What the Liver Keeps

One at a time

I have told you about more than one bush. They are not a set. Do not run them together in the same day, and do not start two in the same week. If you try one, try one, and give it a good long while before you even think about another.

Nobody knows what several of these do to a body at the same time. Not me, not your doctor, not a study. I will not pretend I know either.

Your medicine keeps its own hour

Pick the hour you take your tablet and leave that hour empty. Nothing from me for two hours before it and two hours after it.

Thick water can hold a tablet back so your body never gets what the doctor sent. That is not okra alone — that is any slippery thing, any thick thing, any bush water. They have watched that happen in animals. Nobody has watched it properly in a person, and I am not waiting to find out on you.

And hear the part that makes it bad: you would feel nothing. No pain, no sign, nothing to tell you. You would only find out at the next blood test, or you would not find out at all. The danger is not a man throwing his medicine away. The danger is a man drinking something healthy while his medicine is quietly switched off.

Tell your doctor what you are drinking. Say the name of it. A doctor cannot help you with the half you did not tell him.

And this, because it is the belief underneath all of it

Bush is not gentle because it is bush. Half the medicine in the doctor's cabinet started as a bush. If a thing is strong enough to do something, it is strong enough to do something wrong. And two strong things at once is not twice the good — it is a thing nobody has ever watched.

What I said, and what I have to take back

In the video I stood beside that lady, I put my finger on the dark, soft patches on her neck, and I told you the cause was the liver. I said the old healers called it a backed up liver, and that when the liver is full it cannot process the fat, so the body stores it.

I have to correct that, and I am correcting it here because I got it wrong there.

The three things I named are real. Tired after a full night. The patches that were not there last year. The belly that stays no matter what you eat. Those do travel together, and I did not make that up.

But when the doctors look at that mark, what they find behind it is not a full liver.

What that mark is actually telling you

That mark is about insulin — the thing your body makes to handle sugar.

When the body stops answering its own insulin, it makes more, and more, and more. That is what darkens and thickens the skin there. It is not dirt. It does not wash off, and I have seen people scrub at it. It is not too much sugar showing on the skin. It is too much insulin showing on the skin.

And here is why the video landed on something real even though it named it wrong: the fat sitting in a liver, the belly, the tiredness and that mark are the same one trouble wearing four different coats. I pointed at something true. I gave it the wrong name and I sent you to the wrong place.

That mark comes early. It can show up years before anybody puts a name on your sugar. That is not bad news. That is the earliest warning a body gives you, and most people never get told what it means.

So this is what you do with it

Not a glass. A blood draw.

Go and ask for two of them, and ask for both, not one:

• the one they take in the morning before you have eaten anything, and
• the long-memory one — the one that tells them how your sugar has been running for months, not how it is running this minute.

Ask for both. For some of us the long-memory one reads kinder than the truth. If you only take that one, it can send you home easy when you should not have gone home easy.

While the needle is already in your arm, they can look at the fat in your blood and at the liver on the same draw. Ask for that too. It costs you nothing extra to ask.

Carry this page in with you if it helps you say it.

And if you looked at your neck and saw nothing

Then hear this, because it is the other half and nobody ever says it:

Most people whose sugar is running high have no mark at all.

No mark is not a clean bill. The mark is a message when it comes. Silence is not a message. If the tiredness is there, or the belly, or it runs in your family, you go and ask for those two anyway.

One more, and then I will leave it alone

If that mark came on fast — weeks, not years — and especially if it came with a lot of little skin tags around it, or if weight is coming off you and you did nothing to take it off, that is a doctor now. Not soon. Not a glass of anything.

That is rare. I want you to hear that it is rare. I tell you anyway because it is exactly the kind of thing I would want somebody to tell me.

It does not clog

I want to be plain, because the whole trade is built on this one word.

A liver does not clog. It is not a pipe and it is not a filter with a screen in it that fills up. There is no dirt in there waiting for somebody to sweep it out.

What sits in a tired liver is fat. Plain fat. And fat does not come out with a morning drink. It never has, and nobody has ever shown that it does.

So there is nothing to sweep

That is why every word of that kind is off this paper. No flush. No cleanse. No wash out. No detox. And no broom.

I used that word myself. I will get to that.

If your liver were truly failing you would not be reading a paper from a man with a copper bracelet — you would be in a hospital and you would know. What most people have is fat where fat should not be, and fat leaves by the back door. Slowly. By way of the plate, the feet, and the sweet drink.

