Liver Health and Hormone Balance: Healing from the Root Cause with Dr. Brian Rodgers

In this episode of the Gutsy Health Podcast, Dr. Rodgers and Juanique Grover unpack the powerful connection between liver health and hormone balance — and why true healing starts far upstream. They explain the "order of healing" (mindset → mitochondria → gut → liver → hormones) and why treating hormone issues without addressing liver health leads to more problems down the line. You'll learn how CIRS impacts mitochondria and hormone production, why the liver is crucial for hormone detoxification, and how sugar, insulin resistance, and gallbladder dysfunction tie into it all. They also break down why traditional lab ranges often miss liver stress, why cholesterol is a key liver marker, and how healing your liver is foundational for restoring energy, brain function, fertility, and overall vitality.

Helpful Links

• Take the Root Cause Quiz to uncover hidden imbalances.
• Explore the Liver Reset Program to deeply support liver health.
• Free Detox Class: https://www.mygutsyhealth.com/detox
• To book with Dr. Rodgers, email frontdesk@provohealth.com

Key Takeaways

• Hormones are a symphony; imbalance creates dysfunction.
• True healing order: mindset → mitochondria → gut → liver → hormones.
• The liver is essential for detoxifying and converting hormones.
• CIRS severely disrupts mitochondrial energy and hormone balance.
• Signs of liver dysfunction: fatigue, mood swings, skin issues, heavy periods, brain fog.
• Proper nutrient absorption is critical for liver and hormone health.
• Cholesterol (made in the liver) is the backbone for hormone production.
• High LDL and insulin resistance often signal liver distress.
• High fructose consumption (especially from processed foods) damages liver function.
• Gallbladder health is critical for fat digestion and hormonal support.
• Post-gallbladder removal: ox bile supplementation is important.
• Healing liver and gut health leads to natural hormone balance — without relying solely on bioidentical hormones.
• Optimal lab ranges (not just "normal") are key for assessing liver and hormone health.

Episode Titles

• The Hormonal Symphony: Finding Balance
• Healing Order: Mindset to Liver Health
• Liver’s Role in Hormonal Harmony
• Cholesterol: The Hormone Precursor
• CIRS: The Hidden Factor in Hormone Health

Chapters

00:00 — The Symphony of Hormones
03:01 — Understanding the Order of Healing
06:10 — The Role of the Liver in Hormone Health
09:02 — Cholesterol, Hormones, and Liver Function
12:06 — CIRS and Its Impact on Hormones
14:56 — Symptoms of Liver and Hormone Dysfunction
17:57 — The Importance of Balance in Hormone Treatment
23:08 — Understanding Liver Enzymes and GGT
26:04 — The Role of Insulin and Cholesterol in Liver Health
30:48 — The Impact of Sugar and Fructose on Liver Function
35:10 — Recognizing Liver Stress and Functionality
37:39 — Gallbladder Health and Its Importance
46:01 — Balancing Hormones for Optimal Health

Love what you're hearing?
If you enjoyed this episode of the Gutsy Health Podcast, please take a moment to rate and review the show! Your feedback helps us reach more people looking for real answers and natural healing solutions. 

Subscribe to stay updated on upcoming episodes — and don't forget to share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Thank you for being part of the Gutsy community!

Transcript

Dr. Brian Rodgers (00:00)
And when the hormones aren't balanced, you're tired, can't sleep, you have no energy. The best way I can describe it is you no longer feel like a woman and you no longer feel like a man. You just don't feel right. The hormones give you a symphony in your life. And if your symphony is out of tune, not playing and not working right, your hormone symphony is off. You just don't feel good.

Juanique (00:30)
Welcome to the Gutsy Health Podcast where science meets soul and healing becomes reality. I'm Juanique Grover, your guide on this transformative journey to reclaiming your health, vitality, and freedom. This season, we're diving deep into the order of healing, starting with mindset and working through the layers of what it truly means to heal. Each episode is designed to empower you with tools, knowledge, and hope so you can become the self-healing advocate you were meant to be. For more resources, free classes, and downloadable quizzes and guides, visit

MyGutsyHealth.com. Let's rewrite the future one step, one insight, and one courageous choice at a time. Now let's get gutsy.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Gutsy Health podcast. I have Dr. Rodgers on the podcast with us again. He is our new DO and medical director over at Provo Health. He's also a CIRS expert. In fact, he's the only physician certified CIRS expert in all of Utah and Idaho. so Dr. Rodgers, you have been creating waves online with your podcasts on CIRS, with your IG lives. A lot of people's minds have just...

completely been blown learning about CIRS. So one, thank you for your expertise. Thank you for educating everyone. A lot of people are feeling hope because they're feeling seen and heard. And a lot of their symptoms are matching CIRS. And they're like, I feel like I have an answer for the first time in years. So thank you.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (01:58)
I'm happy to do it. I'm happy to help these people who have CIRS, who've been suffering for years and haven't been able to get the help they need. I enjoy helping people and getting them better.

