Bile question

[Dawn]

Hi Shelley. I noticed under the liver management page that you wrote:

30 minutes later eat a high-fiber breakfast, or eat sauteed apples or apple sauce, or a Fiber Shake. The fiber will trap some the bile and stop it from
being re-absorbed by the liver. It's why oats seem to lower cholesterol.

Why don't we want the bile reabsored by the liver? What's wrong with bile? Doesn't it have a useful function in the body?

Thanks
Dee

[Troy McClure]

Dee,
the body uses bile for 2 main functions. 1 is to help emulsify fats for digestion. 2. As a store for toxins filtered by the liver.

These apparently unrelated tasks are fulfilled by 1 substance - bile. So yes bile is useful, but equally it needs to be removed.

The liver is the main filter of the body - it filters the blood of toxins. These toxins have to be stored somewhere - that somewhere is bile.

Think of bile as being like a set of garbage bags. Garbage bags are great for clearing up the house. But if you don't take the garbage out, soon you are creating one big mess! In the same way bile must be removed from the body, otherwise you will become very toxic.

The way nature takes care of this is every time you eat fats in your diet you release bile from the gallbladder. It then mixes with your food in the small intestine. Now 90% of this bile will get reabsorbed at the end of your small intestine (just before the colon). The body is incredibly good at recycling, and will hang on to most of your bile. However if you have fibre in your meal, the fibre will bind to much of the bile and take it out of your body via your stools. So much more garbage gets outside this way.

This is one of the main reasons why high fibre diets are so good - and how/why they lower cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of the main ingredients of bile. This is also a reason why low fat diets are not a good idea - they stop bile from being released and so low-fat people tend to be more toxic.

So what happens if our bile binds to fibre and exits our body? Won't we run out of bile? No that hardly ever happens as the body is very efficient at making bile.

So bottom line is think of bile as being like a garbage bag - very useful for keeping the house clean - but only if we remember to take the garbage out every once in a while!

[h0ppy]

Couldn't have said it better Troy!

[Dawn]

Thanks Troy. I loved your analogy. It was easy to understand and follow....sometimes I have trouble following medical jargon.