Gallbladder Matters (More Than You Think) - Ask a Nutritionist

Transcript:

LEAH: Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt. I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. This podcast helps people around the world make the connection between what you eat and how you feel.

I want to thank you all so much for your support and listenership over the years. And if you're enjoying this show, let us know by leaving a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps others find these important real food messages. So on today's show, I will be answering one question that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

And this listener asks, please share tips for gallbladder health and gallstone prevention. So great question. I've worked with a handful of clients over the years who are actively dealing with gallbladder issues and gallstones, but more often I see clients who have marked gallbladder removed on their health questionnaire.

So for some clients, this was maybe a procedure they had done a year ago. For many clients, this is 15, 20, even 30 years ago that they had that procedure done. So whenever I see this marked on a health questionnaire, I do make it a point to ask clients about what happened with their gallbladder, what led to the gallbladder being removed and just how things changed for them and their health after their gallbladder was removed.

It could help give me some clues into other aspects of their health, which we'll chat about here in just a little bit. I do want to say, for one little innocent organ, there's a lot of ins and outs when it comes to keeping the gallbladder happy and healthy. Especially when the conventional thought around the gallbladder tends to be that it's kind of a throwaway organ.

It's kind of like, yeah, it's nice to have your bile stored up in this neat little package, but you won't die without your gallbladder. So it's not really a big deal to have it taken out. But what I've found over the years of, as I've learned more about how the gallbladder and the bile tie into so many other systems in the body, the more I am convinced that we actually do need to care a lot about our gallbladder and try to keep it around as long as we can.

It's not always possible, but there are things we can do to help improve the health of our gallbladder to help that bile flow nice and easily. And again, this is a big topic so I'm going to summarize and try to hit the high points of gallbladder and bile health with this mini episode.

But please know we have covered gallbladder health and a few other full length Dishing Up Nutrition episodes in the past. Specifically, we did a show called “How the Gallbladder Impacts Digestion”. That was back in June of 2019. We did another show called “Post Gallbladder Surgery: What Can I Eat?” back in February of 2017.

And we did a special episode called “Radical Metabolism” with one of our listener favorite guests, Ann Louise Gittleman. And that was in August of 2018, where Ann Louise makes the connection between gallbladder health and the health of our thyroid and also the health of our metabolism. So go ahead and go back and listen to those if you're looking for a little bit more in depth discussion about the nutrition connection to gallbladder health.

Basics of the gallbladder

So, let's talk some basics really quick about the gallbladder first. Let's just lay out the land a little bit. The gallbladder is this little pear shaped organ that sits in the upper right quadrant of the abdomen, and it sits right under the liver. Now, the job of the gallbladder is to store and concentrate bile.

And bile is this kind of yellow, greenish, brownish fluid that's made in the liver, and then it gets stored sent down a little tube or a little duct down into the gallbladder. So the gallbladder acts as a holding tank for the bile until the gallbladder gets the signal from the small intestine that says, Hey, we've got food coming down the pipe.

Please send bile to help with digesting this food. And actually in particular with digesting the fat. So bile is really critical for digesting and emulsifying fats and cholesterol and for helping us digest and absorb our fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Think of like dish soap mixing with water and that emulsifies and breaks down food particles like on our plate and breaks down the fats on that plate so that we can get our dishes clean.

Same idea with the gallbladder. So if someone is eating a lower fat diet, so hello, 80s and 90s nutrition, the gallbladder may not be getting signals properly to make and to send bile down to the small intestine. That can create some slow or sludgy bile.

What are gallstones & what causes them?

So then we have to ask like, what's the story with gallstones? Like, how do those happen? Why do they happen? Who do they happen to? About 10 to 15 percent of the population gets gallstones at some point in their life.

So what happens is the flow of bile, it might start to get slowed down or that bile liquid starts to get thicker and get sludgy or congealed over time. And when this happens, there can be little crystals or deposits that develop in the gallbladder, and this is known as gallstones. So there can be a lot of tiny little crystals that get all packed into that gallbladder and then there can also be larger crystals that plug up the ducts that go from the gallbladder down to the intestinal tract.

So this prevents that bile from getting down into the small intestine and prevents that bile from being able to do its work. When this happens, it's incredibly painful and miserable, and this is what people will often call a gallbladder attack. The stone or the stones, they may pass on their own after a while, or the gallbladder may need to be surgically removed and those stones need to be taken care of.

Women are twice as likely to have gallstones as men, mostly due to hormone differences, especially related to estrogen. But there are other things that raise the risk of having that kind of slow and sludgy bile and gallbladder problems. And that includes things like insulin resistance or blood sugar issues, fatty liver disease, hypothyroidism, being sedentary, so not moving much throughout the day, taking medications with estrogen in them.

So think like hormone replacement therapy or birth control. Also really rapid weight loss. So just another reason why crash dieting and trying to lose a lot of weight very quickly isn't a really great idea. So one thing I want to double click on really quick is that gallbladder health relates a lot to the health and flow of the bile.

So the poor gallbladder kind of gets a bad rap for issues with sludgy and stagnant bile. So when we think about a healthy gallbladder, we have to think about healthy bile and good bile flow. So the question is, what helps those things? Well, before I continue on, I'm going to pause here. We do have to take a quick break. And when we come back, I will share some important tips for taking care of your bile, which helps in turn take care of the gallbladder.

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Fiber promotes healthy, free flowing bile

LEAH: Welcome back. So let's talk about things we can do to help promote healthy and free flowing bile. One important thing we can do is to eat a diet that is rich in fiber. So otherwise known as eat your vegetables and get as much variety as you can with those vegetables.

