Siggi Clavien on what we now know about liver health (and a new approach to liver scans)

0:01Dr Sophie Shotter:Hi, I'm Sophie and this is Age Well with Dr Sophie Shotter, a space devoted to all things health, wellness and longevity. Because for me, ageing well is about looking and feeling like the best possible version of ourselves, inside as well as out. So together with my producer Fee, I'll be deep diving into the latest research, sifting fact from fiction. I'll also be talking to all kinds of trusted experts, tapping into their knowledge, along with bringing you conversations from a range of interesting women, and men finding out how they age well. So this is my show, welcome along and as always thank you so much for listening.

0:45Dr Sophie Shotter:Siki, as I understand it you had a previous corporate career in spirits and winemaking but you're now considered to be one of the most exciting and innovative voices in liver health. We absolutely want to talk about the liver scan technology you've developed and of course deliverance, the supplement that a lot of people are now talking about. But first, can you fill in the gaps between you working in the drinks industry to now working with liver? Because that's obviously quite a shift. Why is your work focused on the liver? Was there an aha moment that made you change career? Yeah, I come from actually a wine family.

1:20I have a Swiss father and our family for 300 plus years in Switzerland have been vintners. So we grow grapes, we have vineyards, we make wine. And then my mother's British and she was a nurse and a healer by many ways. So I was destined to be a winemaker, to take up the mantle of kind of a family lineage and what I was meant to do. Went to University of California, Davis, which is in Napa Valley or close to it, and is one of the great universities in the world that teaches viticulture, which is the process of growing vines and grapes and making wine. Whilst I was there, my best friend passed away suddenly on his 21st birthday from a drug interaction.

2:07And that drug interaction and a lot of drug overdoses are actually drug interactions where it's two drugs or compounds mixing can cause cardiac situation. So he passed away. And that took me in a completely, set me in a completely different direction of, okay, how do I use my knowledge of chemistry and biology to try to prevent this from happening? I had this amazing foundational knowledge of this winemaking and the spirits industry as well. So I started formulating and working on formulations to reduce the chances of overdose and to help with drug interactions. And that evolved into working with rehab clinics and that as well.

2:51But at the time, starting a new business, and I was a young father at the time, I had to have a job and I had to be able to pay for not only my school, but certainly my company, but most importantly for my family. So I was a beverage specialist and I worked at some of the top restaurants and fine dining. I was a sommelier. So by night I would be in the drinks industry and everything from teaching salespeople to bartenders to beverage directors how certain spirits are made, the process that goes through why a five-times distilled vodka is less toxic than a one-times distilled vodka. But in the daytime, I was starting this business, and I was working with scientists and doctors and got into the health field to develop natural remedies to try to mitigate what had happened to a loved one of mine.

3:41And in my career of doing that, as my supplemented nutraceutical business got bigger, I was able to step down from the beverage industry, but it did actually kind of ironically fueled my ability to create products to do that. And my mentor that helped me start my first company owned a big nutraceutical company. And funny enough, he was actually a customer at this high-end bar that I used to run. I was telling him about what I wanted to do. And he funded me and helped me start that. And unfortunately, he passed away from liver cancer. And my godfather, who had taught me to be a Renaissance man, had died of cirrhosis.

4:21So now you've got three of the most influential men in my life had passed away from this. So I used that as my deliverance. That's why you use the name deliverance to take me from a bad situation into a good one. And I use those negative experiences to create products, modalities, knowledge to help prevent that from people. So in 2003, I said, well, actually, I'm going to go into the alcohol market and I want to create detoxification products to help people from liver damage, to suffering from alcohol, to help sober people up, et cetera, et cetera. And that took me down this rabbit hole of liver health and liver disease and this epidemic that's affecting 2 billion people globally.

5:06And so it was God and life and all those things pushed me into this direction. So it was more of an evolution rather than a one-time aha moment. It was a series of aha moments, which I still have today and will still have more.