Juanique (02:08)
Well, and you're not just a CIRS expert. Like you can deal with Lyme, you deal with autoimmune, Epstein-Barr, like infections, cancer, like hormone imbalance. You're like the hormone king, which is why I actually have you on the podcast today because we are actually talking liver and hormone health. But long story short, if you have a complex case, Dr. Rodgers can help you pow-wow it. He can help you find answers.

in combination with supplements, medications, treatments, protocols, and Provo Health. Like, illness and complexities are like our wheelhouse. That's what we like, eat, brave, and sleep. So, welcome back to the podcast. I'm really, really happy to have you. Listeners, if this is your first podcast that you're listening to, we are talking about the order of healing. So, what is the order of healing? Your body heals in an order.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (02:45)
Absolutely.

Juanique (03:01)
If you don't follow the order, you will feel like you are implementing things in your healing journey that feels like two steps forward, two steps back, two steps forward, two steps back. And what do I mean by that? Well, a lot of people have hormone issues. So they'll take hormones, synthetic hormones, bioidentical hormone, they'll take supplements for hormones, and they'll feel like they're just not, they're getting a little bit better, but they're not quite.

there yet. And so we're going to talk about why that is today. When it comes to the order of healing, hormones are almost dead last in steps of what to fix first. So let's go through the order and please listen to previous podcasts. January, I spoke about step one in the order of healing, which was mindset. February, we spoke about mitochondria, which is step two. March, we spoke about gut health, which is step three. And step four this month is liver health.

And your liver health and your liver function is so intricately connected to hormone health. And that's because your hormones, your adrenal hormone, your cortisol hormone, your sex hormone, they're all packaged biosynthesized, detoxed in your liver. Your liver is, it converts your hormones. It

transfers hormones, it makes them active, it deactivates them, it changes them. The liver is a big, big player when it comes to hormones. However, the reason why liver health is number four, it doesn't come before gut and it doesn't come before mitochondria and it doesn't come before stress is because I want Dr. Rodgers to touch a little bit about this. Let's go to step one, mindset and liver health.

and mindset, liver health and hormone health. Because really this is a liver slash hormone podcast that we're going to be talking about today. But mindset is number one, because when we were saying, I was telling you Dr. Rodgers, I'm like, well, liver is kind of king when it comes to hormones. You were like, tell everybody what you said was king.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (05:07)
brain is king because the hypothalamus and pituitary are the conductors of the hormone system. You have to have them working perfectly or properly in order for the hormones in your body to work. If your brain is not working, other things aren't working. And I want to add something to your order of healing. I agree completely with what you're saying, but if someone has CIRS, they need to start treating their CIRS at the same time.

as they do the mindset. They can do them together, but if they don't do the CIRS, they're not going to maintain their mindset.

Juanique (05:43)
Agreed. Since I've met you, I'm like, my gosh, CIRS has to go right in the beginning there with mindset. It's so important. But your brain is the conductor of your hormones and your liver converts a ton of those hormones, like all of the hormones, right? But what I love, again, why we go back to the order of healing is when you are in sympathetic dominance, when you're in fight or flight all the time, it activates certain brainwave patterns

that tells your hypothalamus and your pituitary to release hormones in a way that is either conducive to healthy hormone releasing or unhealthy hormone releasing. That's why mindset is step one. And you nailed it. You were like, actually, no, your brain is king. And I'm like, well, yeah, you're right. Let's go back to step one of why we need healthy hormones. You were absolutely right. Liver is not king. Your brain is king. So I'm glad you brought that up.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (06:21)
Correct.

Absolutely. Now, as we're talking about liver, I want to add some things here at the beginning. The biggest job of the liver is to detoxify everything. And in doing so, it needs the help of the skin. We lose toxins out of our skin when we sweat. We lose them out of our lungs when we breathe. But we especially lose those toxins as we urinate and defecate. Toxins leave through our kidneys and our bowels the most.

If those things aren't happening correctly, and that's why we talk about the gut before the liver, we need all those things happening properly for the toxins to not be in the liver so that the liver can do its job properly. Obviously, it detoxifies things, it converts things, and we need those things happening properly.

Juanique (07:26)
Another thing too, in line with liver health and the order of healing is, you know, the liver is, it's so metabolically heavy, it requires a ton of energy. So I think something like 21 or 22 % of all your ATP production goes to the liver. Now, to contrast that with something, your muscles use about 22 % of your ATP, like all of your ATP production. So your brain works, your

Dr. Brian Rodgers (07:39)
absolutely in that area.

Juanique (07:54)
your liver works as hard as all of your muscles throughout your body, like, which is insane.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (08:00)
Your brain uses about the same amount and the heart uses just a little less.

