Top 7 liver supplements, tested and ranked. I spent $487 across five months. Here's what actually moved my bloodwork.
My ALT was 64. My AST was 44. Fatty liver, grade 1. My doctor spent eight minutes telling me to lose weight and try Mediterranean. I went home, opened a spreadsheet, and started testing the supplement aisle.
The day I picked up my second set of labs, my doctor pulled up a chart that looked identical to the one from a year earlier. ALT 64. AST 44. He said the words "fatty liver, grade 1" the same way he'd said them in 2024. Lose weight. Try Mediterranean. Recheck next year. The whole appointment took eight minutes. He closed the door behind me and was on to the next chart.
I am 54 years old. I am a paralegal. I do not have another twelve months to sit in traffic and hope my liver gets bored of being inflamed. So I did what anyone with a deductible and an internet connection does. I went down the supplement aisle, with a spreadsheet and a willingness to pay for my own bloodwork.
Over five months I bought seven different liver products. Tea. Powder. Capsules. A $70-a-month "reset." I tested them one at a time, with a four-week run on each, and a fresh blood panel between most of them. Total tab, including labs: $487. What I learned about this category is mostly bad news for the people selling it.
Below are the seven, ranked from worst to best. The last one is the one I'm still taking.
Yogi Tea DeTox, Liver and Kidney
Money Score
What works
- Pleasant ritual; tastes like licorice and ginger
- Cheapest entry on this list by a factor of three
- Zero side effects of any kind
What doesn't
- No clinical actives at any meaningful dose
- Burdock and dandelion in tea-bag amounts move nothing
- "DeTox" is a marketing word, not a mechanism
I drank this every morning for two weeks. It is a perfectly nice tea. It is not, in any clinical sense, a treatment. The active ingredients are present in herbal-tea quantities, meaning small, unstandardized, and well below anything that's moved liver enzymes in a trial. My ALT after two weeks: 64. Identical to baseline. I kept drinking it after the experiment because I liked the taste. I stopped pretending it was doing anything.
Organifi Liver Reset
Money Score
What works
- Mixes cleanly, no chalky aftertaste
- Includes recognizable hepatic herbs on the label
- Third-party tested for heavy metals
What doesn't
- "Proprietary blend" hides every individual dose
- $840/year for a formula with no published per-ingredient amount
- Bloodwork unchanged after a full 30-day cycle
$70 a month. The label lists eleven ingredients tucked inside a "proprietary blend," which is the supplement industry's way of telling you the dose without telling you the dose. Could be 500mg of milk thistle. Could be 50. I drank it for a month, $70 lighter, ALT 63. Honest brands publish their amounts. The ones that don't are usually leaning hardest on the cheapest ingredients in the jar.
BulkSupplements NAC Powder
Money Score
What works
- Cheapest NAC dose on the planet
- Single ingredient, full label transparency
- COA available on request
What doesn't
- Standard oral NAC: 4–9% bioavailability
- Sulfur burps for 2–3 hours after every dose
- Tastes like a swimming pool; needs juice to choke down
Raw NAC powder is the closest you'll come to free. It's also the worst delivery form of an already-poorly-absorbed molecule. Standard oral NAC clocks in at 4–9% bioavailability, meaning most of what you swallow ends up in the toilet, not your liver. My ALT moved two points over three weeks. Could be the supplement. Could be lab noise. The sulfur burps were unambiguous.
Liver MD by 1MD Nutrition
Money Score
What works
- cGMP-manufactured, third-party tested
- Tolerated cleanly; no GI issues
- Real milk-thistle content at a real dose
What doesn't
- NAC content is token, well below therapeutic
- Formula reads like recognizable focus-group ingredients
- Ad spend explains the brand recognition, not the science
If you've spent ten minutes on YouTube in the last year, you've seen this product. The formula is milk thistle, dandelion, turmeric, artichoke, beetroot, and a courtesy sprinkle of NAC well below therapeutic range. It is a perfectly fine multivitamin sold as a liver intervention. After four weeks my ALT was 62. The recognizable label doesn't mean recognizable results. It means recognizable marketing.
Luma Nutrition Liposomal NAC
Money Score
What works
- Liposomal carrier actually clears the stomach
- Zero sulfur burps; clean tolerability
- Bloodwork moved in a month, modestly
What doesn't
- 600mg is half the clinical 1,200mg dose
- Doubling the label doubles the price
- One ingredient, premium pricing, partial commitment
Right idea, half-built. Liposomal delivery wraps NAC in a phospholipid carrier so it survives the stomach and reaches the bloodstream at roughly 40% bioavailability instead of 7%. Luma uses the right format. They just put half the clinical dose in the capsule. I doubled the serving and watched my ALT drop from 62 to 56 in four weeks. Promising. But I shouldn't have to override the label to hit a researched dose.