5:22Dr Sophie Shotter:I think many people think of the liver as just another organ, but it's actually a gland as well, isn't it? So for listeners, a gland is a specialized type of organ or group of cells that makes and secretes hormones among many other things. Would you mind going over all of the incredible functions that the liver is actually involved in? Do we know anything new about the liver and how it functions and the things it's involved in? Absolutely. To touch on that too, yeah, a liver, it's a gland as well. And the gland basically is anything that makes one or more substances. And that could be hormones, digestive juices, sweat, your tears are created by a gland, saliva, or milk in case of women.

6:04The liver is this incredible master organ that controls so many other organs as well. So it's thousands and thousands of functions, 500 of which are vital, probably the most complex organ in the human body. It's why we can't replicate it with technology. It goes on and on, everything from your immune system to hair to red blood cells to it's your powerhouse of your engine. If you get up right now to go make a cup of tea, your liver will actually be the one that's burning those energy to be able to allow you to do that. So it's also your furnace, but it's also your own internal nutritionist and dietician.

6:43It manages and controls all of the vitamins and proteins and carbohydrates that you consume. So it decides what gets burned, what gets stored, what gets passed through. It's doing so many things at so many times. And we're constantly making new discoveries. And that's one of these I love as a scientist about the liver is we're learning new things every day about it.

7:07Dr Sophie Shotter:We would love to talk about the big dangers for liver. And obviously, alcohol is, I guess, the most well-known ones. So maybe let's start there. Can you perhaps talk a little bit about just alcohol for now? And then we will move on to other risk factors because we imagine it's not just alcohol. Can we also have your insights? I guess this is linked on how easily the liver can repair from, for example, binge drinking or alcoholism. We heard you say on the Dave Asprey show that the liver is the only organ in the human body that fully regenerates. But what about someone who's continually binge drinking, what do we know?

7:43So alcohol in itself, when you consume alcohol or anything for that matter, your liver will have an enzymatic response and it will create an enzyme to break that down and then to convert that in the detoxification process. The by-product of that, so the liver produces enzyme, it breaks the alcohol down, and then there's this waste that comes out of it. And that waste and that by-product is incredibly toxic. And in a normal scenario with low amounts, your body will get rid of it and it'll go away. But if you drink too much and you have a compounding effect, more and more of this toxic byproduct builds up and that causes damage.

8:20And that can cause damage from everything from liver damage to it slows down cells and it can create toxicity. And too much toxicity can affect brain chemistry to a light degree. That's why you start to get lightheaded. You start to get drunk. And then you have all kinds of cognitive effects as well as physical and motor skill as well. So it's essentially a toxic buildup and of too much and it compounds and people don't realize that when you drink, it takes about 30 minutes to metabolize the alcohol. So if you have a shot of tequila, what have you, you really don't start to feel the effects for 30 minutes.

8:55And that's why, especially younger people that don't know how to control drinking, they'll say, oh, I feel fine. I'll take another one and another one. And then that all hits because there's a delay between when you consume it and when it starts to affect. So alcohol does cause liver damage, premature aging, dehydration, and there is negatives to alcohol. There's positives too, but there's also very negatives from a physical perspective. So you know what? You just did one of the best positive effects of alcohol, and that's laughing. And laughing is one of the best medicines in the world. And in moderation, in slight amounts, does have positives because we laugh more, we de-stress, we can relax, Social anxieties can go away.

9:38You can have more fun with your mates. So there is a positive aspect to it as well. But if taken too much, it does cause a lot of physical damage. And that could be compounding as well. So it's something that has to be done really responsibly. And when you do drink, you should drink an alcohol that is distilled more, less toxicity as well. And some people can't control drinking. And if you can't, then you should not drink. Binge drinking, when you binge drink. So if you have a drink and you stop, right, you get a little bit of an up and then your liver repairs it and you keep going and then it compounds.