The morning

Eat something. Take your tablet at its hour.

And here is the second correction. In the video I told you to drink that okra water in the morning, before anything else, on an empty stomach. I have to add something to that, and I am adding it here because I did not say it there.

Plenty of you take your tablet first thing in the morning too. That is exactly the hour I told you to fill with thick water. That water and that tablet must not travel together. If it had been anybody else's grandmother I would have caught it. It was mine to catch and I did not catch it.

The one thing, if you only do one thing

Put down the sweet drink.

The soda. The juice — yes, the juice, and yes, even the one that says it is from the fruit. The sweet tea. The coffee that comes with the sweet cream already in it.

If you take one thing off this whole paper, take that one. It costs you nothing, it needs no shop, and of everything on this page it is the one with the most weight behind it. Sweet drink goes into the liver as fat faster than food does.

Water. Or coffee. Or tea with nothing in it.

The plate

Less of the fryer, less of the red meat, less of the meat that comes in a packet with a long life on it.

More fish. More peas and beans. More of the green thing. The oil from the olive if you can get it. The pot instead of the fryer — and yes, the okra belongs here, on the plate, whole, the way it has always been eaten.

That is not a diet with a name. That is how the plate looked before everything came out of a box.

About your size, and I will not put a number on it

A little less of you is a little less of it in the liver. Not all of you. A little, and it counts — that is the part nobody tells you, so people give up before they get the good of it.

I am not going to write you a number to hit. A number on a page like this only becomes a thing to fail.

The walk

Most days. Long enough that talking gets a little harder while you do it. That is the only measure I will give you, and it is a better one than a number on a clock because your own chest tells you the answer.

If your knees will not walk, then it is the water, or the chair with the arms going, or the yard. Moving is moving.

The drink at night

Less. On the days you can manage it, none. A liver carrying fat has enough work.

Coffee

I am not sending you to buy anything.

If you already drink it, drink it — black, or near enough to black. The people who drink theirs do seem to fare a little better with a liver like this. Nobody made that happen in a study. It is not medicine. It is coffee. I put it here only so nobody tells you to give up the one thing you like.

Sleep

The liver does its work while you are lying down. Short nights are not free. And if the person beside you says you stop breathing in the night, that is a real thing with a real name and a doctor can fix it — that one drags a liver down harder than most of what is on this page.

And the medicine you already have

Take it right. On time. Every day.

Your pressure tablet and your sugar tablet do more for that liver than anything I could ever hand you across a fence. That is not me being humble. That is the truth of it, and any man who tells you otherwise wants something from you.

What I am not promising

I am not telling you this routine cures anything. Fat in a liver went in slow and it comes out slow, and some of it depends on things neither one of us chose.

I am telling you it is honest work, and that it is the work with something behind it. That is all I have got.

What the old people say

Ochro is food. It has been in a Jamaican pot as long as there have been Jamaican pots. That part needs no proving.

Some of the old ones used the slippery part of it for a sore belly, for a stomach that would not settle. I have heard that all my life. I will tell you honestly that I could not find that written down anywhere I would be willing to stand on — it is in mouths, not in books.

And I have heard it said that a woman near her time drank the water from it in the days before the baby came. Same honesty: I heard it, I did not find it written down. I am telling you where I heard a thing and where I did not, so you can weigh it yourself.

And here is what the old people never said

They never said liver. Not once that I could find. Not in one book, not in one survey of the bush medicine of my own island.

"The liver's broom" is not a saying from back home. I said it in that video as though it were, and it is not. It is a saying off a telephone. It went around, it sounded old, and I repeated it. That is on me.

A man who tells you a thing is ancient when it is five years old is inventing a grandmother to sell you something. I will not be that man, even when the thing I invented was my own line.

What was actually tested on people

They did test okra on people with the sugar sickness. That is true and I am not going to hide it.

But they did not test the glass I poured you. They tested the powder, weighed out. They tested the dried fruit made into a tea, weighed out. They tested it in a capsule. One single test out of all of them used the fresh pod soaked in water — and it used more pods than I told you to use.

What moved, moved a little, on the sugar. And the tests disagreed with each other so much that the ones who added them all up said so out loud.

And two things did not move at all in those people: their weight did not move, and their bellies did not move.

Nobody has ever tested my glass. If the good of it is real, it belongs to the powder in the hospital — not to one pod in a cup on a windowsill.

