Re: middle eastern, greeks, meditereaneans prove liver flush

 someone brought up a great point that if the stones are made in the intestine as a chemical reaction then all the greeks and middle eastern people and mediterraneans would be passing 'soap' in their stools for thousands of years.

First of all most people are not weird and obsessed enough to be picking through their feces to dig out small pieces of saponified olive oil. So this occurs a lot more frequently that people think, but most people don't dig through it and just flush.

And obviously the person making the claim did not understand how these so-called "stones" form.  Some are from the saponification reaction in the intestines. The others are from a sterol-cholesterol complex. The later "stones" require not only the olive oil but also cholesterol from the bile. Regular ingestion of olive oil, such as in the Mediterranean diet, releases the bile from the gallbladder on a regular basis preventing the saturation of the bile with the cholesterol needed to form these "stones" in the intestines. See no magic involved, just simple science.

In addition they are not ingesting magnesium sulfate with meals. Did your friends consider the fact that the breakdown of the magnesium sulfate can form magnesium hydroxide increasing the saponification of the oil?

By the way they should also look up fecal soaps. They are normally formed from the reaction of alkalis on fats in the intestines. But again most people don't go looking for it in their feces. And the soaps don't always form globs that look like real gallstones.