10:11But when you binge drink, it's like getting to a melting point. You start creating so much that your liver cannot keep up. Its ability to respond and to break the alcohol down and to get rid of the toxins and to keep you stable is overwhelmed. You've basically overwhelmed the liver's ability to repair and then that can cause more serious damage. damage whereas your liver could keep defending you but if you overwhelm it you've overwhelmed your defenses and then it could cause much more severe damage like getting drunk if you have one drink an hour and then you wait two hours and have a drink you're not really going to do that much and you're not going to feel it as much but if you hit it too much too hard too quick you're going to break through and you're going to cause damage you're going to get sick remember being sick is a vomiting is a reaction to too much toxicity you've poisoned yourself so much that your body has taken the steps to try to purge you of that because your toxicity has got so high.

11:08That's why binge drinking can cause a lot more damage. You're better off drinking lightly every day of the week than having one night of binge drinking. Because one night of binge drinking has caused so much more damage.

11:20Dr Sophie Shotter:Great answer. Binge drinking is just the biggest culprit in so many ways. so let's move beyond alcohol what else impacts the liver negatively for example does it respond to stress or a poor gut microbiome what about environmental factors or processed foods or anything else that the research is showing has a correlation or that maybe we need to be aware of so the answer is all of those things i just learned something yesterday about the liver i So that is why it's very, very exciting, but it also leads to, which I love the term is, you know, we have known knowns, we have known unknowns, and then we have unknown unknowns.

12:03And life's like that, but especially with the liver as well, there's, you know, there's things we don't even know that we don't know. And some of the new discoveries and really bringing this into alignment, I mean, Eastern medicine knew a lot of this, but it was more through wisdom and observation where they didn't understand it maybe on a biological perspective, but you have the brain-liver-gut axis. So it's not just the gut-brain axis, it's also the liver is in the middle of that and controlling that as well. So how that relationship works, we're learning more and more about. One of the things I find very fascinating, and this was actually discovered at one of the schools I went to, which is the gut produces all these different enzymes as well.

12:44And it produces this really cool molecule called lactobacillus, and it's a bacteria in our gut. And that bacteria that produces a molecule that actually repairs liver damage, and it also repairs the gut lining simultaneously. So the relationship is so transverse back and forth. I mean, that's something that's newly been discovered as well.

13:07Dr Sophie Shotter:Gosh, and that's a probiotic, isn't it? Lactobacillus. Correct. Yeah. And all of our bacteria is managed and regulated in the gut. and the gut-liver connection is so important. And 30 % of modern liver disease is caused by alcohol. 70 % is now other factors, right? That's flipped. And now those other factors are kind of a mix of everything because we haven't gone deep enough into them. But some of the biggest culprits are processed foods, synthetically made sweeteners, carbohydrates, Hydrates, microplastics, overuse of pharmaceuticals, paracetamol, pesticides, herbicides, wearing polyester clothing, you absorb toxins from those.

13:53You also absorb microplastics from those. Air that we breathe, you know, pollutions in the water, hormone dysregulation because of the hormones. And, you know, the largest chemical or one of the largest contaminants in tap water in London is birth control. That's cunning. endocrine disruption and hormone disruption, that gets you out of balance. Then you're mixing that with, I'm drinking a diet soda because the food industry told me that it's good for me. That's causing liver damage. I'm taking paracetamol because I'm dehydrated, I have a headache. And that's the largest cause of liver damage is actually the chemical that's found in paracetamol or Tylenol.

14:32That's the number one cause of liver failure. Those are doing that. And then you're compounding that with alcohol. And it processed foods, though. I mean, the chemicals in food dyes, maybe it's herbicides, pesticides, insecticides. All these things are hitting the body. Your liver is out there out front, like a castle trying to protect you from all of these things. And then you take in modern lifestyle. With modern lifestyle, you got electromagnetic interference. And then you compound that with stress. Stress causes so much damage. Stress causes more damage than alcohol can. The amount of damage that stress can cause.

15:10I mean, stress, it reduces blood flow. Too much cortisol gets going. The cortisol causes inflammation, which promotes liver failure, promotes liver fat. You know, liver cells deaths, accelerates scarring, impairs your ability to detoxify. So being stressed can inhibit and basically weaken your liver's ability to detoxify all the other toxins you're dealing with. Chronic stress and the fast lifestyle that we live and instant gratification with computers and cell phones. And I've got emails and phone calls and texts and SMS and EMF disruption from my Wi-Fi near my bedroom. These are all things that are leading to stress and you're overwhelming the liver.

