Can You Drink Alcohol on a Liver Cleanse? Why Dr. Jarod Takes It Off the Table

On Dr. Jarod Ward's 21-day Love Your Liver cleanse, alcohol stays off for all three weeks, and so does diet soda. Here's his reasoning in his own words, plus what the research says about how your liver handles every drink.

Your liver handles almost every drink you have

About 90 percent of the alcohol you drink is removed by oxidation, and most of that work happens in your liver. A review of alcohol metabolism puts it plainly: "Alcohol cannot be stored in the liver." It has to be processed as it arrives, and the average adult clears about one drink an hour.

That's why Dr. Jarod treats alcohol as the clearest example of a toxin that adds to the liver's workload. During a cleanse, he wants that workload as light as possible. In his words, drinking during the cleanse is "like letting in, you know, a monster into your room, into the liver's room."

Dr. Jarod's concern is the repeated hits

Heavy drinking over years is the version of this everyone has heard of. Dr. Jarod's point is that smaller, repeated hits work the same way, just slower:

"The liver can become damaged from alcohol toxins repeatedly blasting it over and over and over, right? But a lot of us are doing the same thing, just on a much more micro but slow, yet still dangerous, pace and level."

The research on heavy drinking shows where repeated hits start. Fatty liver is the earliest and most common response, and it develops in more than 90 percent of problem drinkers who have 4 to 5 drinks a day. The good news is in the same review: if drinking stops, fatty liver "is a reversible condition with a good prognosis."

Diet soda is on his list too

Dr. Jarod puts artificial sweeteners in the same category of things the liver has to clean up:

"Other toxins like artificial sweeteners, like aspartame, which is like in Diet Coke or diet sodas, I should say. Splenda is terrible. All these different artificial sweeteners can cause a lot of extra inflammation and chemically cause a burden on the liver that it has to solve."

So a zero-calorie drink doesn't get a pass during the cleanse. Why the rest of the cleanse is just as strict is in Why Is a Liver Cleanse So Strict? Dr. Jarod's take on coffee is in Can You Drink Coffee on a Liver Cleanse?

The full plan comes with the cleanse

Love Your Liver is Dr. Jarod's 21-day guided liver cleanse, and it's self-paced. The full meal plan, supplement schedule, shopping list and daily texts come with the cleanse. Your supplements ship to your door, and Day 1 starts the moment you tap start.

Prefer to start with a conversation? Dr. Jarod runs functional medicine and lab testing at Crown Chiropractic in Fort Myers. Call (239) 441-2275 to book a consultation.

Sources

• Dr. Jarod Ward, Crown Chiropractic. Liver episode on YouTube, 4:38 to 5:34 and 11:15 to 11:21.
• Cederbaum AI. Alcohol metabolism. Clinics in Liver Disease 2012;16(4):667-685.
• Osna NA, Donohue TM, Kharbanda KK. Alcoholic liver disease: pathogenesis and current management. Alcohol Research: Current Reviews 2017;38(2):147-161.