So I will not tell you

I will not tell you your liver is clogged. A liver does not clog. I said it and it was wrong, and I would rather look foolish on paper than have you drinking a glass against a thing that does not exist.

I will not tell you your belly will go down. In the video I told you it would. They tested that on people, and the belly did not go down and the weight did not go down. That was the weakest thing I said and it was the thing you most wanted to hear. I am taking it back, out loud, here, so it is not just quietly missing.

I will not tell you it is safe for a person who makes stones. The pod holds a thing that troubles some people's kidneys. When you eat the pod, hardly any of it reaches you — that part has been measured, and it is good news. But the water pulls out exactly the part that dissolves, and nobody has ever measured what is sitting in that glass. Nobody. So I do not know.

And because I do not know — if you have ever passed a stone, this glass is not for you. That is not me knowing more than the next man. That is me telling you what I do not know, and refusing to guess with your kidney.

If you are going to keep the glass anyway

I already gave the recipe away in the video and I am not going to pretend I can call it back. So take the rules with it:

• Not on an empty stomach, and not at the hour of your tablet. Two hours clear on either side of your medicine. That is the whole reason for this paper.
• One at a time. Not this and another bush in the same week.
• The pod. Not a powder, not a capsule, not an extract. Whatever is in a capsule was not what anybody put in a cup, and you cannot see what you bought.
• If it loosens your belly or blows you up, stop. There is a thing in okra that does that to some people. Which is worth a small laugh: the drink that was sold to take your belly down can be the very thing that swells it.
• Tell your doctor you are drinking it. By name.

And where I would rather you put it

On the plate. Whole. In the pot, with the fish, with the rice, the way it was eaten before anybody thought to put it in a glass.

That is the okra I can defend all the way down. As food it has fed my people for generations and nobody had to test it to find that out. As a morning glass it is a thing off the internet wearing my accent.

Milk thistle

This one deserves respect, so I will give it respect and still say no.

It is the most tested thing on this whole list. Men in white coats have gone at it for years, on real people with real liver trouble. And after all that testing the tests still argue with one another, and nobody has yet shown it takes fat out of a liver.

When a thing has been tested that many times and the answer still will not settle, that is not a thing I put in your hand and call a routine. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is not settled, and I am not going to sell you the unsettled part.

Warm water with lemon

It is water with lemon in it. It is a pleasant thing to drink and I have nothing against it.

It does not open anything. It does not wash anything. It does not wake a liver up — your liver has been working all night without being asked.

Drink it if you like it. Just do not write it down in your head as work done, because the work is still waiting.

Celery juice

Somebody sold that one very well.

Nobody has tested it on people for a liver. Not once that I could find.

And juice is a plant with the best part thrown in the bin — you strain out the fibre, which is the very thing that helps, and you drink what is left. It is also a great deal of one green thing at once, and that matters if your kidneys are not what they were or if you take one of those pressure tablets that watches your potassium.

The detox tea off the pharmacy shelf

The box says cleanse. There is nothing in you to clean out.

And most of those boxes have a leaf in them whose whole job is to make you run. That is the trick, and it is an old one. You go to the bathroom, you feel lighter, you look flatter, and you call that poison leaving your body.

That is water leaving your body. It comes back by lunchtime, and what left with it was some of what your heart needs.

Senna, and anything sold to move you

That leaf is a real medicine for a real problem, for a few days, when a doctor says so. It is not a daily thing and it has nothing to do with a liver.

For you especially: on a pressure tablet and a sugar tablet, running yourself dry is one of the straight roads to hurt kidneys. I will not put a thing in your morning whose whole purpose is to empty you out.

Powder, capsule and extract of anything

I do not send you to buy powder.

The harm that has actually been written down — the livers that went bad, the kidneys that went bad — happened with bottles and capsules and concentrated extracts, not with a pot on a stove. And when people have tested what is inside those bottles, one brand held several times what another held, and one held less than half of what was printed on its own label.

You cannot see inside a capsule. You can see inside a pot. That is the whole argument and it is enough.

The trap

If your numbers get better while you are doing all this, that is your medicine and this work together. It is not permission to touch the tablet.

Write the number down, carry it to your doctor, and let him decide about the tablet. Never you. Never me.

And nothing here takes the place of the tablet the doctor gave you. Not on a bad day, and not on the day you feel better than you have felt in years — that day especially. Feeling good is not a reading.