15:55That's why liver disease is up 400 % and it's accelerating.

16:01Dr Sophie Shotter:Gosh, it's when you really put it like that and you put it all together, it does make you think about the combined impact of all of these things. We want to get on to supplements, including deliverance, which is your proprietary supplement. But first, tell us about the liver clinic and the unique liver scan that you offer, how it works, why you develop this technology, why it's different to the kinds of scans that we could get, for example, here in the UK. Yeah, of course. So in our development of deliverance, everything's natural, but we very much use technology and I like science and evidence and data.

16:40And in that, we were noticing when we were doing clinical trials that, you know, so we got 22 million people in the UK with liver disease, fatty liver, and 90 % of people don't know it. So we were doing the traditional model, which you're in the UK and you go to see your GP, they'll do your liver panel and your liver panel looks at cholesterol and kidney function and liver function, et cetera. And the liver panel has eight biomarkers that it looks at. And the ones that are really relative that your doctor will hone in on if they're elevated are ALT, AST, and then your gammas. And if those are elevated, that's signal of you've got some liver stress or liver inflammation.

17:17But it does not indicate if you have fatty liver disease. It could be a canary in the coal mine and it could be an indicator that your liver's under a lot of stress. But at the end of the day, a blood test is a lagging indicator. So if those biomarkers are up, that means you've already got something probably more of a problem. And at the time we were doing studies, we looked at doing MRIs and we looked at doing CAT scans and we were doing fibro scans. And we noticed that, okay, about 90%, 80 to 90 % of the people that we were scanning that had fatty liver disease was not showing up on the blood tests.

17:56So we're like, ooh, okay, this is one of the reasons all these people that have fatty liver disease don't know they have it because they're relying on these blood tests. So we said, okay, more people need to be scanned because at the end of the day, the silver lining for fatty liver disease and to diabetes is they're reversible. But you need to know you have the problem or that the damage isn't too severe to be able to reverse that. And then that scanning was a key element to that. So it's a gold standard technology. Just to replace it, it's not my technology. What I've done is I've taken this technology that exists throughout the UK and the world, but they're using it for sick people.

18:37So traditionally, in the NHS, if you want to go get a fibro scan, it can be a one to two year wait before you get one. And they'll only qualify you for one if you've got other symptoms and you're already sick. So I've said, this is bananas. We've got this great technology that's quick. It's not invasive. It's relatively inexpensive to do. this should be a frontline screening tool so that's what we're doing is we're taking this amazing diagnostic machine that the universities and nhs and the hospitals are saving for sick people and we're putting it to the frontline and the one thing that will save the nhs is preventative medicine yeah and preventing people from getting ill that's much less expensive it's much more efficient it's definitely better karmically for people to be you know we want to prevent you from getting sick, not waiting until you're sick and then trying to react to it and throwing drugs at it and throwing treatments at it.

19:34Dr Sophie Shotter:It's making an NHS tool accessible to everyday people without these long, long waiting lists, or as you say, without them saying, I think there's something actually wrong with me. Makes sense. Makes sense. So we're like, okay, we can't get the NHS, God bless it, to be able to scan people because they just don't have the capacity, the infrastructure, the bureaucratic ease to do that. So I said, well, I guess we're going to have to start liver clinics. So we started our own liver clinics to where we'll generally partner with the clinic, or we will set up our own, such as we have at John Bell, and we will make this a frontline screening tool.

20:08And we go to shows and we go to expos and we go into some businesses in the UK. There's a Formula One team in the UK that has a thousand employees and they have a health day. We go in and we were scanning their engineering department. And lo and behold, 50 % of the men 25 % of the women at this billion pound a year company has liver disease. So we're being proactive with the screening and the scanning as well. So the British Liver Trust is doing a lot to be able to go out there and to try to make advances to getting people screen. But they really, because they have limited capacity, they're generally people that need a certain symptom or criteria to get scanned.

