The liver is your largest gland

Al Lowe
Contributor

This is by far the biggest gland you have. It weighs from about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 pounds. Perhaps it is so large because it does so many things for you.
Your liver is mostly at your back, just below your diaphragm, at the upper right. It is made up of four lobes, two quite large ones, and two smaller ones. You probably know what animal liver looks like, at the butcher shop or at home. Well, your liver looks just like that, dark red, soft, floppy tissue.
One of the major things which your liver does is to act as a storage warehouse. Carbohydrates, the main food stored there, is in the form of glycogen. Your blood always has some sugar in it (about 0.1%), which is the source of energy for your muscles. This sugar (Glucose) is regulated by your liver. Suppose you become very frightened, or very angry, or you have some other reason to be very roused up, then your liver will very quickly convert some of this glycogen into glucose, which flows into your blood stream. This gives you all that extra energy when you are in a ‘fight or flight’ mode. People can sometimes perform prodigious feats of strength when they have to, because of this extra rush of sugar into your blood. Under normal conditions, glucose is passed into your blood, at just the right rate to keep it normal.
That’s not all your liver stores away for you. It also stores iron. In the old days when I was young, one of the things you did to increase your iron, was to eat some raw liver every day. My poor old other had to do that!
Several vitamins are stored in this marvellous organ as well. Vitamin A, which is essential to your eyesight, and your inner and outer skin cells, is also stashed in here in quite large amounts. Another is Vitamin D, which governs the development of teeth and bones, and the absorption of calcium and phosphorus. Once more, going back to when I was young, I wonder how many of you remember the daily dose of cod-liver oil in the winter? Just like people, Vitamin D is stored in the livers of many salt water fish. When the oil was pressed out of them, it became that awful-tasting ‘diet supplement’.
And still a third vitamin is tucked away in that old liver of yours. That is the Vitamin B complex. This is a large group of vitamins which is largely known as preventing the so-called deficiency diseases - nervous disorders, beri-beri, some retardation of growth, dry skin and quite a few others. Your liver helps keep your supply of these extremely important vitamins up to scratch. Without them, you could get very sick, indeed, in a lot of unpleasant ways.
And that covers just a few of the many values of this most important gland. Next time, we will look at some other things your good old liver does for you.