Chairwoman's Message

  Wellness Works – Engaging Employees in Promoting Prevention 

Healthy employees are more productive and help to control medical costs related to preventable illnesses. Empowering individuals to make healthy behavior choices depends on understanding how they can easily participate in staying healthy and avoiding chronic illness that could have been prevented. . . if they had only known how.

The missing piece in efforts to engage individuals in taking responsibility for their own health care is information about the body’s internal power plant and chemical converter. . .the liver.

Why do you eat three meals a day?  You are providing the fuel required to keep the liver processing vitamins for strong bones, proteins to make muscle, carbohydrates and sugar to provide energy, nutrients that create enzymes and immune factors to protect you from the sea of germs that surround you, hormones, clotting factors, and orchestrating hundreds of chemical reactions that keep you alive each day.

How well are you taking care of your liver? 

Apparently millions of people are feeding their liver too many fatty foods and/or simply too much food.  Obesity and fatty livers are causing an ever increasing number of debilitating health problems and untold deaths related to overeating and overworking the liver. One in every 5 Americans has a fatty liver that can lead to cirrhosis.

The liver controls the production of cholesterol that is involved in heart attacks.  It processes the sugar/carbohydrates and foods that can lead to diabetes.  The chemicals in drugs and alcohol that must be processed through the liver can cause liver cells, the workers in the liver, to die.  This is called cirrhosis.

Additional major trouble makers for the liver are hepatitis viruses. These insidious troublemakers enter the blood stream through broken skin or mucous membranes and travel to the liver where they multiply, attack and kill liver cells. Exposure to contaminated blood of infected person through shared needles, tooth brushes or razors, unprotected sex, or through an open cut, are easy ways one can become infected.

Your liver takes care of you every minute of every day.  How did you treat your liver today???

Simple blood tests can tell you how healthy your liver is or if it is in trouble.  Give your liver a break.
 

Author ---Thelma King Thiel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
                Hepatitis Foundation International