Re: From my biochemistry manual - may help you

That was another thing I had been taking regularly, with the bile salts, and have also gotten negligent about. I've also read that most of the time, people that have their gallbladders removed, within 10 years will also have blood Sugar problems because of the extra stress that is put on the pancreas.

Thanks for the information Telman. I am starting to understand this better. A couple of things that were in the article in the link I gave, also stood out:

>>Bile is a complex biochemical mixture, made continuously by the liver — 500-1000 ml/day passing down into the duodenum via the bile duct. There is a diversion in this journey: a small 50 ml sac — the gall bladder — fills with bile from the liver, and, by absorbing water across its walls, concentrates bile 5-6-fold.>>

So, no gallbladder means...bile isn't concentrated either.

And then this also:

>>The function of these remarkable molecules is inextricably involved with cholesterol. The two main bile acids, cholic acid and chenodeoxycholic acid, are both made from cholesterol in the liver and pass into the bile in combination with amino acids, as bile salts. Cholesterol is virtually insoluble in water, and in the words of the 1989 Nobel prizewinners, Brown and Goldstein, ‘Cholesterol is a Janus-faced molecule. The very property that makes it useful in the cell membrane, namely its insolubility in water, also makes it lethal.’ (The authors were referring to the crucial part played by cholesterol in the pathological process of atherosclerosis.) So the body has resorted to some remarkable strategies to excrete this difficult substance, and it seems that cholesterol excreted by the liver is partly extracted from the circulation and partly made by the liver itself. The body's main strategy is to use bile salts as detergents: the molecules have a water-soluble (hydrophilic) side and a fat-soluble (hydrophobic) side. This enables bile salts to make small parcels (‘micelles’) including several different molecules, with cholesterol as contents and bile salts as the wrapping. The hydrophobic aspect of the bile salt faces inwards, and the hydrophilic aspect faces outwards into the aqueous component of bile.

The bile micelles pass into the duodenum, where the detergent action of the bile salts emulsifies fats, which are then broken down by the enzyme lipase from the pancreas. Bile salts also assist the final absorption of the products of fat digestion. Both bile and lipase are necessary for the proper absorption of fats by the small intestine. Without one or other of these two, there is deficiency of the vital fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E and K, and malabsorption causes fat to appear in the faeces (steatorrhoea).>>>

http://www.answers.com/topic/bile

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