Gallbladder-safe foods

In My Humble Opinion
1

What foods are relatively gallbladder-safe? I know low-fat is the general recommendation, but I’m looking for specifics. What did or didn’t work for you or your friend/family member? Some sites have said under 45g of fat a day, others say under 20. Does fat type (saturated/trans) matter? Is low-fat dairy ok, or iffy? What about caffeine? Is it ok to fill up on carbs instead, like pasta and breads? Does the distinction between complex carbs and simple sugars matter at all? I’m not concerned with losing weight right now, I just don’t want to feel sick after eating anymore.

I’m not looking for medical advice, just dietary. However, if relevant, here are more details: intermittent (recently becoming daily) nausea with intermediate abdominal pain spreading up the right side of my chest, and nausea when I lay on my right side, which sounds potentially gallbladdery. My sister had her gallbladder out last year, and so have various relatives, so I know I’m predisposed. I’m hoping to wait for the new year to see a doctor, so it all counts toward the same annual out-of-pocket limit (in case I need surgery). Until then, I’m trying an elimination diet because my symptoms are not yet severe.

I just thought that maybe this would do better in Cafe Society? It’s OK if a mod wants to move it.

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The diagnosis is (or was - mine came out in 1983) one doctor’s visit and one x-ray. And we had a pretty good indication of the diagnosis during the initial visit, when he pushed on the gallbladder and I nearly climbed up his arm and onto the ceiling. They may do it with ultrasound or an MRI, now.

If it’s gallstones, I’m guessing that any surgery or lithotripty will be scheduled for next year anyway, what with the holidays coming up. And if you’d rather it be put off, the doctor won’t argue, because gallstones are one step away from elective.

On the other hand, if it’s not gallstones in the gall bladder, it could be a stone or something else irritating or blocking the common bile duct and that can irritate your pancreas, which is not an organ that you want to irritate. Pancreatitis can flair up and leave you on the floor. Do not mess with the Pancreas.

I also know someone who was putting off going to the doctor for her gallstones until her husband got a job with insurance. (He’d freelance for a few years and then get a job with insurance for a few years.) When she went, it turned out to be stomach cancer and the time lost mattered. Not that a month is likely to be as big a deal, this is just what I think of whenever someone puts off checking out gallstones, and it probably always will be.

I’d really suggest an initial visit to confirm that it’s probably the gallbladder.

(Answer part)

That said, if you’ve googled, you know as much as anyone will be able to tell you. With gallstones, what you’re trying to do with diet is keep it from thinking that it needs to squeeze down and squirt a little bile into the mix. I was told that every gallbladder reacts differently. That some can be set off by apples. To stay as low fat as possible, but to try eating only one thing at a time and waiting twenty minutes or so to see what the reaction to that was.

I was supposed to build up a repertoire of permissable foods. Unfortunately, by the time I was diagnosed, the only things that didn’t set it off were ramen noodles and V-8 juice. (The diagnosis was slowed because the only pain I felt was referred to my back.) And ramen noodles have about 15g of fat, so I don’t know why they worked.

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I basically went as fat free as possible. I’d walk around the store and buy anything that said “0g Fat”.

I remember I ate a lot of roll-ups: fat-free ham, turkey, and cheese with some mustard rolled up in a tortilla. And those imitation crab legs with cocktail sauce. And WalMart had this fat-free chocolate sherbet.

So as you can see I didn’t regard a fat free diet as an excuse to eat healthy.

4

Thank you so much for all you posted, Yllaria. I am still on a payment plan from an ultrasound I had last February, so I’m trying to minimize my costs however possible. I ended up **$800 **out of pocket for ONE procedure, because my insurance company was an asshole. I will go sooner if the pain gets worse, of course. I have a pretty realistic pain tolerance… I’ve had kidney stones so I know what it feels to be knocked flat.

Thanks for the list! It feels so good to not be in pain that I’ve been fantasizing about eating nothing but vegetables for a month and a half, if that’s what it takes.

5

For me, it did not seem to matter what I ate. For many years I would get an attack once a year, sometimes skipping a year. It suddenly got much more frequent. I will say that the danger in waiting is the possibility of infection (cholecystitis) . Without any infection it is a very simple (laparoscopic) procedure, often done on an outpatient basis. If it gets infected, it gets much more complicated.

One thing they often do to diagnose the issue is to do an ultrasound. All that does is to tell you that you have gallstones. Unfortunately, many people have gallstones, often without problems. They followed up my ultrasound with a hida scan. If you are having an attack at the time, it can confirm whether those gallstones are the problem.

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I have gallbladder problems too. It sucks. I’ve found that certain foods really trigger pain, especially cream cheese and coffee creamer, for some reason. Otherwise, just an overabundance of fatty/snacky/delicious foods will do it sometimes.
I pay close attention to how I feel. If I start noticing even a little pain or twinge, I cut back on coffee creamer and other dairy, any fast foods, and butter. Usually that will take care of it. If I have a really bad few days, I pretty much don’t eat except low-fat ham or turkey and vegetables. When I feel really bad, it seems like I only feel good if I don’t eat at all.
I’m in a similar situation–waiting a bit before I can get that sucker out.

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My gallbladder problems flared up when I ate eggs.

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For me it was always fats. Bile exists to break down fats, and the gallbladder exists as reservoir of bile.

That said, it was only large quantities of fats that ever caused problems for me. Most likely, there is some threshold that will work for you.

