Dr. Ameet Aggarwal ND psychotherapist and author of Feel Good: Easy Steps to Health and Happiness was interviewed by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
The hidden master organ: Why treating your liver is fundamental to anxiety and depression
- Why the liver is the hidden master organ and defining a sluggish liver
- The role of lactate and the liver and how this contributes to anxiety
- How the liver affects thyroid hormones
- Dietary factors that improve the liver and the ones that make it more sluggish
- A form of breathing that massages the liver
- Homeopathics, antioxidants and herbs for a sluggish liver
- The benefits of using a castor oil pack
- The importance of organic psychotherapy, family constellations, de-stressing, meditation, and exercise
Here are some snippets from our interview:
We call the liver the master organ because it’s really responsible for most of the functions in your body, including blood purification, detoxification of drugs and toxins, and also detoxifies the toxins that are produced by your body itself. The liver also creates a lot of enzymes, produces bile, so it’s responsible for a lot of your digestion, hormone production, protein production, and it also helps with blood sugar storage and regulation. Not only that, it helps with immune cell activation and storage of vitamins and iron.
When you have a sluggish liver, less bile is produced and digestion is poor leading to constipation, toxin buildup, inflammation and less absorption of important nutrients. You can then have neurotransmitter deficiencies and be more susceptible to anxiety.
Your liver also controls hormones, so if your liver is imbalanced, you will see a progesterone deficiency and usually estrogen dominance. As you know, Trudy, progesterone deficiency directly affects the function of GABA in your brain, and so with liver qi stagnation, leading to progesterone deficiency, we will see increased levels of anxiety.
Here is the Neuropsychopharmacology paper called Neural pathways underlying lactate-induced panic where they connected high lactate levels to panic attacks. We discussed how sugar, alcohol, caffeine, food sensitivities, low levels of niacin and vitamins B6 may contribute to elevated levels of lactate in the blood.
Here is the paper that addresses the liver-thyroid connection: The relationship between the thyroid gland and the liver. Basically, thyroid hormones are processed by the liver. Some of the conversion of T4 into active T3, which is a thyroid hormone, requires healthy liver function.
Ameet shared this at the end of our interview and I want to share it here because I’m inspired by what Ameet is doing, because I love Africa and Kenya (my husband and I honey-mooned there) and because I’d love to inspire you to get involved and consider a trip to Kenya (why not!):
I actually live at the bottom of Mount Kenya right on the equator, a little town called Nanyuki. My dream was to come back to Kenya after Canada to start mobile clinics for remote communities and supervise students and doctors from around the world, which I started through a program called FIMAFRICA/Foundation for Integrated Medicine in Africa. Basically, we go to remote villages that don’t have medical services and treat them for chronic diseases or acute diseases using naturopathic medicine, mainly homeopathic medicine, which works really well, because a lot of these communities suffer from just a lot of chronic disease but all they’re given is antibiotics or antimalarials, which don’t necessarily treat the root cause of the issue. So, they love homeopathy because a lot of chronic disease is disappearing, and they really notice the difference between the two types of medicine. So it’s my passion, and yeah, I hope to continue doing it for the rest of my life. My aim is hopefully one day to sell a million copies of my book and just do mobile clinics all day.
Watch this short video of Ameet talking about it and then tell me you’re not excited about the idea of going to Africa and getting involved!
If you want to help, check out the FIMAFRICA site above, contact him about going there and volunteering or buy a few copies of his great book Feel Good: Easy Steps to Health and Happiness
Here is a nice video of Ameet giving an overview of Feel Good
And get your free chapters from the Feel Good book (on emotions, better sex and liver health)
If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here www.theAnxietySummit.com