The 9-Day Liver Detox Diet – by Patrick Holford

While the author is not “Dr. Patrick Holford”, it’s worth mentioning that he is a career nutritionist with half the alphabet after his name, and decades of experience in the field.

Now, about the detox diet: being well-informed 10almonds readers, you probably know that most detox diets do little to nothing, and your liver detoxes itself; that is literally one of its main jobs.

However! Depending on diet and lifestyle, sometimes it can get a backlog of work, and then it starts struggling. We wrote about that in our article: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver.

The premise of this book is in the largest part very similar to what we wrote there, and it’s about giving your liver a metabolic break, for which it will be grateful and use the slack to do its own internal clean-up and regeneration.

The way Holford recommends doing this is consistent with what we’ve written before, just, in a lot more detail because it’s a whole book. It’s also more extreme, because it’s a 9-day thing rather than our usual focus on sustainability, so for example he’ll often say “cut out” many things where we have often said “reduce” or “avoid”.

In few words:

• Cut out foods with a high glycemic load (e.g. most starches and sugars)
• Cut out foods that are known to be inflammatory (e.g. meat and dairy)
• Enjoy foods that have anti-inflammatory properties (e.g. foods high in antioxidants)

He offers a dietary approach (and of course, a 9-day meal plan, with recipes), and also recommends a lot of supplements. However, if you don’t love taking supplements, then the diet plan is already just fine.

Oddly, he does include a chapter on reintroducing all the “bad” things, which seems like a strange thing to choose to do especially in the cases of things like alcohol if you literally just quit it, but of course it’s an option.

The style is quite old-school pop-science, but still very readable, easy to navigate if looking for specific things, and there’s a bibliography as well as a resource list at the back.

Bottom line: if you’d like to take radical short-term action to improve your liver health quickly, this book will indeed help you to do that!

Click here to check out The 9-Day Liver Detox Diet, and give your liver a chance to get better!