Thorne NAC
Money Score
What works
- NSF-certified, used by professional sports teams
- Decades of quality-control reputation
- Clean single-ingredient formula, no fillers
What doesn't
- Plain capsule; no delivery technology
- Same 4–9% bioavailability ceiling as the powder
- Two pills to hit 1,000mg, still under clinical 1,200mg
Thorne is genuinely one of the most credible names in the category, and I want to be clear that this critique is structural, not personal. Their QC is excellent. Their sourcing is excellent. The formulation is from a decade where capsule was the answer to every question. Two pills got me to 1,000mg of NAC and, on plain-capsule absorption math, probably under 100mg into circulation. ALT moved from 56 to 53. Respectable. Not state-of-the-art.
Orvia Labs Liposomal NAC
Money Score
What works
- Full clinical 1,200mg dose in the recommended serving
- Liposomal delivery (up to ~85% bioavailability vs. 4–9%)
- Zero sulfur burps; clean tolerability
What doesn't
- Newer brand; less institutional history than Thorne
- Not the cheapest option per bottle
This is the one I kept. Two capsules in the morning. No sulfur, no powder ritual, no six-pill protocol. Over eight weeks my ALT dropped from 56 to 31 and my AST from 44 to 26, back inside the reference range for the first time in three years. I'm aware my results aren't typical, and I'm aware I changed nothing else except this supplement. The formula isn't doing anything magical. It does the one boring thing nobody else does: it actually puts a clinical dose of well-absorbed NAC into the bottle, and doesn't hide it inside a blend.
All seven, side by side
One table, every dose, every price, every absorption number, so you can stop scrolling.
| Rank | Product | NAC Dose | Delivery | Price | Bloodwork Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #7 | Yogi Tea DeTox Avoid |
None | Tea | ~$5 | No change |
| #6 | Organifi Liver Reset Skip |
Undisclosed | Powder blend | ~$70/mo | No change |
| #5 | BulkSupplements NAC Weak |
600mg | Raw powder | ~$17 | −2 (noise) |
| #4 | Liver MD by 1MD Overhyped |
Token | Multi-blend | $42–52 | No change |
| #3 | Luma Liposomal NAC Close |
600mg | Liposomal | ~$25–30 | −6 ALT |
| #2 | Thorne NAC Respectable |
500mg/cap | Plain capsule | ~$26 | −3 ALT |
| #1 | Orvia Labs Liposomal NAC Winner |
1,200mg | Liposomal | $39.90 | −25 ALT · −18 AST |
What the industry doesn't tell you
Proprietary blends are a marketing technology, not a science one. A "blend" lets a brand list ten exciting ingredients without telling you the dose of any of them. If a formula works, the dose is the entire point. It's what got studied, and what moved the bloodwork in the trial. A blend without doses is a confession that the cheap ingredients are doing the heavy lifting.
Standard NAC wastes most of the dose. Oral NAC at 4–9% bioavailability means a 600mg capsule delivers somewhere between 24 and 54mg into circulation. The clinical trials on NAC and liver enzymes use 1,200mg of well-absorbed NAC. Most NAC bottles on Amazon are a five-cent capsule with a four-dollar story.
Brand reputation is not formulation quality. A 30-year-old supplement company with great manufacturing standards can still sell a formula designed in 1998. Reputation tells you they won't poison you. It doesn't tell you the formula is current.
What I wish I'd known
- Get your bloodwork before and after, every time. ALT, AST, GGT. If a bottle won't move your numbers in four weeks, you'll have the receipts.
- Ignore the marketing words. "Cleanse" is meaningless. "Reset" is meaningless. "Restore" is the weakest word in the supplement aisle.
- Read the dose, not the front of the bottle. If the amount is buried inside a proprietary blend, assume you're being underdosed.
- Pay for delivery, not just ingredients. A clinical-dose ingredient with no absorption is an expensive way to do nothing.
If you want to run the same experiment on your bloodwork
I'm not your doctor. I'm one paralegal with one set of labs and one strong opinion about which bottle on my shelf earned its place. Orvia Labs has a 90-day money-back guarantee, which means you can put your own ALT to the test and ask for your money back if the numbers don't move. That's the only test that matters.
See Orvia Labs Liposomal NAC