So fiber is hugely important to help regulate those blood sugars. And remember I mentioned insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, blood sugar issues. These are risk factors for having that sludgy bile. Fiber helps slow down the digestion of food and carbohydrates in the gut, which leads to more steady blood sugars after a meal.

And that is exactly what we want. We want those nice, steady, rolling hills blood sugar after we eat. Fiber is also crucial for supporting digestion and gut health from bulking up the stool to feeding our good gut bugs. And newer research suggests that inflammation and imbalances in the gut may be a predisposing factor to having inflammation in the gallbladder and may lead to gallstones.

Gluten can increase inflammation for some

And then when we have bile that's sludgy and unhealthy, this creates more inflammation and mayhem in the gut. So you can see this ties in and creates this vicious cycle that we have to try to break. So if you take the gut and the gallbladder connection one step further, and thinking about inflammation in the gut may lead to inflammation in the gallbladder, it may be helpful to run a gluten free trial for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, to see if an undetected gluten sensitivity is an issue.

For most people, gluten creates a leaky gut phenomenon. Most people have heard that term before, leaky gut. And that just means that the gaps between the cells in the intestinal tract open up and they stay open. So those cells open up, there's a gap in between, and it lets things from the gut get into the bloodstream, which is no bueno; that's not what we want.

But it turns out that the liver and the gallbladder may also be affected in a similar way to leaky gut when they're exposed to gluten. So think you could possibly have a leaky liver situation or leaky gallbladder, if you will. And additionally, if gluten has affected the small intestine, it might not be able to signal to the gallbladder properly.

That will have an impact on how well bile is released and how often or how well we move that bile into the digestive tract. So all of this to say is that gallbladder health includes addressing any issues in the gut; this could range from swallowing issues or reflux all the way down to diarrhea and constipation.

The importance of bitter flavors/bitters for gallbladder health

So there's no healing the gallbladder without also healing the gut along with it. Another big ticket item that I think about when it comes to bile and eating for gallbladder health is using bitters. We have receptors for bitter flavors all throughout our digestive tract. When we consume bitter foods or bitter spices or anything with that bitter flavor, it signals to the rest of the digestive tract to start making its own juices and digestive enzymes.

This includes signaling the liver to make bile and it includes signaling the gallbladder to squirt out that bile. So what are bitter foods? Luckily, this includes everyone's favorite beverage, coffee. Just not the kind of coffee that's loaded down with tons of creamer and sugar and different flavorings.

The goal is that you want the bitterness of the coffee to really come through. You don't have to drink it straight black, but this is a case where the stronger, the better in terms of that bitter flavor.

Other bitter foods include things like grapefruit, leafy greens, like arugula and watercress and kale, dandelion greens, citrus peels and spices and herbs like thyme and turmeric and ginger and cacao.

So again, think like the darkest dark chocolate that you can find. So you can work toward incorporating some of these foods into your routine every day. Maybe you already do the coffee piece. So maybe your next step is to do something like cook more with turmeric and ginger or add some kale into an egg scramble in the morning.

Again, like kind of pepper some of these foods in where you're able to. You can also use a supplement of digestive bitters. This is usually a tincture of bitter herbs that's mixed in a little bit of water and alcohol, and you drop it on your tongue to saturate your taste buds with that bitter flavor.

You can use these before you eat or during a meal and even in between meals. I tell clients you can use it any time if you ever feel like your meal or your snack just doesn't sit quite right in your stomach that you can use the digestive bitters anytime. At Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we really like a brand called Urban Moonshine.

We carry some in our Nutrikey store. I tend to keep a bottle of those digestive bitters at work and at home. It's just a tool in my toolbox when I feel like my digestion just needs a little bit of a leg up. Bitters can also be super helpful for things like reflux and just reducing gas and bloating after a meal. So it's a jack of all trades. It can be very helpful for a lot of different digestive things, including bile and gallbladder health.

Physical activity & digestive enzymes promote gallbladder health

And I'd say the last two little nuggets that I think about that I'll throw into the ring when it comes to gallbladder health. One is moving our bodies; every single day with some kind of physical activity.

The other is supplementing with a digestive enzyme that contains ox bile. So that physical activity, first and foremost, it means that we're moving our abdomen, which means more movement for the gut, which means more movement of bile. So just like movement is important for moving our bowels daily, movement is also really important to help bile flow more efficiently.

So get out and move, get out and walk, do some kind of activity and get up out of that chair as often as you can. As for the digestive enzyme, so a digestive enzyme that includes a little bit of hydrochloric acid or HCl and some ox bile, that helps to thin that bile out so it doesn't slow down and get sludgy, so it can flow better.

This can be hugely helpful for preventing gallstones. I find that a digestive enzyme with ox bile in it, to be usually pretty helpful for my clients with all kinds of digestive complaints, but also for those who have had their gallbladder removed in the past, and maybe they are still struggling with digesting certain kinds of foods or certain kinds of fats.

My go to is our Nutrikey Key Digestive Enzymes, which has both a little bit of that hydrochloric acid and ox bile. It does also have a couple of those bitter herbs and roots that we talked about earlier too. So kind of a nice well rounded digestive enzyme. I have had clients who do find benefit from just supplementing with ox bile or hydrochloric acid alone.

So it might just take a little experimenting to find the right combo for you. Just know that a little extra digestive firepower can go a long way with helping you feel better and helping address some of those symptoms. So, again, I tried to hit the high points. There is a lot more we can dig into around gallbladder health, so I do encourage you to listen to some of those full length gallbladder episodes that I mentioned at the top of the show.

You will glean more nuggets out of that. It's a lot of ground to cover for one little organ. So I hope that was helpful. I want to thank you all again for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist”. Again, if you found this episode helpful, be sure to leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app.

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