If both liver and kidneys are cleaning the blood, what’s the difference between them?
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A shorter version of all these answers is the liver takes stuff that will kill you today and turns it into stuff that will kill you in a few days. The kidney then removes this less harmful (but still harmful) stuff out of the blood.
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.
there are two ways to deal with toxins in the blood.
* you can turn them into something less toxic, or…
* you can take the toxin out of the blood and dispose of it.
The liver turns toxins into less toxic substances. It can also remove certain toxins from the blood, and dump it into the intestines, so you can poop it out, but mostly it just uses enzymes to chemically converts toxins into chemicals that are harmless (or less harmful).
The kidneys just extract the toxins from the blood, and dumps them into the urine, so you can pee it away. Urine is basically just highly filtered blood, with toxins concentrated into it.
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.
there are two ways to deal with toxins in the blood.
* you can turn them into something less toxic, or…
* you can take the toxin out of the blood and dispose of it.
The liver turns toxins into less toxic substances. It can also remove certain toxins from the blood, and dump it into the intestines, so you can poop it out, but mostly it just uses enzymes to chemically converts toxins into chemicals that are harmless (or less harmful).
The kidneys just extract the toxins from the blood, and dumps them into the urine, so you can pee it away. Urine is basically just highly filtered blood, with toxins concentrated into it.
Easiest way to think about it is that the kidneys filter water soluble solutes and the liver filters fat soluble solutes. They also both have other functions beyond filtration…the liver produces lipoprotein “cholesterols” that transport fat soluble solutes throughout the body. The kidneys produce erythropoietin (which is responsible for red blood cell production), regulate blood pressure, and manage electrolyte balance.
At the most basic ELI 5 level, all the chemicals in your body and that make up your body are small or big. The small ones usually dissolve in water and hate fat, while the big ones only dissolve in fat and hate water.
Your kidney handles the small, water loving chemicals and the liver handles the big fat loving chemicals. Part of the liver’s job is to get rid of large molecules that can’t be broken down well into bile, which goes out your bowel, and another part is to, when it can, break those big molecules down into small ones which do love water and can then be handled by your kidneys.
The most common example of a molecule that starts in your liver but gets broken down there so it can dissolve in water and go out the kidney is urea, which makes your pee yellow. It is how your body gets rid of excess nitrogen from breaking down proteins.
The liver is a chemistry lab. It does lots of things, but one thing it does is take in blood ands breaks down stuff carried in the blood and makes it dissolve better in water (blood’s mostly water).
The kidney is a filter that blood goes through and water mixed with waste (a lot of which is stuff broken up and made easy to dissolve in water by the liver) comes out: pee, which collects in you bladder until it starts to fill up and you pee it out.
The work together.
Easiest way to think about it is that the kidneys filter water soluble solutes and the liver filters fat soluble solutes. They also both have other functions beyond filtration…the liver produces lipoprotein “cholesterols” that transport fat soluble solutes throughout the body. The kidneys produce erythropoietin (which is responsible for red blood cell production), regulate blood pressure, and manage electrolyte balance.
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