"the liver’s to-do list is second only to that of the brain and numbers well over 300 items, including systematically reworking the food we eat into usable building blocks for our cells; neutralizing the many potentially harmful substances that we incidentally or deliberately ingest; generating a vast pharmacopoeia of hormones, enzymes, clotting factors and immune molecules; controlling blood chemistry; and really, we’re just getting started...
“Everything you put in your mouth must go through the liver before it does anything useful elsewhere in the body,” Dr. Lok said...
As the master sampler of circulating blood, the liver keeps track of the body’s moment-to-moment energy demands, releasing glucose as needed from its stash of stored glycogen, along with any vitamins, minerals, lipids, amino acids or other micronutrients that might be required.
New research suggests the liver may take a proactive, as well as a reactive, role in the control of appetite and food choice... “It makes sense that the liver could be a nexus of metabolic control,” Dr. Gillum said. “At some level it knows more than the brain does about energy availability, and whether you’re eating too many pears.”
FB: This is a love letter to the liver, which is actually super fascinating and complex "researchers found that in mice, which normally eat at night and sleep during the day, the size of the liver expands by nearly half after dark and then retrenches come daylight. The scientists also determined the cause of the changing dimensions.
"We wanted to know, is it just extra water or glycogen?” Dr. Schibler said. “Because that would be boring."
It wasn’t boring. “The total gemish, the total soup of the liver turns out to be different,” he said. Protein production in mouse hepatocytes rises sharply at night, followed by equivalent protein destruction during the day.""
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