I have been researching the lasting effects of gall bladder removal and have found that there do not seem to be any.
I know the gall bladder stores bile.
Would not its removal prevent the proper dispensing of bile to the duodenum. Could it change the colour of feces if there is too much bile or interfere with fat digestion if there is not enough?
Thanks
My wife had her gall bladder removed and I remember looking into this at the time and finding that its removal can have an effect on fat digestion, though not a large one, and that is consistent with my wife’s experience. I can’t remember what her doctor may have told her at the time. Here is one example.
IANA doctor, but I have had my gall bladder removed. That extra storage of a couple ounces of bile does indeed aid in the digestion of fats and some really spicy foods. For myself, I’ve found that I process fatty foods differently now – they tend to move very slowly through the early stages of digestion, causing me to fill up much faster and sometimes suffer from cripplingly painful gas. After that, though, my body seems to give up on trying to process the excess fats and just sends them out the other end of the system as fsat as it can, keeping me very… regular (and that’s about as nice as I can say that). So while I can report that living without a gall bladder is not that big a deal, I wouldn’t classify it as a vestigal organ, as it does serve a particular purpose in making the digestive process run more smoothly.
I had my stone-ridden g.b. removed a year ago and have noticed no huge difference. I’ve just been eating fewer fats and usually fewer sugars, but that was a choice made independently.
As far as the processes go, the liver is now trickling bile slowly, directly, into the intestine instead of having a place to store it.
The gall bladder is not vestigial. It is non-essential.
While its removal is thus not fatal, there can certainly be effects. Some people are affected more than others. Some have difficulty with digestion of fatty or greasy foods. Some have diarrhea due to an imbalance of bile salts.
I’m not sure how you came to find “there do not seem to be any” lasting after-effects. While that is true for some people, it is quite definitely not true for others. Dig a little deeper in your research?
My wife’s experience with gall bladder removal has been the same as DPJ’s. She never went back to what she considers normal digestion.
An over-simplication of what I gathered from my doctor before I had mine removed:
The gall bladder is not as necessary as it once was, but is still a functional organ.
The liver makes bile and pushes it into the stomach. Along the way, there’s the gall bladder, sort of a “holding tank” where some of the bile gets diverted before getting to the stomach.
This was a pretty darn good thing a number of years ago, when meat was hard to come by and we hadn’t learned to keep it from spoiling. We’d live on a meager diet of plants and such most of the time, which the bile in the stomach would handle just fine.
But every now and then the hunter-dudes would manage to kill a mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger or something, and there’s be meat to eat. A lot of meat, all at once. And you’d eat all you could because it won’t stay good for long and who knows when you’ll get to eat this well again.
And the stomach says, whoa, I don’t have enough bile to handle all this meat, and my buddy the liver can only make so much at a time! Enter the gall bladder, who says, “got ya covered,” and squirts some extra bile in there to help take care of things.
Nowadays, folks generally have much steadier and more balanced eating habits, and the stomach/liver team is pretty much sufficient to do the job. If you do gorge yourself on lots of fatty foods in one sitting you’ll get a little extra jolt from the gall bladder, just because it can. But if you don’t have one you’ll probably do no worse than a case of the runs in a few hours.
At least that’s been my experience. Haven’t noticed a whole lot of difference otherwise, though the doc said mine probably hadn’t been working right for years anyway, what with that golf ball growing in it.
Ditto here (mine went bye-bye 2 months ago). Not vestigial, just not essential. Average poop consistency is a lot looser in general than it was before the surgery. And there are times where I do that clench-cheeked fast-walk down the hall to the restroom.
In my case it’s just a notch in the continuum from constipation to diarrhea (maybe from an average of 4 to 6 or whatever). Nothing I can’t live with. There isn’t necessarily a tie-in to how much fat I’ve eaten.
The bile doesn’t go into the stomach, it goes into the start of the thin intestine, right below (after) the stomach.
In Spain, people whose gallbladder is being removed are told to cut out on fat and to get used to eating “smaller meals more often”, so apparently Spanish doctors do think there are long-term consequences to the removal. For people like my grandmother, who eats 20 meals a day or a single one with many interruptions depending on how you count, and who has eaten like that for over 70 years, there is no change; for someone who is used to a single huge meal and several minis, there is a big change.
Wait, let me pause to fully develop the mental picture here… :eek:
In fairness, the rapid walk is to prevent the :eek:. 
The bottom (heh) line being, one can’t try to say to oneself “nah, let me just finish this then I’ll take a break”, instead one must say “Oh, OK. Guess it’s breaktime now”.