This is the million dollar question and what a lot of people are trying to understand.
Basically the liver will store fat when it is out of balance. By this I mean more fat is entering the liver than leaving it. But why this happens is not so clear.
So lets look at how the liver uses fat more closely:
1. Fat gets sent to the liver from different sources: a) fat from your diet (carried in particles from the gut called chylomicrons), b) released from fat tissue (scientific name = adipose tissue).
2. Your liver can actually make its own fat from sugars through a process called de novo lipogenesis ( 🙂 lots of Latin in science, this essentially means making fat from scratch).
3. The liver can get rid of/use fat in different ways a) it can secrete it in particles called lipoproteins, b) it can use it as a fuel and oxidise it
Imagine a see-saw with High fat/sugar diet at one end and secretion/oxidation at the other. If you make one side heavier the other side struggles to balance the see-saw.
Therefore if you have a high fat diet or are obese or have a lot of sugar in your diet the liver may not be able to keep up with burning off the fat and will therefore start to store it inside your liver instead (tipping the see-saw to storage).
Also it becomes more complicated as your genetics can also make it more likely for your liver to become fatty which is why it is important to have a healthy and active lifestyle to reduce the changes of getting metabolic disease.
It is also important to remember that fats have a good role as well in the body – they provide some of the building blocks of all living cells (cholesterol) and they are also stores of energy for when our body needs it.
So if we go back in time when food wasn’t easily available (like in the caveman days) so our body had to store fat so that it could be used as energy for times when food wasn’t easily available. But nowadays food is usually easily available in developed countries, so we are always eating and storing fat and if we are not exercising regularly and burning off that stored fat then it just lies about until it is needed. This leads to more and more fat being stored in the liver and other places (such as the abdomen – or belly).
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Majid commented on :
It is also important to remember that fats have a good role as well in the body – they provide some of the building blocks of all living cells (cholesterol) and they are also stores of energy for when our body needs it.
So if we go back in time when food wasn’t easily available (like in the caveman days) so our body had to store fat so that it could be used as energy for times when food wasn’t easily available. But nowadays food is usually easily available in developed countries, so we are always eating and storing fat and if we are not exercising regularly and burning off that stored fat then it just lies about until it is needed. This leads to more and more fat being stored in the liver and other places (such as the abdomen – or belly).