I Trained Five Days A Week. His Panel Came Back Better Than Mine.

Why fit people get flagged

I Trained Five Days A Week. His Panel Came Back Better Than Mine.

Six years without missing a session. The man beside me at the screening had never set foot in a gym. His liver numbers were the clean ones. It took me four months to find out why, and the answer was not fitness.

Nordvia Research Desk · Written against published literature on the individual ingredients · Updated September 2026 · Estimated 7 minute read · References at the foot of this page

Advertisement. Fictional dramatization, not a customer testimonial. The narrator, colleagues, dialogue and events below are invented to illustrate a mechanism.

The company put on a health screening in March. Free bloods, a blood pressure cuff, a nurse in a meeting room with the blinds down.

A man in his forties in training clothes sitting on a gym changing-room bench reading a printed lab result
I read it in the changing room, which in hindsight was the wrong place to read it.

I went in relaxed. I am forty-one. I lift four mornings a week and run on Saturdays. I have weighed my food, on and off, since I was twenty-six. I had not missed more than ten days of training in six years.

Dave went in after me. Dave is fifty, buys lunch from the garage, and describes exercise as something that happens to other people. We joked about it in the corridor. He said he was going in to get told off.

Two weeks later the results came back by email.

Dave’s cholesterol was a mess and his blood pressure needed watching. All of which he expected, and none of which surprised anybody.

My liver enzymes were flagged. His were not.

ALT 68. AST 54. Two small numbers, in bold, on the panel belonging to the fittest person in the room.

The First Thing I Did Was Assume It Was Wrong

I want to be honest about the next month, because I think the reaction is the interesting part.

I decided it was a lab error. Then I decided it was the deadlift session I had done two days before the draw, because I had read somewhere that hard training can nudge AST. Then I decided it was the creatine. Then I decided it was nothing, because I feel fine, and a man who trains five days a week and feels fine does not have a liver problem.

I paid for a retest privately in May, eight days off training, no supplements, nothing to blame.

ALT 64.

That is when I actually sat down and read.

Fit People Get This More Often Than Anyone Says Out Loud

The condition has a new name as of 2023 — metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease — and the reason they renamed it is that the old name had the word alcoholic in it, and that one word was sending everybody, patients and doctors both, to the wrong conclusion.

Most of it is metabolic. And metabolic does not mean lazy.

Here is the sentence that rearranged my thinking, and I am going to put it plainly because nobody put it plainly to me:

Training burns fat that is sitting in your muscle and under your skin. It does not, by itself, get fat out of your liver.

Those are two different processes. I had spent six years getting extremely good at one of them and had never once been told the other existed.

How Fat Actually Leaves The Liver

It does not drain. It does not burn off in place. It does not respond to how much you care.

Fat leaves liver tissue exactly one way: the liver packages it into a transport particle and ships it out through the bloodstream. That packaging is a physical thing that has to be built, and the main material the body builds it from is choline.

No packaging, no export. The fat stays where it is regardless of your body fat percentage, your weekly mileage, or how clean your macros are.

And then I looked up where choline comes from.

The richest dietary sources of choline are egg yolks, liver, and red meat. They are also, almost without exception, the first three things a person cuts when they decide to get serious about eating well.

I had been eating egg-white omelettes since 2019. Four eggs, yolks in the bin, every single morning, because the yolk is where the fat and the cholesterol are and I was being disciplined.

The yolk is also where every bit of the choline is.

A man separating eggs at a dawn kitchen counter with four intact yolks discarded in the bin below
Every morning for six years. I was very consistent about it.

Red meat down to twice a week. Liver never, because who eats liver. Whey protein instead of whole food at two meals a day, which is a fine protein source and contains essentially none of what I am describing.

Dave, meanwhile, eats a full breakfast from the garage most mornings. Yolks included.

I am not telling you Dave is healthier than me. His cholesterol is genuinely a problem and he knows it. I am telling you that on this one specific mechanism, his diet was supplying something mine had been stripping out for six years, and the panel showed it.

The Part That Made Me Angry

I had a supplement shelf. Of course I had a supplement shelf.

Whey. Creatine. A multivitamin. Magnesium for sleep. Fish oil. Vitamin D through the winter. Two hundred pounds a year, give or take, on things I had researched properly and could defend in an argument.

Not one of them supplied choline. Not one of them touched a liver pathway. Every product on that shelf was aimed at performance, recovery or a deficiency the internet had told me to worry about, and the organ that had actually been flagged on my bloods had nothing on it at all.

The one thing I did eventually buy for it was a milk thistle bottle from the pharmacy, because that is the name everybody knows.

Four Jobs, Not One

Milk thistle protects liver cells from further damage. That is real, it is the most studied herb in the category, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It is also one job out of four.

What the organ is actually asking for

  • Rebuild. The liver runs its filtering on glutathione and manufactures it continuously. It can only build it from cysteine, and the reliable way to supply that is NAC — the same compound hospitals put into an IV when a liver is in acute trouble.
  • Move. Fat has to be packaged before it can leave. That is choline, and it is the one I had personally removed from my diet.
  • Drain. What the liver breaks down still has to exit, through bile. Dandelion and artichoke support that flow.
  • Protect. Milk thistle. The one I already owned.

