Milk Thistle is a potent detoxifying herb with antioxidant properties and is widely used to help maintain a healthy liver.
Our bodies are constantly under attack from a variety of pollutants, toxins and chemicals. Some of these are in our environment; others like alcohol are self-administered. Your liver works very hard to clear the blood of drugs and poisonous substances that would otherwise accumulate in the bloodstream. When the liver becomes over-loaded and can no longer process the toxins we can become unwell and in the longer term may suffer from a variety of diseases.
Glutathione is an amino acid like compound that is essential to the detoxifying process. You could picture it as an effective 'gatekeeper' limiting the number of toxins that the liver processes at any time. Milk Thistle can help to prevent the depletion of glutathione to ensure that the liver does not process too many toxins at any one time.
Milk Thistle is also a powerful antioxidant so it helps prevent damage from cell damaging molecules in the blood called 'free radicals' that are formed when our bodies are exposed to pollutants.
Milk Thistle is a natural herb that is also known by the same name as its active ingredient Silymarin. It is a member of the sunflower family, with purple flowers whose seeds have been used medicinally for centuries. It is considered to be one of the safest herbs on the market. When buying Milk Thistle products you must make sure that they are made from standardised extract that contains at least 80% Silymarin.
This Healthspan formula contains 88mg of Silymarin (the active ingredient) per tablet, equivalent to 3025mg of whole herb.