If you are here, you or someone you care about, is obese, has or is at risk for liver disease. You won’t care about this topic except as a health issue. This is what you will find here:
• Non-technical explanation of how your body actually works
• How triglycerides work in your body
• Why fats are a critical source of fuel for your cells
• How the liver manages triglycerides
• How the course of fatty liver disease depends on triglycerides
• How the kind of fat you use matters
• Information by a liver patient for liver patients
Frequent medical advice is to change your lifestyle and diet. Generally this is unsuccessful and there are endless marketers trying to sell you products that will fix you. The purpose of this material is to help you understand how your body actually works. If you understand yourself from a bio-chemistry point of view you might have a chance to judge the value of what folks are trying to sell you. Your life really is a bio-chemical process so the smart thing is to have it work as well as it can. Since you are looking for this information, it may be that you haven’t always been the best steward of your body.
This chapter of Let Me Splain You will look at the role that fats play in the body. They are common in the foods that we eat because life is carbon based and fats are simply chains of carbon atoms of various lengths. Carbon is the most chemically flexible atom so your body has evolved to manipulate a wide variety of arrangements of carbon and your liver is central to the process.
Here we will look specifically at the family of fats that we call triglycerides as they are the most important to your well being because they are the building blocks for cells and the carriers of the energy that powers your life. We will explain how the digestion of triglycerides is unusual and how the fatty acids that are the actual fats themselves work in the body. It is also interesting to note that those fatty acids come in many lengths and how they function in the body depends upon the details of what that means chemically and how those details are important to you being able to live.
So for all adventurous souls, come aboard and