Cover one and the other three carry on unattended. That is not a motivation problem — it is a coverage problem, and it is very easy to have while feeling extremely virtuous.

What I Take Now

Nordvia Complete Liver Support. It is a liquid, and it covers all four — NAC and L-Glutathione to rebuild, choline to move the fat, dandelion and artichoke to drain, milk thistle to protect.

Four jobs, not one: build with NAC, clean with L-Glutathione, clear with Choline Citrate, protect with milk thistle
Four jobs, in the order the organ needs them.

I chose it on coverage, not on marketing. I had already worked out that the alternative was four separate bottles bought at four separate anxious moments, and I know myself well enough to know I would have taken two of them.

A four-segment bar with only PROTECT filled in, and BUILD, CLEAN and CLEAR slash DRAIN left empty
What the pharmacy bottle was covering. One segment out of four.

Two millilitres a day. The bottle is 60 mL, which is thirty servings — a month, exactly. Every active and every amount is printed on the panel, which after six years of weighing oats I was not going to compromise on.

A loading depot with no boxes: fat needs packaging to leave the liver, choline citrate 50mg
Six years of discipline, aimed with great precision at the wrong number.
I did not stop training. Nothing here says exercise is pointless — it is one of the few things with genuinely good evidence behind it for this. What it does not do is supply the material the export step is built from. I kept the training. I put the yolks back. I added the thing that had been missing from both.
See all four jobs on one labelNAC · L-Glutathione · Choline · Milk Thistle · Dandelion · Artichoke — 2mL daily

What To Expect, Honestly

The honest timeline: weeks 1 to 2 nothing yet, weeks 3 to 4 afternoons lighten, weeks 5 to 8 retest window
Nothing useful happens in a week. That is the biology, not the marketing.
Weeks 1–2Most people feel nothing at all. This is where people quit and blame the product.
Weeks 3–4Afternoons tend to be the first thing that shifts. Not a surge — an absence. If you train, the flat sessions are usually the first to go.
Weeks 5–8The window where a repeat panel starts being worth paying for.
Week 8+Steady state. Livers repair slowly and nothing changes that.
Do this first: get the number. ALT and AST sit on most standard panels already — ask for them by name. Write down what they are today. In sixty days you are looking at evidence instead of a feeling, which if you already track your training is the only way you were ever going to judge this anyway.

Why I Did Not Buy One Bottle

One bottle is thirty days. The guarantee runs sixty.

Buy a single month, judge it at the end of the month, and you have arranged the one version of this decision where the guarantee cannot actually protect you — you will have run out before you are allowed to have an opinion.

An empty Nordvia bottle beside an open shipping box with a 60 days full refund seal
Empty is fine. That is the point of a guarantee that outlasts the bottle.

Three bottles is ninety days, which is also roughly the interval a repeat panel is worth booking at. Take it, re-test, and send it back if nothing moved.

Buy 3, get the 90 days — $97.60Free Liver Panel Decoder ($39) · free shipping · 60-day money-back, empty bottles accepted

Frequently Asked

Can hard training raise liver enzymes on its own?

Yes, particularly AST, which is also released by muscle. That is exactly why a retest after a rest week is worth doing before you conclude anything. Mine came back 64 after eight days off and no supplements, which is what made me stop arguing with it.

I already eat clean. Why would I be short of anything?

Because the specific foods richest in choline — yolks, liver, red meat — are the ones most clean-eating plans cut hardest. A low-fat, high-protein, whey-heavy diet can be excellent on every number you were tracking and still supply very little of it.

Will this affect my training or my lifts?

There are no stimulants in it, nothing banned, and nothing that acts on performance directly. If you are tested competitively, check any product with your governing body first — that applies to everything on your shelf, not just this.

Can I take it with whey, creatine and the rest of my stack?

Yes. It does not overlap with any of them, which is rather the point — none of them were covering this.

What if nothing changes?

Sixty days, send it back, empty bottles accepted, full refund. No forms.

Start the 90 days3 bottles $97.60 · 1 bottle $44.99 · 60-day money-back guarantee

Six years of training was not wasted and I would do it again. It was just aimed at a different organ than the one that got flagged, and nobody in six years had ever mentioned that the two were not the same project.

References Rinella ME et al. “A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature.” Hepatology, 2023. · Corbin KD & Zeisel SH. “Choline metabolism provides novel insights into non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and its progression.” Current Opinion in Gastroenterology. · Zeisel SH & da Costa KA. “Choline: an essential nutrient for public health.” Nutrition Reviews. · Kwo PY et al. “ACG Clinical Guideline: Evaluation of Abnormal Liver Chemistries.” American Journal of Gastroenterology.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Statements about ingredients reflect published research on those ingredients individually and not on the finished formula; individual results vary. This article is general information, not medical advice, and is not a diagnostic tool or a substitute for evaluation by a qualified physician. Abnormal liver results have many possible causes, some of them serious — discuss yours with your doctor, do not alter prescribed medication without medical advice, and consult your physician before starting any supplement, particularly if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication or managing a diagnosed condition.

Nordvia Complete Liver Support · 60-day guaranteeShop Now