Juanique (08:04)
Isn't that crazy? Like your brain, your liver, like your muscles, they are so metabolically heavy, which is why again, step two in the order of healing mitochondria, you need to have your mitochondria working producing energy so it can fire up your liver and have your liver actually work for you. So it can detoxify. So it can biosynthesize hormones. So it can convert estrogen and detox bad estrogen out of your body. But then let's go to step three with gut health.

And I promise you, this is all relevant to hormone health. We're getting the hormones soon, don't worry. But step three is gut health. Your liver requires so much nutrients. So if your gut is not absorbing your nutrients from your food, then your liver is not being fed the nutrients necessary for it to do its job biosynthesizing hormones, detoxing hormones, converting hormones. So if you are eating a meal, but you're not absorbing it because your gut is wrecked,

your liver is going to be wrecked. It's not going to be fed the nutrients necessary for it to detoxify, to biosynthesize, et cetera, et cetera, everything that we've been talking about here. So now we get to liver health, which means let's get a little bit nerdy about hormone health. Dr. Rodgers, let's talk about fat and cholesterol and liver health and hormones. What is the link and why is it important?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (09:29)
First of all, all the cholesterol we eat, we could eat a dozen eggs a day and it's not going to increase our cholesterol. Cholesterol gets broken down in our gut, but cholesterol is made new again in our livers. And so the liver needs to work properly to have the cholesterol, the cholesterol, the precursor to all of our hormones. We get fatty liver when our insulin, which is a hormone, gets out of whack and we have insulin resistance.

that creates fatty liver and that bonds down our liver and it cannot work properly. can also disease our liver with cirrhosis by drinking heavily and other things. Other things can harm that liver. in the liver, the biggest thing it does with our hormones is it detoxifies them. It also can convert hormones that are made elsewhere. For example, our thyroid hormone is the inactive hormone is T4.

Our thioids make T4 and then enzymes in the liver convert that T4 to T3. Our adrenal glands make sex hormones and cortisol. Our ovaries and testes make sex hormones. They can be converted in the liver into what is needed. However, if the liver's not working properly, they're converted into something else that can cause disease or cancer.

Juanique (10:50)
What's interesting is a lot of times people are like, my hormones, because cancer is a big buzzword, right? It's like a certain breast cancer that is estrogen driven. And so people are like, hormones are the blame. But could we really say like, actually, no, it's your liver. Like you need to get your liver on board to stop converting your estrogens into inflammatory estrogens. Is that correct?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (11:15)
That is correct. Estrogen is metabolized. It can go down to one of three pathways, one of which is good. And that's the one we prefer because it doesn't lead to breast cancer. The other two pathways can lead to breast cancer. And so if the liver is not working properly, the metabolism pathways are not working properly. Yeah, that can lead to cancer.

Juanique (11:36)
So really, it's not a hormone issue, it's a liver issue when it comes to cancers, like these types of cancers that are estrogen driven.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (11:43)
It's probably both because estrogen is a hormone and there are estrogen receptors on those tumors that can cause that problem. Absolutely. At the same time, the liver needs to metabolize our hormones into safe metabolites. If they're not metabolized into safe metabolites, those hormones can lead to cancer.

Juanique (12:06)
Interesting. I want to add CIRS in for a second because in the podcast that we did a few weeks ago, you mentioned that if someone has a CIRS gene turned on, then it actually tells their mitochondria to turn one molecule of glucose into 2 ATP versus one molecule of glucose into 36. So, how does CIRS affect liver health and therefore hormone health?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (12:30)
That's correct.

Well, number one, if CIRS has made, taken our mitochondria and turned them from energy plants into battleships, and when CIRS mitochondria are doing that, they're doing exactly what the body is telling it to do. So they're not dysfunctional, they're just doing a different job. But when their mitochondria are only making two units of ATP per unit of glucose, the liver does not have the energy it needs to do to do its job.

to detoxify and metabolize things.

Juanique (13:07)
A lot of people with CIRS just have tanked hormones because their liver just can't do the job.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (13:13)
They have tanked hormones for several reasons. One, their livers can't do the job. Two, their hypothalamus and pituitary glands are messed up. Three, it messes up some of the brain neuropeptides and hormones that mess things up. So yes, that happens.

Juanique (13:30)
So it's like a double whammy. If you have CIRS, you're going to have imbalance in brain, your HP, your hypothalamus, and your pituitary signaling all of your glands to release the right amount of hormone. But now you have disruptive mitochondrial function that is supposed to help with hormone production and conversion, but now you have less mitochondrial function to do that.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (13:54)
Correct, and in addition to that, the liver doesn't have the energy it needs to detoxify things. And if it can't do that, then it's even harder for the hormones to be balanced.

Juanique (14:06)
I can't imagine what it feels like. Well, I can't actually, because I was sick for a very long time. for someone who is dealing with the sluggish liver with improper hormone conversion, potentially CIRS, like what are symptoms of someone that is dealing with CIRS liver hormone dysfunction?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (14:24)
Well, that's a big one.

