Day 10 | 12 Body Parts of Christmas
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Download the Redfin app and start searching today. Welcome everybody to another edition, episode, whatever you want to call it, of Dr. Matt and Dr. Mark's 12 Days of Christmas. We are on day 10, which means, drum roll, on...

On the 10th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me 10 functions of the liver. 9 double regions. 8 B vitamins. 7 cervical vertebra. 6 extraocular muscles. 5.

Layers of the skin. Four heart chambers. Three middle ear bones. Two carotid arteries. And a spleen free of malaria. You can't just change it. All right. We are on. We're going insane. That's what we're doing. We are going nuts. Day 10. Day 10.

functions of the liver. There are 10 functions of the liver. Well, there's probably a hundred functions of the liver. We haven't left the studio in 10 days. That's why we're going crazy. I know. In retrospect, we should have just recorded them all back to back instead of waiting to each day, especially the poo corn is really starting to stink. All right. So 10 functions of the liver. Uh,

The reason why... Is that 10? I think there's more. Yeah, there's about 100. You've just chosen 10. Probably 200, yeah. Are these your favourite 10? 10 important. Probably not my favourite. I wouldn't rank them, but I would say that these are 10 very important functions of the liver. That you can't live without. Can't live without. Can't live alone. Wonderful. All right, so we are going crazy. The reason why I chose this was because one of the functions is detoxification. And the liver detoxifies many things. One thing which is important over Christmas...

Now, we don't condone drinking alcohol. Eggnog. And eggnog is probably Matt's favourite drink. That's not big in Australia. I've never had eggnog. No, that's a lie. Is it? I think that when I had housemates, maybe about, I don't know, a decade ago...

that one of our housemates used to make a cinnamon eggnog with rum, and I believe that was very rich and delicious. But again, I do not condone, I don't really drink much. You don't drink. So alcohol isn't a thing for us very much, but it's important because a lot of people drink over Christmas time.

And the liver does the bulk of the detoxification. And so let's talk about 10 functions of the liver and then focus on detoxification. So one, detoxification. Two, bile production. Is that what you're saying? Sorry?

That's all you're explaining? No, I'm going to talk about detoxification. Yeah, I'll come back to it. I just want to say the 10. So yes, detoxification, definitely. Bile production. So the liver makes bile. We spoke about that yesterday. Yesterday. Yes, bile helps emulsify fats, breaks it down, easy for absorption. Beautiful. Three, metabolism. A lot of the metabolic processes of proteins, fats and carbs occur in the liver. Mm-hmm.

Storage of vitamins and minerals. Liver can store a whole range of... Yeah, particularly the fat-soluble vitamins. You like that? Very good. I've got that one. You remembered it. Remembered it from whatever day that was. Helps produce a lot of the blood clotting proteins. So that's very important. So it's important... Fibrinogen and all the... Factors. Yeah, the factors. Yeah. Immune function. So the liver has cook for cells that help...

clean, get rid of any invading pathogens that might be filtered. They're just like a resident macrophage. Yeah. Cholesterol and lipid regulation. Okay. HDLs, LDLs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Hormone metabolism. So the liver actually helps to metabolize testosterone and estrogen and break them down. Okay. So that's important.

Protein synthesis. I did say blood clotting regulation produces the blood clotting proteins, but also a whole range of proteins like albumin, for example. Which is the most common plasma protein. Yes, important for carrying things, but also for maintaining oncotic pressure. Yes. And blood filtration and storage. The liver can store, I think, a quarter of a litre of blood per day.

if it needs to. Similar to the spleen. Yes. So it can act like the spleen. If you have no spleen. In regards to filtration, but also store blood similar to the spleen, which we spoke about on day one. So let's go back to detoxification, shall we? So let's just say, I know you haven't had alcohol for probably quite a while, but let's just say I gave you some eggnog and it has rum in it, delicious cinnamon eggnog.

In that eggnog is ethanol. That's the active alcohol. It's not methanol or anything like that. It is ethanol because they're metabolised differently. Yes. So it's important to highlight that. And that's very topical at the moment because we've had a few –

On the news, particularly in Australia, we had an unfortunate event where a couple of young Australians died from ethanol poisoning. Maybe I'll just touch on that when you explain it. Yeah. But keep going. Yeah, so it is important to know the difference and taste-wise you can't really taste the difference, especially if it's mixed with things. Or visually or smell. That's the danger of it, especially when you're drinking from somebody else's, which like you said you'll talk about later, but alcohol.

