Can Cannabis Help with a Fatty Liver?

How Cannabis can Help a Fatty Liver

fatty liver disease and marijuana

No one pays too much attention to their livers, but it is actually like your best friend when it comes to your organs. Not just is it the largest internal organ, but also one of the most important ones. People don´t realize how much abuse the liver suffers. One of the most severe abuses is and excess alcohol consumption. Other abuses are related to drug abuse, even over the countertop ones, and then there are high sugar- and high fatty diets too. Obesity also plays its part.

But what is Fatty Liver Disease?

Another name for it is hepatic steatosis. More than the normal amount of fat builds up and when it becomes too much, there are health risks at stake. The liver is necessary to process nutrients from what you take in and to filter all harmful substances from your blood. When there is too much fat in the liver, the liver gets inflamed and eventually leads to scarring and liver damage. When a person drinks a lot of alcohol, the disease is called alcoholic-fatty-disease, and if they don´t drink it is called non-alcoholic-fatty-liver-disease. Needless to say, any damage to the liver is very hard to reverse and would have a hard impact on the way of living.

The important role the Liver plays

Being the second biggest organ, there is no doubt the liver is super important. Some of the main functions the liver has are to:

Create bile to help with digestion and the breakdown of proteins in the stomach

Acts as a filter to filter toxins from the blood. This includes hormones and external components.

Regulates blood sugar and cholesterol levels

Forms part of the mononuclear phagocyte where Kupffer cells are to help protect the immune system that makes it harder for infections and diseases to attack the body.

How do you know if you have a Fatty Liver?

As is the case with many illnesses, there are not always clear-cut symptoms at the beginning. You might feel a bit tired and some discomfort in the upper-right side of the abdomen. What people don´t know that liver disease is more common than we think and twice as many people die yearly in the US because of that. Even more than diabetes and road accidents together. Symptoms to look out for are when there are liver scarring or cirrhosis are:

Loss of appetite

Weight loss

Tiredness

Weakness

Nosebleeds

Itchy skin

Yellow skin and eyes

Blood vessel clusters under the skin

Abdominal pain and swelling

Swollen legs

Breast enlargements in men

Confusion

When a liver is healthy and slight damages occur, it has the ability to regenerate itself. But when scarring starts to happen, it starts with fibrosis that finally ends up as cirrhosis. When it comes to cirrhosis, the liver is not able to regenerate anymore. In fact, it starts to slowly die and obviously the body too.

How can Cannabis help?

Researchers are only at the beginning to understand the mechanism of how cannabis helps the liver. One thing they believe though, is that liver diseases are partial because of an endocannabinoid deficiency. Many inflammatory conditions share the same thing. A fatty liver has too many triglycerides in the hepatocytes (part of the parenchymal tissue of the liver involved in protein synthesis). Many factors influence this. In the beginning, it is still reversible, but over time it becomes more complicated.

Increasing evidence shows that cannabinoids are very important for the modulation of a fatty liver. The endocannabinoid system has three main systems:

Endocannabinoid – lipid mediators interacting with cannabinoid receptors to produce effects similar to THC. The two main endocannabinoids are anandamide and 2-AG

Endocannabinoid receptors – CB1 and CB2 receptors. CB1 receptors are mostly in the brain and peripheral tissue. CB2 receptors are predominantly in immune and hematopoietic cells.

Endocannabinoid-metabolizing enzymes

Alcohol-related Liver disease

Too much alcohol causes a build-up fatty acid in the liver. The damage causes important liver cells to die. But because the liver can rehabilitate itself, people don´t know when they suffer from this disease. The good news is that consuming cannabis when you drink, helps to combat inflammation by killing the hepatic stellate cells that cause scar tissue.

What happens when it gets to Cirrhosis?

Cirrhosis is very serious, and it takes years of serious abuse to let the river reach this stage. Significant scarring is noticeable and the liver can´t repair itself anymore. The cannabinoid CBD can stop further development of cirrhosis. It will also help to restore healthy cells. It might not be able to repair the liver to its original state, but it would stop the damage from increasing.

Conclusion

Cannabis has a beautiful relationship with the liver. If in doubt, prevention is always better than cure. Start using cannabis in all its glory to strengthen your endocannabinoid system.