Find The Liver Stressors Causing Your Gut Discomfort

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Welcome back to “Reversing Chronic Gut Conditions.” I’m your host, Sinclair Kennally. And today, we are diving into Day 2, just a super important theme that I want to unpack with you. So, we’ve gathered some of the best experts in the space to help you understand your gut bugs, your digestion, and your immune system. How do all of these issues fit together? What do all of these factors do to affect one another? And how do they drive your digestive conditions? What do you need to know about your digestive system in order to take control over it? And in order to do that, in order for all this to make sense, I really want to delve into a foundational layer of understanding together about something that often gets overlooked in digestive health, and that is the health of your liver and your gallbladder. It’s no secret that I’m often known as the liver lady in the functional medicine space and on functional medicine stages, and I’m happy to share some of these insights because they were so key for my health. Overlooking liver efficiency and liver stagnation and listening to that super old trope in medicine, “Liver is fine. It’s super resilient. It already detoxes. You don’t need to help it.” That actually added several years of suffering to my health journey that I don’t think needed to be there. So, I’m really passionate about you understanding this piece. We’re going to talk just briefly today about liver congestion and gallstones and gallbladder congestion and what they have to do with your digestive issues. So, we often think about, you know, your beautiful digestive tract as a tube, right? That’s what everybody says. It’s a tube. It’s the inside skin for your body where it’s deciding what gets to come in, what has to stay out and exit, and all that’s true.

Digestion starts in the mouth. You know, it works down your esophagus, down into your stomach. We’re talking about the finer points of this today in all of our expert talks. What actually happens at each step of the way? What can go wrong and what you need to know in order to fix it? What happens in the small intestine? What happens in the colon? You know, all the fun stages. And yet what often gets overlooked is that your liver is actually doing the phenomenally heavy part of actually absorbing your foods for you and breaking them down and your bile, which is what your liver makes. It’s this liquid gold detergent. It’s super precious. I call it liquid gold because it’s expensive for your body to make and your body wants to keep recycling and reusing those bile salts. In fact, it will use 95 to 97% of your bile salts again if it gets the chance to because they’re so hard to come by. So bile is made from cholesterol components and distilled down, combined with amino acids, which yeah, you have to be digesting food well enough to absorb these made, and then those combined to create bile salts which are actually solids. They’re not liquid. And then your liver suspends these bile salts in liquid, in very delicate chemistry. And it does not take much to throw off your body. When your body goes, your liver is trying to process your blood. And you know, it’s dealing with different toxins and trying to break those down into different metabolites so they can get excreted out through the bile or through the kidneys. Your bile will come into contact with things like particles of downy detergent or Bounce dryer sheets, or air freshener glade, or you know, that old, you know, secret, or Dove deodorant that you used to use. Now you use the good stuff. No aluminum, but you used to use this old weird stuff and it got mobilized out of your fat and circulated down through the lymphatics into the bloodstream again to your liver. Could flush it out. Oops. Some of those are super synthetic toxins that your liver did not evolve with and doesn’t recognize. And it’s like, okay, let’s deal with that. But oof, the chemistry and the charge of it. Those bile salts drop out of liquid form and then things start to slow down. Your 2000-mile ducts, miles of bile ducts in your liver start to slow down. They get just a little sluggish, just a little, you know bile is supposed to be thin and free-flowing. And just that little bit of slowdown can start to cause so many issues downstream in your digestion. Let’s take a look. 

So I’m going to share my screen, and I know about you, but I love visuals. It can be super helpful. Let’s look at some of the symptoms that this might be applying to you. Okay, here we go. Perfect. So conditions related to liver toxicity and sluggish bile. You will notice right away some of the top ones are digestive in nature, right? Look, Crohn’s colitis, diverticulitis, SIBO. Wait a minute. That’s a lot of the most common issues with our digestive tract. What we’re talking about, and I’m talking right here in this very summit. Some of the symptoms connected to liver congestion, fatigue, feeling sluggish, gas, bloating, indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, slow metabolism, food sensitivities, difficulty digesting fats, histamine sensitivities, excess weight, compromised immune system. Oh, yeah. And all of these other symptoms that are related. You have already been told throughout this summit by other experts and these other related conditions as well, that in fact, these conditions all start in the gut. So if they start in the gut, but they’re actually driven in part by liver stagnation, then we’ve got to become experts at supporting the liver and the gallbladder to catch up. It’s not that we want to override the body. We just want to understand how it works so that you realize your body is making a perfectly logical response to living in a very strange day and age and having maybe a little bit of a backlog or maybe a big backlog. I have to tell you that when I learned the stuff as a practitioner, I was already, you know, I’m a little bit skeptical by nature. And also, remember, I’m kind of a wuss. So when I heard about this and I heard that gallstones can form actually not just in your gallbladder but in your liver, and you can have hundreds, if not thousands of them, I was like, Yeah, right. You know, I was listening to Andreas Moritz speak, he was the gentleman who wrote the amazing Liver Gallbladder Flush.

