After reading this I feel so blessed knowing about Dr. Miller's Iaso Tea in that it cleans the liver as well as all the other organs in your body. There are a lot of things in this article that I did not know about the liver.

A major cause of liver dysfunction is a clogged, toxic bowel resulting in constipation. This overworks the liver & causes it to be congested and sluggish...This is why I drink the Iaso Tea!

YOUR AMAZING LIVER

Did you know your liver is so important to a healthy life that if up to 80% of your liver were removed, it would grow back to full size in approximately 3 months?

Although a healthy, normal liver weighs only about 3 pounds, it performs more than 500 chemical functions for your body!

After the heart and lungs, the liver is the most important organ. Your body can function almost normally with as little as 1/6th of your liver. Because the liver is designed in this way, it is usually hard to determine if the liver is damaged until the damage is quite advanced.

Some Major Liver Functions:

-- Making three-quarters of your total cholesterol, which is used to produce hormones and bile salts.
-- Storing as much as 1 liter of blood in times of excess blood volume to be able to supply it in times of blood loss or heavy exercise.
-- Metabolizing up to ½ ounce of alcohol per hour.
-- Making 1 quart of bile per day for fat metabolism and alkalizing acidic toxins.
-- Detoxifying incompletely digested proteins, excess hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc.), drugs, food addiitives, poisons, etc.
-- Converting beta-carotene to Vitamin A.
-- Breaking down and absorbing vitamins A, D, E, and K. (If your liver is dysfunctional, you will not be able to metabolize tthese vitamins, no matter how much you take!)
-- Storing excess vitamin A, B-12, D, K, and iron.
-- Converting ammonia, a byproduct of protein metabolism, into urea for kidney excretion.
-- Filtering out bacteria in the blood from the intestines before it enters general circulation.
-- Synthesizing up to 4 ounces of glucose daily, if needed; for example, during fasting or diabetes.
-- Reducing blood sugar swings up to 65%.

By the way, according to Chinese medicine, the liver works hard to filter blood between 1 to 3 am while we sleep. If the liver is congested, a significant amount of blood may be retained in the liver on arising. Early morning exercises get the blood moving out of the liver into circulation. Symptoms of a congested liver are stiffness, numbness in the fingers or dizziness due to lack of circulation. Stretching and deep breathing exercises in the morning provide great benefit for a weakened liver.

• Your amazing liver - part 2
• Possible Symptoms of Liver Dysfunction:
  
  · Poor digestion
  · Excessive amounts of hormones (The liver deactivates them and is, in fact, the most important organ for hormone regulation.)
  · Increased cholesterol levels
  · Abdominal bloating or tenderness in the liver area
  · Acne, skin rashes, itching, or jaundice (yellow tinge to skin)
  · Constipation
  · Fatigue (low energy)
  · Loss of appetite
  · Bitter or metallic taste in the mouth
  · Split ends (hair)
  · Brittle nails
  · Mood swings (due to large swings in blood sugar)
  · Hemorrhoids or varicose veins (due to liver congestion producing pressure on the veins)
  · Pain in the back between the shoulder blades
  · Inability to digest fats
  · Water retention in the legs
  · Muscle pain when inflating a blood pressure cuff around the calf
  · Gallbladder problems
  · Sleep disorders
  · Heart palpitations or even heart attacks (All the blood to the heart goes through the liver. So, if it's congested the heart may not get as much blood as it needs.)
  · Poor memory
  · Allergies
  · Arthritis
  · Thyroid problems
  · Frequent numbness in the extremities
  · Frequent infection
  · Fainting
  · Night blindness or blurry sight (The Chinese say that the liver is the river into the eyes. Clean and nutrient-rich blood flows into and nourishes the eyes.)
  
  Common Causes of Liver Dysfunction:
  
  I. Diet
  · Fried foods, animal fats, hydrogenated vegetable fat (margarine, etc.), too much vegetable oil, and roasted nuts can congest the liver.
  · BHA (a common food additive) are bad for the liver.
  · B vitamin deficiency can compromise the liver.
  · Too much meat, gluten, or soy protein overworks the liver because the metabolism of protein creates ammonia as a by product, which the liver must convert to urea for excretion by way of the kidneys.
  · Refined sugar decreases the ability of the liver to breakdown excess triglycerides, which causes elevated triglyceride and cholesterol levels.
  · Artificial sweeteners have caused liver damage.
  · Alcohol causes cirrhosis of the liver.
  · Tobacco and caffeine are also detoxified by the liver and can overwork it.
  
  II. Drugs
  · Ferrous sulfate as an iron supplement can damage the liver.
  · Strong medications, cleaning solutions, soaps, deodorants, birth control pills, pesticides, herbicides, food additives, polluted air and water, etc. can overtax the liver and damage it.
  · Cortisone, carbon tetrachloride and tetracycline can all cause liver damage.
  · Medical drugs are another important cause of liver disease.
  
  III. Compromise of other organs
  · Pressure on the nerve from the spinal cord to the liver can cause liver dysfunction.
  · Problems with the other organs of elimination (colon, kidneys, lungs, or skin) can overload the liver by giving it more work to do.
  · A major cause of liver dysfunction is a clogged, toxic bowel resulting in constipation. This overworks the liver causes it to be congested and sluggish.
  
