What does the liver do? Part 2

What does your liver do?

Your liver has some 500 different functions. Especially important among these is helping to process the food you eat by:

• Aiding digestion
• Extracting nutrients
• Breaking down harmful drugs and poisons, including alcohol

Digestion requires a substance called bile. Bile, a greenish-yellow liquid full of chemicals, is made in the liver, transported in the bile ducts and stored in the gall bladder (a pear-shaped bag about 9cm long). When you eat, the gall bladder releases bile into the gut (the duodenum, part of the small intestine) to help with the absorption of food.

Bile plays a central role in helping the body digest fat. It acts as a detergent, breaking down the fat into very small droplets so it can be absorbed. It also makes it possible for the body to take up the vitamins A, D, E and K from the food passing through the gut.

Once food has been broken down in the small intestine (with the help of bile made in the liver), the nutrients are absorbed and transported back to the liver by the portal vein. The liver then filters the blood, neutralising poisons and processing the nutrients - for example, turning some of them into protein and others into fat.

Courtesty BBC health