Age, obesity and diabetes are other common causes of liver disease, a potentially fatal condition that often has no symptoms until it's too late.“When we’re advising people about diet, we’re focusing less on fat and more on refined sugars and carbohydrates,” says Dr. Jordan Feld, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, and research director at the Toronto Centre for Liver Disease.
Ignore your liver, and it will break down. Abuse it with toxins, including overconsumption of alcohol or acetaminophen , and it will fail you. And it will do so without you even knowing, until it’s too late. Taking that vital little organ, weighing about a kilogram, for granted can have serious consequences.Wayne Aelick, who lives on the shores of Lake Huron, would never have suspected his liver was in trouble.
“I lived a fairly normal life,” he says. “I never did drink alcohol very much, just once or twice a year at a party.” “We also see fatty liver as a complication of some other medical conditions, including when people lose a lot of weight,” says Dr. Jordan Feld, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, and research director at the“Fatty liver can occur with significant weight change, going up or down,” he says. “We see it in people with anorexia, for example. But the reason it’s a population health problem is that it’s following the obesity epidemic.
Feld says the “fatty” in fatty liver disease is not so much related to fat as it is to sugars and carbohydrates. “When we’re advising people about diet, we’re focusing less on fat and more on refined sugars and carbohydrates and trying to get people to reduce their intake of those.”