  The liver detoxifies most of the poisons we consume and breathe in daily. The liver reaches a saturation point and then causes symptoms. One person, constantly exposed to toxic chemicals, ate a diet high in fatty foods: corn chips, vegetable oil, peanut butter, and fried foods. He broke out with a skin rash and hemorrhoids. His liver could not handle the chemicals and the fatty foods. After some acupressure and eliminating the oils from his diet, his symptoms cleared up. A few months later, he went back to eating fatty foods and his symptoms returned until he cleaned up his diet again.
  

"Cure is in the prevention, not the treatment"

Over 340 varieties of parasites can live in the human body. Many form large colonies inside the folds within your colon. Others attach themselves to the inner walls of your colon and small intestine.

Blood flukes, liver flukes, lung flukes, and their tiny eggs usually enter the human body by drinking water which contains them. Drinking water can also contain the spore stage (oocysts) of microscopic parasitic protozoa like Giardia and Cryptosporidium, as well as parasitic amoeba.

Some common intestinal worms (called nematodes) are pinworms (also called threadworms), whip worms, hook worms, and roundworms. Tapeworms are a type of flatworm related to flukes. Tiny worm eggs or larvae are often found in the muscle tissue of animals and fish which humans eat as food; while others are transferred to the mouth by fecal-oral transmission, i.e. through contact with dirt or surfaces which have been contaminated with fecal matter containing the worm eggs. Pinworm eggs can be carried to the mouth on fingers, clothing and bedding.

Pin worms often cause a very annoying itch in the anal area, and they are very infectious. The female pin worms lay their eggs at night, coming out through the anus and depositing the eggs on the skin around the anus - and also in pajamas, underwear, and bedsheets. While laying their eggs the worms excrete a substance which creates a strong itching sensation on the skin, so the sleepy victim often scratches the anal area and picks up the eggs on their fingers and under the finger nails, and later transfers those eggs to the mouth - or to the pillows or bedclothes, where they can be transferred through contact to the mouth of another person.

Sometimes the pinworms miss returning through the anus, and will enter and infect the vagina of a woman or young girl.

Roundworms can grow to be 14 inches long, and tapeworms can typically be 1 to 3 feet in length - and some up to 30 feet! These two can be acquired by eating improperly cooked meat which contains their eggs or larvae. The fish tapeworm can grow to a length of 33 feet or more, and it can produce more than a million eggs per day.

Whip worms are a nasty type of roundworm that injects a digestive fluid into the colon tissue, which turns it into a liquid which the worms then feed upon. It literally eats its human host! Fortunately, they are found only in tropical regions, but tourists can be infected while visiting tropical countries. Whip worms are also found in some areas of the southern USA where outdoor toilets are still in use. They are acquired by skin contact with the whip worm larvae which inhabit grass covered ground that has been contaminated with human feces - usually by walking barefoot.

Hook worms are like little vampires which feed on your blood and body tissue. Just one adult hook worm is able to drain one-tenth of a milliliter of blood from its human host per day. That means 1000 of them could cause an infected human to lose a tenth of a liter of blood per day, or a liter in ten days. As part of their life cycle, hookworms travel through the bloodstream and into the lungs, where they can cause symptoms similar to asthma or bronchitis, and then eventually cause severe coughing which gets them expelled into the throat where they can travel down through the stomach and into the small intestine.

Some parasites such as flukes, pork tapeworms, Toxoplasma gondii protozoa, and Candida yeast, travel to other tissues and organs such as the liver, heart, and even the brain.

There is a suspected link between parasites in the brain and certain diseases such as schizophrenia (bipolar disease) and encephalitis.

An infection by parasites in the human body is called human helminthiasis.

The most common helminth (parasite) species are:
Ancylostoma duodenale, Necator americanus, Ascaris lumbricoides, Brugia malayi, Brugia timori, Hymenolepis nana, Onchocerca volvulus, Paragonimus westermani, Schistosoma haematobium, Schistosoma mansoni, Strongyloides stercoralis, Taenia saginata, Taenia solium, Trichuris trichiura, Wuchereria bancrofti.

Some helminths which are found worldwide but are less common include:
Diphyllobothrium latum, Echinococcus granulosus, Echinococcus multilocularis, and Taenia solium.

An estimated 150 million Americans have intestinal parasite infestation, and over 55 million American children have worms. Ascaris Lumbricoides, a large roundworm, is the most common nematode parasite found in humans, infecting an estimated 1.47 billion individuals world-wide.

Five species of parasitic amoebae which are pathogenic to humans are:
Entamoeba histolytica, Naegleria fowleri (the brain-eating amoeba found in warm freshwater lakes in the southern USA), Acanthamoeba, Balamuthia mandrillaris, and Hartmannella.

Where do these human parasites (helminths) live in our bodies?

• · Alimentary tract (digestive system): 197 species
• · Cavities, organs and tissues: 107 species
• · Circulatory system (blood and heart): 21 species
• · Skin and tissues: 56 species