Our example tells us that gallbladder removal, or cholecystectomy, can be broken down. Cholar, remember, refers to bile. Systo refers to a bladder, here, the gallbladder. And ectomy, which is a surgery where you excise something or cut something out. So anyways, gallbladder removal is one of the most common surgical procedures, with over 1,000,000 surgeries performed in the United States each year. It seems like a lot. Indicate whether you would expect each of the following to increase, decrease, or show no change after gallbladder removal.
Taking out the gallbladder, do you expect there to be more or less total bile production? Well, the bile is produced by the liver. So, the gallbladder just stores it. So I actually think that there will be no real significant change. I have no reason to believe that there would.
Now, what about the amount of bile that can be released at one time? Well, the gallbladder is there to store bile, so you can get a big squirt of bile all at once. If you take it out, you can't get that big squirt of bile. So this, I think, is going to decrease.
It says, do you think that patients who have gallbladder removal are generally advised to avoid eating fats altogether, avoid eating foods with highly concentrated fats, or to not consider fat intake in their diet, and explain your answer. What do you think? Well, remember, bile is there to break up the fats in your food so that the enzymes can better access that fat as it's all mixed in with the chyme. Now if you take the gallbladder out, you still make bile. And remember, the liver is connected to the small intestine via the bile duct. So the liver is still making bile and that bile can still get into the small intestine. What you can't get is big squirts of bile, big releases of bile, sort of all at once from that gallbladder. So that suggests to me that you probably can still eat fats. Right? You're still getting the bile, but you don't want to eat a lot of fat at once because you can't get a lot of bile to break up those really fatty foods. So therefore, I am going to say avoid concentrated fats. And my reasoning is you can still make bile but can't release large amounts at once. Of course, if this were on a test, I would put that in some nice complete sentences.
With that, we're moving on to some practice problems. I'll see you there.