Juanique (14:26)
They

probably don't feel very good.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (14:29)
Let's take out the CIRS because we've talked about the symptoms of CIRS in other podcasts. We'll talk liver and hormones. Let's separate the liver from the hormones for just a second here. With the liver, you're going to feel sluggish, you're going to feel slow because your toxins are not going to be metabolized and gotten rid of in your body. You're going to feel hot, you're going to feel sick.

Juanique (14:35)
We'll just do liver and hormones.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (14:56)
you feel toxic. You actually say, feel toxic today. When the hormones aren't balanced, you're tired, you can't sleep, you have no energy. The best way I can describe it is you no longer feel like a woman and you no longer feel like a man. You just don't feel right. The hormones give you a symphony in your life. And if your symphony is out of tune, not playing and not working right,

your hormone symphony is off, you just don't feel good.

Juanique (15:31)
I want to add to your list because I actually have the root cause quiz. Yes. Everyone go to my show notes, take the root cause quiz. But in that root cause quiz, some of the questions are like, are you sensitive to chemicals and smells and perfumes? Do you have acne? Are you gaining weight? Are you dealing with fatigue? Do you have mood swings? Are you breaking out in skin rashes, hives, eczema? Like these are all signs of liver dysfunction.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (16:00)
Absolutely.

Juanique (16:01)
You have dark circles under your eyes. Do you have heavy, painful periods? That's another sign of liver toxicity, which then bleeds into hormone imbalance. So take my root cause quiz. See what shows up for you. It's so interesting that you mentioned sex hormones and the symphony. Like if you don't have optimal hormone production and conversion, you don't feel like a woman. You don't feel like a man. You're just existing. How crazy is it that

To have proper brain health, one, have to be regulated and then we have the proper brain wave patterns signaling the HPA axis to work optimally. But when they are signaling the brain properly, we have the sex hormones actually helping improve brain function. Correct? When you have the proper estrogen, testosterone, progesterone ratios and conversions, it actually reignites brain function.

which then sends the proper delta, theta, alpha, beta waves to tell the hypothalamus and the pituitary to signal the sex hormones to release the right amounts of hormones at the right time, which then again reinforces proper brain health. So it's this like really beautiful, you use the word symphony and that's exactly what it is. It's this beautiful symphony of like, I feel good, I feel sexy, I feel...

energize, I feel inspired, I have great hair, skin, nails, I'm going to go work on a project and go save the world, right? Because you have healthy brain patterns enforcing healthy sex hormones and hopefully a healthy liver converting healthy sex hormones to reignite your body's health and energy. But the opposite is true as well. So you're constantly dysregulated, you're constantly stressed, you're feeling anxious, depressed all the time.

you are scattered. You're watching, I have a thing about the news. I'm like, if you're watching the news, you're basically drinking poison for your brain. You're watching the news all the time. You're doom scrolling all the time. And now your brainwave patterns are shifting, which is now telling your hypothalamus and your pituitary to signal your sex organs to release hormones that are imbalanced, that reflect the imbalance in your brain. And now guess what? You're not going to feel good.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (18:11)
Correct.

Juanique (18:26)
You're not going to feel inspired. You're not going to have healthy menses. You're not going to be fertile. You're not going to feel energized. You're not going to feel sexy. And then people come to you, Dr. Rodgers, and they're like, fix it. Give me bi-identical hormones. Fix my problem. Or they go to people like you. Here, this is my soapbox, guys. I'm sorry. They go to people like you, and they want to shortcut their problem. Be like, give me hormone. Fix my problem. And guess what? It doesn't.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (18:55)
It's even worse. There are clinics out there that just do hormones. They have a male clinic, a female clinic, and all they do is hormones. They give too much hormone. They look at the labs and they give too much and they rev these people up. They don't feel right. They don't feel good. They know their symphony is off and they're over treated. If you do not use the word balance as you're treating hormones, you're doing something wrong. And a lot of these clinics

It's not balance. It's give you so much that you feel energy, but you don't feel right.

Juanique (19:29)
Right. Because again, when we're looking at the order of healing, when we're looking at root cause problems, you have a brain imbalance because of your brain wave patterns, your sympathetic dominance. You probably are not having proper mitochondrial function, gut function, and liver function. But now you are buying hormone and you're dumping it in this body that isn't trying to actually convert hormone properly for you. So you get probably a little bit of a bump. But like you said,

they're giving hero doses of hormones to kind of band-aid a festering problem that isn't actually being addressed. We're not getting to the root cause of why your hormones are not functioning well. So we have to pause, look upstream, optimize stress, mitochondria, gut and liver, correct?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (20:21)
Correct. Let me give you an example of balance just so that people understand what we're talking about. Imagine about four or five eight-year-old boys jumping on the trampoline. They can jump all day, not get hurt, have a good time. But you throw one of their fathers on the trampoline with them, he'll shoot them into the neighbor's yard.

