Sarah Wakeman

But it can only regenerate up to a point.

So once you get to a level where you have a lot of scar tissue in your liver, we call that cirrhosis, you sort of reach a point of no return where at that point the liver can't heal itself.

So I sort of think of it like, to use a baking analogy, if you're making muffins or a cake,

You're going along, you're mixing all your ingredients, and you realize before you put things in the oven, like, oh, I forgot the eggs.

You can still add the eggs in and like whisk it all together and it's going to be okay.

If the muffins are baking in the oven and you forgot the eggs, you can't like pour the eggs on top and make the batter the same.

And the liver is sort of like that, that up to a certain degree, you can actually completely repair the effects of things like alcohol or obesity, other things.

But once you pass that point into scar tissue, the liver can't regenerate anymore.

Right.

And so when you think about that graph or just the rising rates of liver disease, the main drivers of liver disease are obesity and two is alcohol.

And so those are the leading causes of liver transplant.

And the thing that is so sad is, I mean, I see this all the time working in the hospital is, first of all, we're seeing younger and younger people coming in and liver failure.

So people in their 20s coming in and fulminant liver failure from alcohol and then dying in the hospital.

And the terrible thing is that they often didn't even know that this was causing a problem in their health.

And by the time they get to the hospital, they're so sick it's too late.

And yet all of that could have been prevented or even repaired if it was caught sooner.

And so that's where I think this education of understanding, like, what really are the health harms of alcohol?

And that we have normalized binge drinking on many occasions, especially in young people, as being totally normal.

And yet there are very serious health consequences.

Yeah.