06/29/2026
Concerned about Liver health, clear and factual advise
Liver health practitioner here 👋 I work with patients with elevated liver enzymes and fatty liver disease daily so let me break this down because there's a lot of different advice.
So yes milk thistle can absolutely help. It's probably the most studied natural compound for the liver and the reason it works is because of something called silymarin which is the active part inside milk thistle. It protects liver cells from damage and even helps them regenerate.
But here's the thing most people get wrong. When you grab a milk thistle bottle off Amazon, most of them aren't standardized for silymarin. They'll say 1000mg milk thistle on the front but that doesn't mean you're actually getting enough silymarin to do anything. A lot of them have been tested and the actual active compound is a fraction of what the clinical studies used. So people take it for months, retest their enzymes and nothing changed. And then they think milk thistle doesn't work when really they just never got a real dose.
The other problem is that an overloaded liver isn't just one thing going wrong. You've got oxidative stress damaging your liver cells, you've got chronic inflammation which is why you're tired and bloated all the time, and you've got your internal cleanup system getting overwhelmed and depleted. So fat keeps building up which causes more inflammation which makes the liver worse at processing fat. It's a cycle.
And milk thistle on its own really only addresses the first part. It doesn't do much for your internal cleanup system and it doesn't help your liver metabolize fat. So you're basically fighting one battle out of three.
What I focus on with my patients is supporting the liver in all pathways directly so it can start doing its job again. There are three compounds that help the most in my experience.
Silymarin from milk thistle at a real clinical dose with NAC which is the direct building block your body uses to make glutathione (basically your liver's internal cleaning system) and choline which helps the liver actually break down and export fat again instead of storing it.
When you hit all three at real doses that's when people start seeing their ALT and AST come down, the bloating goes away, energy comes back, and the midsection actually starts responding again.
One thing to watch out for though, most liver supplements on amazon are either generic milk thistle at unstandardized doses or proprietary blends with too many ingredients at too small amounts to do anything. I usually recommend European brands over US ones, their regulatory standards are stricter and the quality control on extracts is much higher.
I know this got long but I see a lot of misinformation online and most people don't realize how much their liver is doing for them. Hope this helps 🙏
This is the produce that Dr. Holloway recommends.
https://rituallabs.shop/products/happy-liver?
Your liver processes everything - alcohol, medications, junk food, environmental toxins. Happy Liver provides daily protection with clinical doses of Milk Thistle, NAC, and Choline