And, you know, he certainly did a beautiful job of helping people to a whole generation of people to support their livers and gallbladder. But I would argue that his work has a time and a place and that we’re now living in a much more complex day and age just a couple of short decades later. So he said, he asserted that he had released thousands, tens of thousands of stones. And I was like, Yeah, right. You know. And sure enough, lo and behold, if you support your liver and gallbladder, you can start breaking up these cholesterol-based stones that are not actually dense enough to show up in an X-ray, or an ultrasound, or other imaging. Because they’re really just cholesterol surrounding bile salts and toxins. They’re really just sludge that starts to congeal and densify over time. And this is what they look like if you actually empower your liver and gallbladder naturally to let them go. And, you know, we do this in a rapid liver reset in a very specific way so that it’s safe for you. But I want you to get an understanding of what’s under the hood, and they can be all different colors. You’ll see these can be in excess due to an excess of bilirubin and a buildup of that. Your body is going to use what it’s got, whatever’s in the liver and gallbladder, and that’s what gets put in. And that’s why some of them can be every color of green because that can be due to bile. I’m going to show you something gross. So if you have a weak stomach, look away. But for some of you, you really need to see this. So if you’re brave, hang with me. These are gallbladders that have been removed, and these are actually stones. And you can see how on the left here, this is actually the most common presentation of stone that we see, which is cholesterol-based stones. And you can often see them floating in the toilet if you allow your body to release, if you empower your liver and gallbladder to let go safely, then at your first opportunity, your body is going to go, “Great, let’s get some stuff out of the liver. Let’s get some stuff out of the gallbladder.”We don’t want this here anymore. And they can actually be released painlessly and that’s the important piece I want you to understand. 

We hear stones and we think, scary, kidney stones, painful, but gallstones, gall just means bile. And stones is a very loose term for these packets of congestion that are starting to solidify over time. You can see some of these have really been smashed up against each other. And yeah, they even have hard facets like gemstones. And some of them, once they’re dense enough, they will sink to the bottom of the joint like gravel. You’ll never see them. But some of these, especially if you’re doing coffee enemas on a regular basis, wink, wink, you have the ability to release these gently and safely if you have the right protocol in place. So I want you to see this because I want you to have in the background of your mind this understanding that your liver and gallbladder are essential for digestion. You cannot live without them. Yes, you can remove the gallbladder, but the liver is going to have to work hard to keep up with your gallbladder through a catcher’s mitt or your purse for your bile, and it’s supposed to be condensing your brown to be just the right patch and intensity to meet that stomach acid coming down with the bolus of food from the stomach, meeting those pancreatic enzymes and sodium bicarbonate from the pancreas. It’s all supposed to converge together beautifully. So the bile can not just come out with toxins ready to meet that food and say, “Hey, will you take me out with you?” Whereas you travel out into the colon? Can I leave this with you here? That would be so cool. Thanks, man. But it’s also the bile that is there to help emulsify the fats in your food so that you can break down those fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E, K, like we cannot skip these vitamins for our essential health.

Also important are minerals like calcium. This is really important to understand. You can’t absorb your minerals as well, especially ones like calcium if you don’t have properly flowing bile. So you’re going to hear experts today obsess about the digestive tract, and I’m so excited for you to hear that. But I want you to understand it and listen to that with this in the background so that you have this foundational understanding from here on out. Well, wait a minute. Am I taking my liver and gallbladder health into account? Because you’re not going to see these on imaging most likely. Or if you do imaging because you go have a gallbladder attack or something and somebody says, you know what, let’s get an X-ray or let’s do a scan, that’s great. But you’ll only see the stuff that’s dense enough to pick up on that imaging, which might be like a gallstone or five gallstones. We, people, come to us in our practice, in our courses all the time. Oh, yeah, I’m here because I have six gallstones. My girlfriend, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands more, beyond it. I know for me personally, I released over fifteen thousand gallstones before I ever did a liver flush. And it’s because I was super fragile when I was healing from my digestive issues, and I would crash very easily. Michael and I had to design protocols together that mimicked the power of a liver flush without freaking out my body because it simply wasn’t ready for that yet. So I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. Yes, I did count. I am a Virgo. I did keep a tally on my phone.

You know, it’s amazing to see this stuff as proof in the toilet. Like if you can literally point at something, like a parasite or a gallstone floating on the water, and say, “That’s why I don’t feel well,” it’s a very empowering feeling. Because your body knows, as it releases, it can feel stress or something like that’s exiting, like a little anxiety. And then, oh my gosh, I suddenly feel a little bit more like myself. I know for so many of you listening, you’ve had an experience like that or suddenly had just a little tiny breakthrough at some moment. The signal in the system that said, “Oh, I am suddenly just a little bit more myself again.” And that’s what the experience of letting gallstones out is like. And again, it can be painless. So I want you to think about your liver and gallbladder health as you listen to the talks today – all about gut bugs, digestion, and the immune system, and all the things. Because they’re so deeply interconnected, it’s actually impossible to separate them. What else would I want to make sure you understand about today before we move on? Just to really set you up for success. And I think that’s mostly it. I want you to understand bile.

Oh, yeah. If you’ve already had your gallbladder removed due to succumbing to pressure or being in a life-threatening situation, I totally understand. Guess what? Let’s skip to the punchline. You can still absolutely feel your best. You just need to take some proactive steps along the way and learn what those are for your body. But fear not, there are some great best practices available to you. So don’t despair if you’re thinking, “Well, my mom, my aunts, and everybody else have already had their gallbladders removed.” There are reasons for that. We want to explore those root causes and also consider what support the liver needs now that your gallbladder is gone. How can we alleviate stress from there? Because this amazing regenerative organ truly is the master regenerator. It just needs a little assistance in this modern age, dealing with some challenges it didn’t evolve for. That’s all. It’s not mysterious. It’s just a bit more intricate than before. But it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t feel amazing. So let’s dive into bugs, let’s dive into digestion, and let’s dive into the immune system together. And I’ll see you in day two of the expert talks.