If both liver and kidneys are cleaning the blood, what’s the difference between them?
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ELi5 Version: The liver filters stuff you consume that is going INTO your bloodstream from outside the body. Your body produces a lot of waste as a byproduct of its existence and a lot of that waste gets dumped back into your bloodstream or accumulates in there so your kidneys filter our the waste already in your bloodstream.
So think of it like your body is a fishtank and all your organs are the little fishies swimming around. If you need to top up the fish tank and just dump tap water in there you will likely kill your fish because it doesn’t have the right pH, the chemicals in the tap water are harmful to the fish, or maybe they’re saltwater and so freshwater will kill them.
Your liver is like the filter/preprocessing you do to your water before adding it to the tank. It balances out the pH, it adds salt, it cleans out any chemicals or minerals that might be harmful to the fishies and then you can drop the water into the tank.
Now your kidneys are like the actual tank filter. Its job is to clean out fish poop and scales and leftover food. it’s not really designed to balance out pH levels or add salt to freshwater but it is really good at filtering out fish waste.
They do a similar job but in very different ways and are optimized for different parts of the process: intaking fresh, clean water and outputting dirty yucky water.
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