If you have listened to the lecture with Dr Perry Nickelston, you will know that the liver plays a big role in supporting lymph. The liver and lymph work “hand-in-hand”.
Lymph is the clear liquid that surrounds the cells of your body. Except for cartilage, nails, and hair, your entire body is bathed in lymph. You are literally swimming in lymphatic fluid, so its nickname is the “Body Aquarium”.
The lymph can be considered the “garbage collector” of the body which cleans up cellular waste. It’s the lymph system’s job to pick up and dispose of cellular “trash” like white blood cells, bacteria, viruses, toxins and other molecular debris from every tissue in your body. That’s crucial, since all cells make waste as a byproduct of their normal processes, plus white blood cells and antibodies are constantly patrolling tissue outside of blood for pathogens and other harmful cells to destroy. It’s like taking out the trash. Think about your house where the trash never gets taken out. Garbage bags piling up, smelling up the place, rancid, congestion.
And to make it worse, so many of the products we use to help with symptoms only make lymph congestion worse!
This intricate “highway” of specialised vessels moves lymphatic fluid from the tips of your toes to the top of your head and to centralised lymph nodes. It helps regulate the balance of all fluid in your body. And its most important function? Detoxification.
About a third of the lymph is produced in the liver which drains into the abdomen and the lymph channels. Hormones surf in the lymph too. So if you want a healthy liver and a healthy lymphatic system you need to be supporting both.
The lymph does not have a pump so to move lymph and help it filter and not become stagnant, we need to move! If all lymph vessels in the body were put head to tail they would circulate the globe approximately 4 times. This is why exercise and dry brushing are so important to the Cleanse programme.
Of the 700+lymph nodes in the body, one third are in the brain. The brain releases toxins which are expelled whilst we rest (sleep) through the glymphatic system, then pass into the collar bone to join the normal filtration. This is why sleep is so important for ridding the brain of toxic waste. Lack of sleep means less clearance of toxins and if this happens consistently it may impact brain health.
As I heard one neuro-specialist quote on a recent podcast
If you do not get adequate sleep and enough slow-wave sleep, I believe that the reason you wake up groggy in the morning is because the glymphatic system hasn’t got all that, “crap out of your brain.”
If you would like to read more about glympatics and sleep, you may find this article interesting:
