The Liver and Hormone Connection

This last week I had the pleasure of sharing some herbal knowledge with a group of young women, being a few years ahead of them myself it got me to thinking what their concerns might be. For teenage girls your looking at skin issues, pms symptoms, stress and anxiety, in other words, your basic hormone issues. Herbalism is very different in that we try to treat the root cause of an issue knowing that treating the symptoms is truly a waste of time as the condition will just continue to persist. So when I look at hormone issues I look at the endocrine system and perhaps slightly less known; the liver. We understand that hormones are produced by various glands, the ovaries, the thyroid and the pituitary but less is understood about the livers role in our hormone functioning.

The liver creates the building blocks for the hormones to be made within their various glands and what I found to be most noteworthy is how we obviously know the liver filters out toxins from our bodies but have you ever considered excess hormones to be toxins? We often think of the things we add to our bodies as being harmful but what if our livers are so overworked that they cannot filter out excess hormones allowing them to reack havoc inside of our bodies. Again we have another reason to be kind to our overworked livers. What an organ! It is in constant battle with toxins from our air, water, food and environment that we so often forget about the invaders from within! If our livers cannot properly filter out those excess hormones we are looking at weight issues, stress, anxiety, skin issues and terrible pms symptoms including but certainly not limited to cramps and mood swings.

So what can we do? We can drink a daily tea that supports our livers functioning, we can add herbal products to help cleanse and repair the liver, we can start our day with a warm glass of lemon water, we can go out and pick a dandelion all the better if you include the root and add it to a tea, feel free to add other more tasty herbs for your enjoyment. Most importanly we can look at our diet and see where we might be adding stress to our liver and where we could ease up and allow our body to find its own way back to balance. It sounds simple and it truly is. Our body wants to be in balance we just need to treat it kindly so that it can find its way. And knowing is half of the battle so lets all cheers our tea and warm lemon waters together and say a big thanks to our Livers! Who knew they also had to deal with our hormones!!!