Juanique (20:41)
It's so chill.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (20:43)
And it's no longer balanced. And so when someone gives a Keros dose of testosterone or estrogen or progesterone, that's exactly what's happening. It's not balanced. And it's not, the sex hormones don't just balance with each other. They also have balance with adrenal hormones. They balance with thyroid hormones. They balance with insulin. All the hormones of the body, it's a very complex symphony that

everything plays their note in their proper order. so you have to balance all the hormones, not just the sex hormones.

Juanique (21:19)
So I actually have list of everything that goes wrong and it's like capitalized. Everything that goes wrong when the liver is ignored and you push hormones, like bioidentical. So you will congest up your liver and that can backfire in these ways. You will worsen your estrogen dominance. So many people are like, well, I'm doing estrogen, but like my total is going up, but my free is going down. And it's like, well, yeah, of course it is because you haven't fixed everything upstream.

you will increase your toxic load. So you might have a short-term gain, but long-term, there will not be a benefit. There are things that are not working in your favor. It will overwhelm sluggish detox pathways. So if your liver was having a hard time detoxifying your hormone as it is, congratulations, you've given it now a boatload, a truckload of hormones for it to continue to detoxify and get rid of, and you're creating inflammation. Symptoms that persist with thyroid or hormone support.

usually trace back to liver stress because of poor bioflow, fatty liver, toxin burden, and nutrient deficiencies. So you're not lacking hormones. You're lacking proper bioflow. You're having liver issues. You're having toxin overload, and you have nutrient deficiencies. So don't push more hormone. Look at the root cause, which are those things.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (22:42)
Now, I'm gonna push back at you just a little bit. Number one, the liver has to be taken care of. If the liver is not functioning properly, the hormones will not function properly. But if your liver is functioning properly, yes, balancing those hormones properly, making sure those glands are working properly is very, very important. But you're correct, the liver has to work properly first.

Juanique (23:08)
I want to talk labs for a second because a lot of people say, I've gotten my liver enzymes checked and everything looks great. What do you have to say to that? Because I have a lot to say to that.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (23:19)
Number one, what looks great to the primary care physician may not look so great to us. And so the liver enzymes need to be lower than what they suggest. Number two, the primary care office never looks at GGT. They used to do it all the time, but they stopped adding it into the complete metabolic panel. And the GGT is very, very important. They said, only if you're drinking alcohol is GGT important.

Juanique (23:26)
100%.

weird.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (23:48)
No, GGT is important looking at detoxification in the liver. You've got to look at it. And so it's crucial. If you look at the labs, the way primary care looks at them versus the way functional medicine and we look at them, totally different. We look at a different range. We're looking for an optimal range, not a reference range, which is just a population statistic, not a normal range. We want optimal.

How do we get that? Well, one way to do that is to get people who are in optimal health and see where their range is. Not the general population. I don't want to be just general and normal and average. I want to be optimal. And that's we want optimal lamps.

Juanique (24:32)
What really drives me crazy is everything that you said, it's like, well, we want optimal, they don't check GGT, but a huge indicator for healthy or unhealthy liver function to me is cholesterol. And so, what drives me nuts is when someone's cholesterol is off balance and they have high LDL, a doctor will put them on a statin which directly shuts down liver function, correct? And so, like it inhibits the liver to actually produce

the thing that is the backbone to hormone. So you are stopping the liver's function to help optimize hormone production further downstream. And so to me, when I see imbalanced cholesterol, when I see high LDL, I think, hey, your liver is struggling a little bit. There's inflammation going on here. It could be liver, it could be somewhere else, but like we need to address a few things here.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (25:27)
When you see elevated cholesterol, that means that something needs to be done. The number one thing that usually needs to be done is fix insulin. Because insulin is off, cholesterol is typically off. We have to look at our diet and see if we're eating healthy foods or we're eating a bunch of toxins. Toxins will mess up our liver, toxins will cause all of that. And so just doing a statin

without fixing all those other things in our life, our diet, our toxins and such, it's a band-aid. It's not doing what really needs to be done.

Juanique (26:04)
I'm glad you brought up insulin because earlier this week when I was talking about liver health and fruit, I'm going to talk a little bit about that. I want to talk fruit, want to talk insulin and I want to talk hormones. Food that works for one person might not work for another person. So what do mean by that? When I eat fruit, I don't have insulin sensitivity. My body handles higher amounts of sugar really easily compared to the person next to me.

If I eat a banana and the person next to me eats a banana, our bodies are going to metabolize that very, very differently. So the majority of fruit have about 50 % fructose and 50 % glucose. Now, all of your fructose, 100 % of the fructose from fruit is metabolized in the liver. The glucose is absorbed in the bloodstream and it increases your insulin, which then increases your cortisol, which then increases

adrenaline and then that messes up your hormones downstream. But I want to talk specifically fructose metabolism in the liver and what that means for liver health. When you metabolize fructose in your liver, there is a byproduct called methylglyoxal. It is a toxic aldehyde that increases inflammation, oxidative stress, and cellular damage. So, every time we're eating fruit, we're actually producing this.

