There's a factory inside you that weighs about 1.4 kilograms and runs for 24 hours a day.
This is your liver, the heaviest organ in your body, and one of the most crucial.
This industrious structure simultaneously acts as a storehouse, a manufacturing hub, and a processing plant.
And each of these functions involve so many important subtasks that without the liver, our bodies would simply stop working.
One of the liver's main functions is to filter the body's blood, which it receives in regular shipments from two sources: the hepatic artery delivers blood from the heart, while the hepatic portal vein brings it from the intestine.
This double delivery fills the liver with nutrients, that it then sorts, processes and stores with the help of thousands of tiny internal processing plants, known as lobules.
Both blood flows also deliver the oxygen that the liver needs to function.
The blood that is received from the intestine contains carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins and other nutrients dissolved in it from the food you've consumed.
These must be processed in different ways.
In the case of carbohydrates, the liver breaks them down and converts them into sugars for the body to use as energy when the filtered blood is sent back out.