What Happens to Your Body Years After Gallbladder Removal

Around 700,000 gallbladder removals are performed in the US every year. Discover the gallbladder removal side effects they don’t tell you about, what happens years after gallbladder removal, and why a healthy gallbladder is vital for digestive health.

What happens to your body years after the gallbladder is removed? Every single year in the United States, 700,000 people have their gallbladder removed. Most of them are told there’s really no other option, and when you have the gallbladder out, it’s not going to be a problem, so you don’t have to worry about it. And what really ticks me off is [music] the lack of informed consent. The lack of telling the patient what could potentially happen if you have your gallbladder removed.

The gallbladder is really a little sack that stores and concentrates bile, and then when you eat, it contracts to release the bile into your small intestine, so you can actually break down fats. Bile that’s stored in the gallbladder, which by the way is produced in the liver. So, the gallbladder doesn’t produce bile, it just stores it and it concentrates it. The liver makes bile, and it goes down this tube, and it ends up in the gallbladder, so it can be concentrated. So, then it contracts when you eat, and it can help you break down fat.

And when the fat breaks down, it turns into fatty acids, cholesterol, fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A, D, E, and K, omega-3 fats, which have anti-inflammatory properties, phytonutrients in your vegetables like curcumin or carotenoids. A lot of the phytonutrients in your vegetables are fat-soluble. So, you really need healthy bile to be able to extract a lot of good stuff from food to pull it in the body. If you don’t have this bile, you can’t get the benefit of the phytonutrients from your vegetables. Also, bile helps remove toxins from the body, excess hormones like estrogen, pesticides, all sorts of stuff.

Bile is the primary route to get rid of excess cholesterol. Also, bile is antimicrobial. There’s a condition where you have too many microbes in the small intestine. That’s called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. A lot of people have it.

They don’t even know about it, but it creates a lot of bloating, excess fermentation, which is the microbes breaking down food, gas, all sorts of things. So, bile is antimicrobial. And also, the bile is involved in working with the microbes to help make sure you have a healthy thyroid. Okay, so thyroid hormones also rely on bile as well. And then we have something called peristalsis.

In other words, that’s the pumping action of the digestive tract. Bile actually helps that process work. So, if you don’t have enough bile, people tend to be constipated. If you have too much bile, then you get diarrhea. One of the reasons why people have the gallbladder removed is they get a stone, okay, in the gallbladder.

Now, the big question is what causes a stone? Typically, what the stone is made out of is a crystallization of too much cholesterol. When you have too much cholesterol and not enough bile salts or bile acids, whatever you want to call them, then you start to get a thickening or a sludge. And then that actually is kind of the precursor to turn into a stone. So, we have these stages from normal bile to sludge to a stone.

And that is the sluggishness of this gallbladder contracting. Maybe it’s not contracting hard enough. Maybe it’s kind of weak and kind of wimpy. Because if you’re not getting enough contraction, then the bile kind of just sits there and you can develop a stone from that. One of the things that triggers the contraction of the gallbladder is fat.

We’re told to always go low-fat. Well, guess what? Low-fat diets increase the risk of gallstones. Also, excessive estrogen can lead to a stone. This is why women that are pregnant or women that take the birth control pills have a risk factor of developing a gallstone or a problem with the gallbladder.

Now, also on the flip side, if this bile isn’t working that well, then we can’t get rid of the estrogen effectively. So, then estrogen concentrates there and now we have a situation where the estrogen is making things worse. Another big culprit is too much insulin or a condition called insulin resistance. I’ve done a lot of videos on this because the person’s consuming too much refined carbs and starches, they start to have gallbladder problems. I had a gallbladder problem for literally probably 15 years.

I didn’t even know what it was and I had a sensation underneath my right rib cage causing discomfort not only in my right shoulder up into my neck, but also wrapping around to my right rhomboid muscle. And I thought it was a spine problem, but it wasn’t. It was being referred from the gallbladder and the other areas because there was so much pressure building up right through here. And of course, I was eating all the wrong foods raising up my insulin big time. At the time I didn’t know what was going on.

Also, a low thyroid situation can create a problem with this because with a hypothyroid condition, everything is slower. And then we get to something really fascinating which is choline. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of what choline is. Super interesting. I’m going to cover it in just a little bit.

I have a free download that I want to give to you. This free download is my daily routine in a checklist. This is a routine that I use every day to feel like I’m 18 years old even though I’m 60 years old and I want to give it to you for free. And so there’s a little link down below, click it and definitely download that. So, let’s now shift to what happens when they remove the gallbladder and you have complications.

Either we have excess bile that ends up in the small intestine or we have a deficiency of bile. One of the two. One way to quickly know is if you have diarrhea. Now, there’s a medication that is prescribed for that that binds to the bile to help limit that. You may want to look for a natural alternative to that medication because that medication does have side effects and you want to try to find something with less side effects.

I’m going to give you that solution to try to see if it can help you. Again, check with your doctor because I’m not telling you to replace any medication. But, certain fiber also binds to bile salt. Psyllium husk, for example, could be something you could take to actually bind your cholesterol. But, there’s other fibers, too.

Pectin in green apples, especially the peel, is also very effective at binding to the bile salts. And also steamed okra, beets, collard greens, and steamed kale also provide great fiber to lock up some of that excess bile to prevent the diarrhea. In addition to this, I probably would recommend taking a probiotic. Now, what if you don’t have enough bile? What are the symptoms?

Constipation. Your stool will be light colored. It will float. You might end up with higher cholesterol. And then you may have right shoulder pain or a fullness or tightness underneath the right rib cage, even if you don’t have the gallbladder because you still have these bile ducts and you could still have sludge through here.

Why? Because they just removed the sack. They didn’t correct anything. Then the question is, what is the solution if you don’t have enough? Well, you can take bile, like an ox bile, take one or two capsules after you eat.

That will give you the bile you don’t have and that could potentially help solve your problem. And if you’ve had a surgery 5, 6, 10, 20 years ago, and you’re wondering why you can’t see at night in dark, and you have dry eyes, that’s a vitamin A deficiency. Chances are you need more bile to extract more vitamin A. Same thing with vitamin D, vitamin E, all these fat-soluble vitamins. And you have to realize you might need to just take bile to replace what’s not being produced after the meal, and then adjust that dosage based on what you need.

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