9

When mine finally flared, I had actually not been eating anything especially high fat. Though the half-glass of bad red wine might conceivably have contributed - that’s a WAG based on liver / gallbladder being sorta connected, and may be purely coincidental.

The tech who did my ultrasound (to confirm the bag o’ rocks) said she’d been involved with a study that showed that fat in the diet does NOT contribute to an immediate flareup, but that’s the only time I heard that particular theory, and conventional wisdom says that it does for reasons already mentioned.

All that said: In addition to the low-fat requirement, I had a very high blood sugar reading during that, certainly caused by the flareup. I’m not sure whether it was directly caused (as in, gallstone blocking a duct from the pancreas, or bile backup irritating the pancreas - my liver was definitely involved), or just a blood sugar spike due to being so ill for several days. My reading (fasting) was 154. 2 weeks later it was 107 - still higher than desirable but in line with the fact that I’m a tubbo.

So anyway, for about 6 weeks before I could get that sucker yanked, I was doing low fat AND low sugar. Short of living on plain chicken breasts and steamed broccoli, there’s no way to avoid ALL carbs if you need to avoid fat also, so I took the stance of concentrating on complex carbs and small quantities of fat (if any). For example Christmas dinner was roast chicken, a roll, a very small sliver of butter, and about 1/4 of a stuffed potato.

Beef barley soup (made with ultra-low-fat ground beef and a higher ratio of veggies) was a favorite, as was a barley/lentil soup from Epicurious (look for barley lentil soup with swiss chard - I usually reduce the chard, a LOT).

I’ve never heard of carbs being an issue with gallbladder problems, though you want to avoid going overboard on sweets obviously simply because they’re not good for you. I personally tried minimizing even fruit, though I didn’t get too paranoid about it.

Good luck - and if you haven’t already, try scheduling that appointment for January 2 to get things rolling ASAP.

BTW, I hear ya on the out of pocket thing. The year of the gallbladder, pretty much everything else was also falling apart. Between the surgery, and some apparent stomach problems which turned out to be a drug side effect but got me in for additional testing including a colonoscopy, I hit my out of pocket limit by July (simultaneously wiping out both my and my husband’s flex spending accounts)… so the rest of the year was free! This turned out to be helpful in that I got several other things taken care of later that year.

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Oh, and - definitely get it tested (and yanked if needed) as soon as practical. Among other things, it can worsen and become a true emergency, requiring full-on open surgery vs laparoscopic, things can go gangrenous, things can spill and make you really sick, etc. This actually happened to a friend of ours. She’s fine now, but it was touch and go for a couple days.

11

For me, it wasn’t so much the amount of fat in my diet as it was sudden changes in the amount of fat.

In my early 20s, I did Jenny Craig and followed it pretty darn well. It was extremely low fat, and since I’d previously been on a fairly high fat diet, the bile my liver produced sat in my gallbladder and either created stones or made the stones worse. When I went off plan one weekend (on vacation, you know how it goes) and ate every dipped in butter, I precipitated myself into a gallbladder attack. Soooooo very not fun.

Whichever diet you choose to stick to, I would recommend not going cold turkey, but slowly changing the level of dietary fat you’re consuming. And don’t increase it suddenly either.

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Update: I’ve been eating mostly salads with lowfat dressing and it did not help at all. Fortunately, I actually found that regular antacid consumption (1 tums every 2 hours) completely eliminates every single one of my symptoms. Based on that, I think it might be an ulcer, which as I understand it presents with very similar symptoms to gallbladder issues. Of course I will get tested sooner if the pain becomes intractable, but I’m trying to wait as long as I can. I’m very low on PTO due to my boyfriend’s post-surgical doctor appointments, so that’s another reason to wait until the next calendar year. If I have to take time off, I want to be paid for it!

Wonderful advice so far, and I thank you all for it.

13

Interesting data point. It might “just” be reflux also. I don’t know how common ulcers truly are, but GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disorder) is quite common. Do some reading on that.

You could also try an over-the-counter proton pump inhibitor such as Prilosec or Prevacid. They take a couple of days to kick in- and when you stop them you can have rebound acid production for a few days (so when I was lowering my dose of Prilosec a couple years back, I did so very gradually). And they may want you to stop it for a bit if they’re planning on doing an endoscopy - when my symptoms worsened over the past year, the doc wanted to do a scope versus just tweaking my PPI dosage first, because that would skew the part of the endoscopy that was looking for GERD damage. It would presumably NOT have skewed a test for h. pylori (the usual cause of ulcers).

In the meantime, it couldn’t hurt to follow the usual recommendations for GERD: avoiding spicy/acidic foods, avoiding alcohol, avoiding high-fat foods (can worsen it), don’t eat within an hour or two of bedtime, prop up head of bed if possible, etc.

I can tell you from personal experience that a large serving of strawberry shortcake/ice cream, washed down with some yummy homemade strawberry lemonade, is a Very Bad Idea if you’ve got GERD :smack::stuck_out_tongue: (but it was sooooo worth it, LOL). Of course this probably isn’t a good idea if it’s the gallbladder, either!!

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Yeah, I already know I have GERD. My diet is terrible but it’s also genetic. Everyone in both sides of my family has it… I’ve had heartburn since my early teens (before I was even fat)… *and *my grandma died of esophageal cancer from untreated GERD that led to an esophageal erosion. So I’m not going to fuck around with this too long.