There is also another enzyme called JNK1, JNK1, which disrupts insulin signaling, fuels fatty liver and metabolic dysfunction, and it triggers inflammation and a cascade, an inflammatory cascade that affects your hormone balance. And so when it comes to eating fruit, when it comes to hormone imbalance, if you have a more severe hormone imbalance than the person next to you, you probably want to be really mindful with fruit and fruit intake.

And I don't want to target fruit because let's talk about high fructose corn syrup. Let's talk about the sodas with high fructose.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (27:57)
Before you go into that, let me talk about fruit a little bit. Okay, you talked about one aspect of fruit. Fruit has a lot of things to it. There's a lot of nutrients and good things to fruit. And then as you're talking about too much fructose can cause problems in the liver. Absolutely. One thing I found interesting with fruit, fruit isn't as bad as like a candy bar, even if it has the same amount of glucose and fructose, because fruit has fiber. I had a patient who was

not a professional bike rider or bike racer, but he was the next step down. He was an amateur. He was skinny. He exercised all the time, but he had pre-diabetes. And the reason he had pre-diabetes is because he had a shake every morning and he put a bunch of fruit in it and he blended it up. And when you blend up the fruit, all the sugars come out, the fructose, the glucose and such, and it caused a big hit on his liver and it causes insulin to spike.

When I took the fruit out of his blender and said, hey, you can eat a little bit of fruit, his blood sugars came down. So that happens. And the other thing you talk about with fruit is the amount. Are you one, two, three pieces of fruit a day or are you eating 20 pieces of fruit a day? The dose of fruit you take will also cause problems in your liver. If you're eating one, two or three, in most cases, you're going to be okay, unless you're insulin resistant.

Juanique (29:13)
Exactly.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (29:25)
You've got to fix that insulin resistance first.

Juanique (29:28)
And I love that you brought that up. Fruit, even though it has its own and I put here an air quote, poison and it's not poison, but it has its own medicine in it too. It has that fiber in, but when you blend it, when you break up that fiber, you're getting rid of it. Your body isn't using that fiber the way that it would if you were chewing it. So now you're getting rid of the medicine and the fruit and you're still getting the vitamins and minerals, but...

Dr. Brian Rodgers (29:47)
Absolutely.

Juanique (29:54)
Again, this is a podcast about liver health, so we're going to stay there. You're not doing your liver any favors. However, eating fruit is a million times better than having candy and processed foods with high fructose corn syrup. This is why we have this epidemic in America because of high fructose corn syrup. Now remember, high fructose corn syrup is just fructose and it's metabolized in the liver. It doesn't have fiber. It doesn't have antioxidants. It doesn't have vitamins and minerals. It's straight up

Dr. Brian Rodgers (30:00)
Absolutely.

Juanique (30:23)
poison for your liver because of these things that I mentioned, the aldehyde and the junk one enzyme that is released and creates this inflammatory cascade that makes you more insulin sensitive. So let's be very careful if you're trying to heal your hormones, if you're trying to heal your liver, we have to become really mindful about where we are getting our sugars from. How much sugar are we ingesting?

Here's some sad statistics. So the average American is only supposed to get about 25 to 26 grams of sugar a day. However, we're getting five times more than that. The average American consumes 100 to 125 grams of sugar a day, which is insane. That is so much sugar. That is so much sugar for your liver to metabolize. And so a lot of people will come to us, Dr. Rodgers, I've heard this all the time. You've probably heard this all the time and they're like,

My methylation is bad. My liver can't detoxify because I have the gene, the MTHFR gene, or I can't detoxify. Your liver can 100 % detoxify. Your liver is not the problem. It's the lifestyle. Correct. Just take a bunch of methylated B vitamins, change your lifestyle.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (31:33)
And just so you know, over half the people have that methylation disorder. And so, as you said, take methylated B vitamins, methylfolate, methyl B12, you take care of the problem. Also the liver has about six different metabolism pathways, methylation, sulfonization, others that all take care of toxins.

Juanique (31:56)
So your liver can do its job. We just need to make some lifestyle shift. Like again, decreasing high fructose corn syrup. If you're eating 10 servings of fruit a day or you're drinking fruit juice or you're doing a juice cleanse, which you shouldn't be doing. If you follow me, you know I hate juice cleanses. You're doing the opposite. You're overburdening your liver. You're throwing a bunch of fructose at your liver without the fiber.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (32:00)
Absolutely.

And I would say it differently. I like what you're saying. I think everything you're saying is true. I just say eliminate refined sugar and processed carbs, and it does the same thing.

