Gall Bladder info

I received this in an email today with information on the Gall bladder
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Health e-Tips, January 2, 2002
Dear reader,
Most doctors would probably tell you that you don't need your gallbladder to live a long healthy life. After all, there are plenty of paychecks riding on its removal: Gallbladder
surgery is the most common operation in North America. Every year, more than half a million people in the United States and more than 50,000 people in Canada go under the knife to
remove their gallbladders because of gallstones.

But when the doctor sends you on your way after gallbladder removal, most of the time they're leaving out one crucial piece of advice.

Consider this:

Gallbladders act as storage reservoirs for bile produced in the liver. When you eat anything containing fats or oils, the fat or oil empties into the duodenum from the stomach, and a
hormone is released which (among other things) causes the gallbladder to contract and squirt an increased amount of bile that reaches the intestine just as the fat or oil arrives (this explanation is oversimplified, but it gives you the general idea, which suits our purposes here). The bile is necessary to emulsify the fats or oils for absorption - think of it like those dish detergent commercials where the soap breaks apart the grease on the pans and in the water. All the important fat-soluble essential nutrients are processed and absorbed this way, including vitamins A, D, E, K, and the essential fatty acids.

So what happens when the gallbladder is removed? There's no reservoir or other storage place for bile, so all that remains is just a trickle from the liver. This means that the chances of fat-soluble essential nutrients being emulsified properly and absorbed properly by your body are substantially less if you don't have a gallbladder.

Luckily there is a solution to this problem, though I'll give you fair warning - it's not for the faint of stomach: If you've undergone gallbladder removal, you need to check the color of your stools. They should be dark, approximately the same color as the mud you scrape off your shoes after a walk in the park. If they're lighter - a very light tan or even
yellow - it's likely because of insufficient bile flow. You're probably under-absorbing those essential fat-soluble nutrients that your body desperately needs.

If so, get a bottle of bile salts and start using them after meals. Bile salts are available in natural food stores. But, as Dr. Wright explained to me, there's no exact quantity to advise. Instead, you need to "keep an eye on things" until your stool color has achieved the proper mud-like tone. Dr. Wright says that, in general, several tablets are usually needed after meals with more fats and oils. But it's really going to take some individual "experimentation" to find out exactly how much you need.
One last thing...
One final note about gallbladder removal and bile salts: It's important to keep in mind that you're likely to need the extra bile salts indefinitely to stay optimally healthy despite the absent gallbladder. But unlike patent medicines designed to "mask" problems, the bile salts are helping your body perform the tasks necessary to get the nutrients you need. As Martha Stewart would say, "that's a good thing."

Yours in good health,
Amanda Ross
Associate Publisher
Nutrition & Healing

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