20:48So they're having to deal with people that are already sick to be able to do that. If somebody gets cirrhosis in the UK, 50 % of them will probably not make it. And the 50 % that do, it costs the NHS 2.6 million pounds per patient that has cirrhosis. It would cost the NHS 50 to 70 to 200 pounds maybe to scan somebody years before they got to that stage. The way to save it is preventing people from getting ill and not just in liver health and everything.

21:20Dr Sophie Shotter:So I know that Fi, you had your scan done back in January at John Bell and Croydon. Do you want to tell us about your experience and also what you found out? Yes, I will. And I have to say, Siggy, I had such a positive experience. I've actually emailed you my results in case you want to take a little look. So yeah, I went to John Bell and Croydon in London. I sat with the woman, I think her name was Serene, running the clinic. She was lovely. She ran through how it works. And we talked about my medical history, including, and I think this is relevant, the fact that I'd had a lot of chemotherapy in 2023.

21:54Dr Sophie Shotter:So my expectations, Siggy, were managed. And so they were quite low. And I was, even though I've been working really hard on my liver, and I was hoping to perhaps see an average score, that was my best. But she said, and I quote, you have the liver of a 20-year-old. And she meant like not a binge drinking 20-year-old. So I did burst into tears, I confess. I was so, so happy. And I have been working really hard on my liver. It was non-invasive. It was one of the easiest scans. Sophie and I have done loads of scans on this show over the last couple of years. It was so easy. It was so lovely. It was such a great experience.

22:29Dr Sophie Shotter:I can't remember any of the technical things that she told me, but if you want to add anything to what I've just said based on what you can see in front of you with my results, go ahead. But it was an amazing experience. Yes. Oh, that's very good to hear. And having a lovely, positive experience when you're doing something as it can be scary or daunting to get a diagnostic done. And we try to do everything to make it as positive as possible. And we always say, no matter what, we're going to give you a positive result. You either have a positive result like you did and you're happy. Yes. Or if we do find something, we're going to put together an action plan and get with the right people to then fix it.

23:03So it's all about positive outcomes and setting positive expectations by making it a lovely, pleasant experience, whether from a smile to the attitude, to the verbiage, to the environment in which you do that. Looking at your report right now, not only is it you have the liver of a 20-year-old yogi that's probably never had a processed food in their life. So I'm looking at it very, very healthy.

23:25Dr Sophie Shotter:I am so happy. And you know what? In terms of my result, I was shocked but not surprised. I mean, shocked because I had chemotherapy and I must confess I binge drank a lot in my 20s and 30s. But I guess not surprised because since then, since going on my own health journey, I've rethought a lot of what I had previously thought about health. I focus really hard on helping my liver recover. So I barely drink alcohol anymore. I do focus on good nutrition, which I guess leads me to ask you, Siggy, do you have any thoughts on liver and chemotherapy or any kind of strong pharmaceuticals? I was really shocked by what you said a few moments ago about paracetamol, for example.

23:59Dr Sophie Shotter:But also for someone, I guess, like me, post-chemo, post-heavy alcohol use, or anyone worried about liver damage, would you pair, if I wanted to have 100 % certainty, would you pair the scan with a blood test too? I think a blood test, whilst a blood test only shows part of the picture, a liver scan shows part of the picture as well. But what the fibro scan shows is the two things. We're looking at stiffness and we're looking at your liver fat level. you want to have a certain amount of liver fat because that's the energy that you burn and you want to keep that low yours was fantastic you're what i would consider in the blue zone so it's not just green so you've got like green which is healthy and yellow which is not and orange and red purple bad i actually like to look at and i think we all should look at none of us want to be mediocre right i just want to be green i want to be optimal yeah right i want to have optimal liver i want to have optimal health i want to feel and look like i'm 30 when i'm 50 those are all the things that we should be striving for, not accepting mediocrity.