Juanique (32:31)
See, you said it so much quicker. Here I'm going on this like tangent. You're like, just eliminate sugar and processed carbs. There you go. Now you're unburdening your liver, which frees up space and bandwidth for it to metabolize hormones. Burden your liver with sugar, which then creates insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance. And now you have a body that can't metabolize and produce and biosynthesize your hormones. And now you're gaining weight. Now you're having brain fog.

Now you're having all kinds of hormonal issues like PMS, skin, hair, nail problems, you name it. So Dr. Rodgers, other than cutting out sugar and processed carbs, refined carbs, how are some other ways to support deliver?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (33:15)
The liver is hurt and slowed down when we give toxins to it. So we need to eliminate those toxins. For example, alcohol, nicotine use, those are obvious toxins. Then we have other toxins in our lives, glyphosate, all kinds of other types of pesticides, BPAs, plastics, all kinds of things, estrogen-like chemicals. We wanna detoxify them in our lives.

Our bodies are meant to detoxify. Our livers are meant to detoxify. We need to assist them. Number one, try and keep those toxins away from us. We cannot keep all the toxins away. That's not possible, but we can reduce the amount that we run into. We can do detoxes. There's an Epsom salt bath as a detox. We can make sure we're sweating properly, we're breathing properly.

our bowels and bladders are working properly, then we can go into some detoxes that are supplement-wise and do those types of things if we need to. We could do those types of detoxes as our toxin load increases. And then if our toxin load increases even more, then we can do some medical detoxes with some heavier supplements. We can do some prescriptions like EDTA,

DMSA and other types of detoxins depending on the person. So the best thing we can do for our liver is avoid and eliminate toxins. Second thing is we can make sure our livers can work properly. We don't take on too much sugar. We want our insulin to be working properly. Our insulin is not working properly. Our livers are not working properly. We fix these things, our livers start working properly.

Juanique (35:10)
I want to go back just a smidge because I just had a thought. When we were talking about blood work, like how can we see stressors in your liver? And people would say, well, my liver enzymes look fine. To me, it's obvious that everything's not fine when you look at cholesterol, but insulin is another indicator. If your insulin is like too high, your liver is probably struggling. Like this is like phase one of liver stress. I always describe when you start to see liver enzymes elevated,

That means that your liver went from not functioning well to now it's not functioning well and it's damaged. So you are years down the line of liver dysfunction.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (35:49)
Correct. Now when I was in medical school, they said, hey, don't worry about liver enzymes until they're twice high normal. Yeah, exactly. Which is not true. Don't worry about GGT until it's really, really high. We look at those, we want them to be much lower than that. If you don't have them lower than that, your liver's not working.

Juanique (35:57)
What?

It's like, don't worry about the liver until it's like end stage and you need a liver transplant.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (36:16)
Exactly.

Not quite that bad, but yes, it's along those lines. They do the same thing with diabetes. If you're fasting blood sugar is under 125, no big deal. But if it hits 126, we got to do everything to fix your diabetes. Yeah. It's just a weird form of thinking.

Juanique (36:34)
It's so crazy. We've been talking all about the liver because it's like the MVP, but we're not talking about gallbladder. Let's do a quick recap on gallbladder health if you don't mind. We know that again, your liver creates bile that helps break down fat, but the gallbladder is kind of like the storage sack that waits for your meal to come and then like squirts the bile onto the food. When people are having sluggish bile or gallbladder problems,

What are some things that people can do to help support that? Or if someone has removed their gob letter, what should people be aware of and do?

Dr. Brian Rodgers (37:10)
Okay, number one, the bile that is secreted by the gallbladder helps us digest our foods. Also in the bile is all the toxins that the liver is eliminating. And so if we have more toxins, our gallbladder is not gonna work properly. If we have more toxins, we're gonna develop stones. And so we really wanna reduce the amount of toxins that we have to help our liver and our gallbladder work properly.

Now, when we have that big squeeze of bile from our gallbladder, when we eat, the food absorbs that bile and takes care of it. When we don't have our gallbladder there, we have a constant stream of bile in our gut, whether there's food there or not. A lot of times that can cause diarrhea. In time, our bodies usually adjust, but some people have diarrhea their whole life after their gallbladder is out.

Some things we can do is take ox bile. often helps. Sometimes it can dissolve those stones. That's the most common thing I use to help the gallbladder. There's some supplements out there and some herbs and nutrients that can also help.

Juanique (38:22)
want to emphasize that it's important to have healthy bile and gallbladder function because we want to break down all that fat which is the backbone, the cholesterol is the backbone to your sex hormones. So if we don't have healthy bio flow gallbladder function, we're not giving our body the backbone that it needs. Even though the liver produces cholesterol by itself, it's still important that we are metabolizing our fats for that backbone molecule.

to the hormones. But let me talk about some gallbladder support. If you have had a gallbladder that has been removed, please take ox bile like when you're eating a meal because as Dr. Rodgers mentioned, gut is my thing. So, I'm going to go in a little bit of a lecture. When you have got that gallbladder removed, Dr. Rodgers said you're dripping bile into your gut but it's not that robust release onto your meals and so you're not getting enough of the bile on your meal to emulsify your fat.

