also come in and help to improve the elimination pathways throughout the body. Uh, we know that the alternatives are really going to uh improve blood sugar regulation, they're gonna help with cholesterol metabolism, um balancing blood lipids, supporting hormonal balance and estrogen uh clearance. We know that they're gonna be really helpful in all kinds of chronic liver and digestive issues as well. And some of the ones I love here, again, we're gonna look to burdock. We could probably look to dandelion. I love cleavers for this. So it's almost like prime time and season for a lot of our liver-loving herbs to be popping up. We're mid-January. It's very sunny right now, so I may be optimistic, hoping, oh, I'm ready for spring. Um, but uh spring isn't really here. But when it is here, a lot of these herbs are popping up and ready to help you. I know another thing about our alternative herbs is they can be very helpful when for women, for women that are dealing with all kinds of hormonal imbalances, whether that's PMS, whether it's breast tenderness or menstrual pain or acne, whether we have chronic inflammatory diseases like arthritis or autoimmune disorders or eczema, as I spoke about, chronic skin conditions or psoriasis, things along those lines. So there's a lot to say about the liver. Biggest thing to think about is that it's not necessarily uh what's the perfect herb for this situation, but really starting to think about which herbal actions you need in this particular situation to match with this unique being. Herbs aren't here to just fix the liver. If you are not getting rid of the toxic stuff that you continue to put in your body, these herbs are not going to be able to work as well. That's why this is a holistic healing process. We figure out what's triggering this. How can we eliminate what's triggering this from our lives? And then we bring in the herbs to help support that process and rebuild and nourish the liver and the other elimination pathways. I definitely dive deeper on a lot of these herbs, on these herbal actions, on how the liver works, and we dive deeper into the functionality of it because this is so incredibly important to understand when you are choosing an herb to work with the body, with the liver, right? We're here to create balance or homeostasis or an environment where the liver can function at its best so that your body can function at its best. This is stuff to visit time and time again. Like you might listen to this episode now and completely forget everything, but come back to this episode when you are thinking about liver health. And if you want to dive deeper, we definitely do that in Beyond Detox, herbal uh support for liver health. This does not include the lessons on chronic liver conditions like fatty liver, cirrhosis, things like that. We do a lot more of that inside of the community herbalist certification program, which is where we think about whole system body thinking and put it all together over a year's container to support you in thinking much more strategically like an herbalist on how you can best help another human. So hopefully you got some ideas on why helping your liver is so incredibly important. The herbs are not the instant fix, but they can be incredibly supportive. And if this was helpful for you, I would love to hear about it. Please reach out and shoot me a message at the Herbalist Path on all the social media platforms, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, um what are those other ones? TikTok, YouTube, all of the spaces. I would love, love, love to hear from you. If you want to dive deeper into Beyond Detox, I will certainly pop a link to that in the show notes as well. And until next time, I am so grateful that you took the time to listen to this episode. And I hope you take the time to love your liver more. It's worth it. And have yourself a magnificent day. Bye. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Herbalist Path. If you're loving this journey into herbal medicine, please follow and review the show. It helps more people find their own path with the plants. And if you know someone who could use this kind of support, please share this episode with them. So that way we can keep making herbalism spread like wildflowers. Also, a gentle reminder: nothing shared on this podcast is intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. This is all for educational purposes, and yeah, a little entertainment too. But it is not a substitute for personalized care from a qualified health practitioner. Always do your own research, listen to your body, and when needed, partner with a trusted professional who honors both your intuition and your unique health journey. Until next time, take care, stay curious, and keep walking the herbalist path.