Your gallbladder has just one simple job to do. Your hardworking liver, on the other hand, has many vital tasks, among them manufacturing bile. Rather than hanging onto this green fluid, the liver sends the bile off for storage to the gallbladder, where it sits until needed. Whenever you eat a meal, the gallbladder gets to do its thing. It squirts some of that bile through a narrow tube—the bile duct—into your intestines, where the bile helps digest fats.
You could think of your gallbladder as a kind of intelligent storage bag. So what could go wrong?
Bile, it seems, is chemically complex, is full of cholesterol, tends to thicken, and can harden into stones. The stones can be as tiny as a grain of sand or grow as large as a Ping-Pong ball. They’re harmless enough when they just sit there in the gallbladder. But what with all that squeezing and squirting, gallstones sometimes move into the bile duct where . . . ouch!
Tiny ones pass right through, but larger ones scrape and push and sometimes get stuck. Whenever a larger stone has a hard time getting through that tiny duct, you know all about it. It announces itself with pain, often accompanied by nausea. If it gets stuck in the bile duct or blocks the duct to the pancreas, you could even find yourself facing surgery to remove either the stone or the gallbladder itself.
If you’ve had an episode or two of discomfort from gallstones moving through your bile duct and your doctor has not recommended surgery, you’ll need to take steps to prevent further gallstone formation. For one thing, you’ll want to take a careful look at your diet.
Excess weight is one of the risk factors for gallstones, so dropping some pounds is likely to be helpful. However, you need to be careful about how fast you drop those pounds. Losing more than 3 pounds a week over a period of time has been associated with increased risk for gallstones.
Many doctors recommend following a low-fat, high-fiber diet. If you want to go one step further, you might consider switching to a vegetarian diet for a time. Going all the way back to 1985, researchers have known that vegetarians have fewer gallstones. Back in 1985 a study published in the British Medical Journal, British researchers found that women who ate meat were more than twice as likely as vegetarian women to have gallstones.
If vegetarianism is too extreme for you, however, simply concentrating on getting more vegetables in your diet should prove helpful, according to British Columbia naturopathic physician Peter Bennett, ND, coauthor of 7-Day Detox Miracle and author of The Purification Plan.
Your liver, which is the organ in your body that cleans toxins from your blood, stashes those toxins in the bile that gets squirted into your intestines. If food moves through your intestines too slowly—in other words, if you’re constipated—the toxin-laden bile gets reabsorbed. Vegetables are high in fiber and will help prevent constipation and keep toxins from moving back into your liver and gallbladder, explains Dr. Bennett.
In addition to following a high-fiber, low-fat diet, there are a couple of supplements that may prove helpful.
A little extra fiber can help keep food moving through your digestive system, says Dr. Bennett. He suggests taking 5 grams of soluble fiber—the kind found in pectin, beans, or oat bran—with each meal.
Among other things, bile contains cholesterol, lecithin, and bile acids, says Dr. Bennett. When the bile becomes highly saturated with cholesterol, it’s more likely to form stones, he explains. Taking lecithin can help keep that from happening.
Dr. Bennett recommends taking 500 milligrams of lecithin with each meal.
In 2007, researchers at the University of Kentucky looked at the diets of more than 42,000 men and found that those who consumed more magnesium were significantly less likely to develop gallstones.
A US government survey conducted in 2000 found that magnesium deficiency is commonplace in this country. The Reference Daily Intake is 400 milligrams.
Studies have shown that the amino acids methionine and taurine help keep bile in liquid form and prevent the formation of gallstones, says Dr. Bennett.
In one Japanese study, for example, researchers fed a gallstone-promoting diet to two separate groups of lab animals. One group also received taurine supplements, while the other did not. Researchers found that the taurine-supplemented animals did not produce gallstones.
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Dr. Bennett suggests taking 1 gram each of methionine and taurine twice a day between meals.
The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), published in 2000, found that the higher the levels of vitamin C that women had in their blood, the less likely they were to have gallstones. Curiously, they did not find this effect in men.
Researchers who published the survey did not recommend a dose for vitamin C. However, experts interviewed for this book routinely suggested 200 to 500 milligrams of vitamin C as a good therapeutic dose.
If you’ve had problems with gallstones, you need to be under a doctor’s care.
Fiber |
5 grams, three times a day, with meals |
Lecithin |
500 milligrams, three times a day, with meals |
Magnesium* |
400 milligrams |
Methionine |
1 gram, twice a day, between meals |
Taurine |
1 gram, twice a day, between meals |
Vitamin C |
200 to 500 milligrams |
*If you have impaired kidney function or any kind of kidney disease, you should not take this much magnesium unless you have your doctor’s approval.