So with all of your meals, especially fatty meals, please take ox bile, please take some kind of enzyme that helps break down your meals. You're just gonna have to do that for the rest of your life. I promise you it's an investment worth making because if you're not metabolizing your fat, guess what needs fat more than anything? Yes, hormones, but your brain. So in decades time, you could have diminished brain function because you're actually not giving it the fats necessary to rebuild and maintain a healthy brain. So please make sure you are taking all of those.

If you have a gallbladder that is funky right now, there are a couple of things that you can do. Ox bile can help emulsify the gallstones, but there's something called chunka piadre. Start taking that. There's a bunch of bitters that you can start taking to help loosen up the gallbladder. Beet greens, blending those up a little bit, cutting them up, eating beet greens, juicing beet greens, not beets, the beet greens. All right, that can help to loosen up the gallstones.

There's so many things that you can do to help save your gallbladder to help support. There's a product called BetaF BetaFood or just BetaFood from Standard Process. There was a Dr. Rodgers, when I went to Standard Process trainings, there was a doctor there who shared a story about a surgeon who was in his practice where they removed gallbladders and he heard about this BetaFood product and he put all of his patients on BetaFood and his surgeries I think went down by 70%.

And they kicked him out of the practice because he was making them lose too much money.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (40:52)
believe

that. Now the other great thing about Provo Health is there's nutritionists on board and to eat properly, to have these supplements, to do these things, to help deliver, those nutritionists can really sit down and talk about these things, make an individualized program, sit with them for an hour, do multiple visits as needed. They can really help out.

Juanique (41:14)
100 % optimizing like digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, taking the right product to help support your gallbladder health or your bile flow could be a game changer for liver health, for hormone health, like you name it. Again, there's an order to healing. If you're not optimizing digestion, you're actually not optimizing liver health and gallbladder health, which means we're not optimizing hormone health. So make sure that you are looking into those avenues. You are working with the health coach

I'm actually glad you brought that up because for this next month, if you are local, we're doing a free F scan and hair analysis to people that are local that schedule with our coaches. So that's $200, almost $200 worth of free testing that you get when you schedule with our coaches. So if you have gut issues, if you have liver issues, if you have hormone issues, energy issues, now is the time to go and get tested and get help from one of our coaches and they can help.

formulate a phenomenal plan to help support your gut and your liver so that it's supporting hormones.

Dr. Brian Rodgers (42:17)
I think that's great because that hair analysis, for most people, the hair analysis is what's needed to be able to find out what needs to happen to detoxify, to have the proper nutrients and such. And if it's something where their labs are worse, yes, we can bring that up to the physician. We can look at more specific labs for those toxins and nutrients as needed. But the nutritionist can take care of a lot of that stuff, most of it.

Absolutely.

have to look at that statistic, that sounds right.

One more interesting thing about the liver is if you only have a part of a kidney, it's not gonna regrow. The liver is the one organ that if you have a little bit of it, it will regrow to be the size it needs to be. It's so important.

Interesting.

Absolutely.

I don't want to say too much about how long I've been doing hormones. It'll tell my age. No, I've been doing hormones for over 25 years. I've been doing hormone pills, creams, pellets. I've looked at hormones from all kinds of different angles. The biggest thing with hormones is balance. And so you need to see where people are at, not only their labs, but their symptoms, how they're feeling. Look and make sure, make sure that other things are done ahead of time.

And then you need to balance those hormones. You need to know approximately where the hormones should be for each individual type of person. Some people need a lot of hormone. Some people need just a little bit. It depends on what they want, what they need, and what their body requires. And so we wanna just look at that balance after looking at their labs and their health history.

The second thing when treating hormones, you have to understand that our bodies are meant after menopause or andropause to not make as much hormone. And sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's not. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on what the person wants in their life. It depends on what their body needs. And you have to look at that too. And so you have to adjust for that time of life.

Well, cura doses you never need. But it depends on what the person is trying to do in their life. And sometimes they do just need a little sniff of it. Sometimes they need a little bit more depending on what they want in their life, what their body needs. For example, when a woman goes through menopause, if she doesn't get estrogen, she's eight times more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. Twice as likely to get heart attacks and strokes.

If you use estrogen and testosterone properly, you can reverse osteoporosis. So these hormones are important. And so some people do just want just a sniff. Some people want more to reverse these diseases. Some people want a little bit more because they want to stay active and engaged in a lot of physical activity. It just depends on the person and you have to be aware of what the person's needs are, what their symphony is asking for, and what their body's asking for.

Thanks a lot. for having me. I enjoy it.

Bye.