If it's ethanol, which is going to be the majority of alcohol drunk, which should be the alcohol that's within the alcohol that people drink, once it gets absorbed very readily through the stomach and also through the intestines, it goes into the bloodstream and then goes to the liver. At the liver, the liver will metabolize ethanol into something called acetyl aldehyde. And it does this using an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. Now...

This is important because in doing so, it turns NAD plus into NADH. Katherine Johnson plotting the path for America's first astronauts. Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf creating the World Wide Web.

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After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. Now, we spoke about, on the eighth day of Christmas, the B vitamins. Riboflavin, right? Two. Yep, we spoke about niacin and riboflavin, and we said that niacin... Three. ...produces NAD+. That's a... When I hear niacin, I always think of nutrient grain. Yeah, because it always says, what's it say? A good source of niacin.

Sort of in that voice too, I think. Now, I said that turning ethanol into acetaldehyde turns NAD plus into NADH. What that means is it fills it up with electrons and protons to carry to the electron transport chain for energy. So metabolising alcohol gives you energy, right? And you can use the alcohol as well for energy, right? Yeah.

Well, alcohol, ethanol, they don't turn into eventually, I think, acetic acid. Yeah, we'll get there. Thanks for... Oops. Keep going. Kicking it in the guts.

So when you turn the NAD plus into NADH, one, you're providing energy, right? But two, one of the signals to tell our body to stop metabolising sugars to use for energy is increased amounts of NADH because it's saying, hey, you've got enough available energy now, right? Because usually we turn the glucose into NADH by stealing the electrons or protons. So the body thinks that, oh, we've done enough energy metabolism, right?

So your sugar starts to accumulate, right? And it starts to funnel metabolic pathways through different pathways. So let's just keep that in mind, right? The second thing that happens is that acetyl aldehyde that you've just made then metabolizes again, still in the liver, to acetate. And this happens through another enzyme called acetyl aldehyde dehydrogenase. This produces even more NADH. Further saying stop glycolysis, stop the Krebs cycle, we've done enough.

This acetate is now released by the liver into the bloodstream and taken up by other tissues like the muscle, which turns it into acetyl-CoA. Okay. Now, acetyl-CoA is part of the Krebs cycle. But if our NADH levels are high, the acetyl-CoA doesn't want to be used in the Krebs cycle. It wants to be funneled into alternate pathways. And one alternate pathway is to turn acetyl-CoA into fatty acids.

And then fatty acids are stored as fat, as triglycerides. So would this be the reason for why you get fatty liver disease? Correct. From drinking alcohol? Exactly. Yes, because you're promoting energy storage. Oh, wow. Okay. And specifically acetyl-CoA into fatty acids. So then why would a person who has a big night out on the turbs... Yeah.

That's an Australianism. Why do they crave certain foods at the end of the night? Does that fit into this somehow? Yeah, absolutely. Because your body has said you've had enough glucose...

Your energy levels are high, right? But the thing is they're not high because of glucose. So your brain is actually getting starved of glucose, which it needs to utilize. The liver has heaps of NADH, which is telling everything to stop. But your brain doesn't have enough glucose. So you then get hungry and says you need more glucose to take in.

So then you go out and you have a kebab and you have some chips and you take more glucose in, but still you can't metabolize it because of the high NADH levels and you store more as fat. Oh, wow. Okay. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

So the big difference between methanol is the same enzymes that you spoke of in the liver, but the only difference is the methanol gets processed by the alcohol dehydrogenase, but instead of acetyl aldehyde, it gets changed into formaldehyde. Oh, right. Then formaldehyde goes through the same enzyme, acetyl aldehyde dehydrogenase, but that turns it into formic acid. Oh, right.

Formic acid is the acid that ants produce when they bite you that causes, I guess you'd say, a site of toxicity. Right. And so when formic acid gets put into your blood, it then becomes quite toxic to a lot of body regions, one being your eye. So that's the risk of going blind with methanol because your, I guess, retina processes the formic acid in a way that becomes a lot of oxidative stress. Your brain will...

Its general function is just inhibited, so they're likely to go into a coma. And then the formic acid, the way it's processed in a lot of organs, causes multi-organ shutdown. And that's unfortunately what leads to the poisoning associated with methanol. Yeah, and that was horrible that it happened. Yeah, horrible. We did one of the ten. We did one of the ten. It's ten functions of the liver. You brought it back to something sad again.

Can we finish on a more positive note out of the 10? Sure. It helps bile produce bile. It's not like the liver has any happy functions, but we need the liver for our survival and therefore it's an important structure of the body and happy day 10 of Christmas.

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