A Look at the Liver — & Mouth/Body Health

Biological dentists spend an unusually large amount of time thinking about the liver.

So do doctors of functional medicine. Naturopaths. Acupuncturists. If you’ve spent much time with traditional nutrition, you’ve probably noticed the same thing there, too. The liver seems to come up everywhere.

It’s not a coincidence.

Your liver is one of the busiest organs in your body. Every minute of every day, it’s at work — processing nutrients, regulating metabolism, storing vitamins and minerals, producing bile for digestion, helping manage hormones, transforming medications and other compounds, and preparing many of them for elimination.

Almost everything you eat, absorb, build, store, or eliminate passes through the liver in one way or another.

Maybe that’s one reason why animal liver has been prized as a food for thousands of years. Traditional cultures recognized it as one of nature’s most nutrient-dense foods long before anyone understood the biology behind it. Our ancestors may not have known exactly what liver was doing, but they understood that it mattered.

Similarly, while not all healthcare traditions describe liver’s role in the same way, all recognize that this remarkable organ sits at the crossroads of many of the body’s most important processes.

And it matters in biological dentistry for the simple fact that every dental treatment takes place inside a body that’s already working to heal, regulate inflammation, process nutrients, respond to stress, and maintain balance. Every dental decision we make ultimately depends on all of those systems doing their jobs well.

At the same time, we’re always alert to how conditions in the mouth may influence those ongoing processes, just as those processes influence what happens in the mouth. It’s part of why we talk so much about nutrition, inflammation, immune function, and, yes, the liver.

Because the liver occupies such an important place in mouth/body health, it constantly shows up in news stories, social media posts, podcasts, and so on. In fact, you may have noticed one making the rounds recently about green tea. Most of the story focused on how the beverage may support good liver health, with an important caution about highly concentrated green tea extracts found in some supplements, which may behave very differently from ordinary brewed tea.

Green tea, of course, is one of those things that seems to make the health news every few months, with a different benefit highlighted each time. There’s a reason for that — and for why green tea has become one of the most extensively studied beverages in nutrition science.

Part of the answer lies in a family of naturally occurring plant compounds known as polyphenols, particularly a group called catechins. Plants produce these compounds for their own protection, but in people, they’ve attracted attention because of their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

For that same reason, it’s no big surprise that research on green tea addresses so many different parts of the body. Oxidative stress and chronic inflammation are involved in everything from heart disease to metabolic health to liver function. They’re also important factors in gum disease and many of the conditions we see in our office every day.

In other words, researchers aren’t studying green tea because it’s magical. They’re studying it because the processes it may influence are involved in so many aspects of human health.

But even healthy foods and drinks deserve to be understood in context.

For one, tea naturally accumulates fluoride from the soil as it grows. How much depends on the kind of tea, where it was grown, how mature it was at harvest, and how it was processed. While black teas contain much more fluoride than green ones, matcha — made from finely ground tea leaves — contains much more than brewed green tea.

Additionally, the tannins that give tea some of its distinctive character can reduce the absorption of non-heme iron when consumed with meals. While this is seldom an issue for healthy people eating a balanced, nutrient-dense diet, it can create problems for those with low iron levels or iron-deficiency anemia, as well as vegans (who rely solely on non-heme iron).

This is one reason nutrition science can be so challenging. Foods aren’t single chemicals. Our bodies aren’t single-purpose machines. A cup of green tea contains dozens of biologically active compounds, each interacting with different systems in different ways.

Drink it alongside an iron-rich meal, and the tannins may modestly reduce the absorption of non-heme iron. Have it at another time of day, and that particular interaction may matter very little. Add everything else that makes up a normal meal — and a normal life —
and it’s easy to see why nutrition researchers are so careful about drawing conclusions.

But one conclusion can be safely drawn: Whatever we eat or drink, the liver will have something to do with its nutritional fate…which is why so many conversations about integrative, functional health keep coming back to that remarkable organ.

FAQs:

1. What does the liver do?
2. Can liver disease affect my oral health?
3. Why is the liver important for overall health?