The biggest organ inside you
Your liver is the biggest organ inside your body. Your skin is bigger, but it's on the outside! In a grown-up, the liver weighs about 3 pounds.
It sits on the right side of your belly, tucked up under your ribs, which help protect it. It's reddish-brown and shaped a bit like a big, rounded wedge.
Lots of blood flows through your liver all the time. Blood from your stomach and intestines goes to the liver first, so it can check and sort what you eat and drink.
The body's cleaner
Your liver works like a cleaning crew for your blood. It catches waste and things your body doesn't need, and changes them so they are safe.
Some of that waste leaves in your poop, and some goes to your kidneys to leave in your pee.
The liver also helps break down worn-out red blood cells and saves the iron inside them to use again.
Bile, the fat breaker
Your liver makes a yellow-green juice called bile. A grown-up's liver makes about 3 to 4 cups of it every day.
Bile works on fat a lot like dish soap works on a greasy pan. It breaks big blobs of fat into tiny droplets, so your body can digest them.
Bile waits in a little pouch under the liver, the gallbladder, until you eat.
Fun fact: bile is part of what makes poop brown!
A storage closet
Your liver stores energy. After you eat, it saves extra sugar in a form called glycogen (GLY-koh-jen). When you need energy later, like at recess, it turns some back into sugar for your blood.
It also stores vitamins, like A, D and B12, and minerals like iron, so they're ready when your body needs them.
And it makes important things for your blood, like the proteins that help a cut stop bleeding.
The organ that grows back
Your liver has a superpower. If part of it is hurt or taken out, it can grow back to about its full size!
Because of this, a healthy grown-up can give part of their liver to someone who needs one. In a few months, both livers grow back to about the right size.
Very few organs can regrow like this.