> it'll be a while before i can ingest fatty foods of any "normal" quantity.
Obviously "today" your system is messed-up from the knife attack, and whatever crisis prompted you to ask for the knife. All those parts got poked and bruised and nicked and generally annoyed, plus the unfelt but significant effects of anesthesia and drugs. (The opiates screw with your gut function, and several of the "better" pain-killers are whack-offs of opiate chemistry.)
I'm not sure what the long-term outlook is. Considering how much fat is hidden in the American diet, "normal quantity" may be too much.
In water-based creatures like us, fat is tricky stuff. It is a rich food source. It can be stored in a pot-belly against lean times. It insulates from cold. It insulates nerves. A touch of fat is used in most cells.
Oil and water don't mix, your gut is all water-based pipes, so fat you eat would slide through and exit. But the liver makes bile, which attacks fat and emulsifies it so you can absorb it. Bile is hard to make, whereas eating is a infrequent event. So the liver slowly makes and stores bile in the gall bladder. When food passes from stomach down into intestines, the gall bladder releases bile to break down fat.
There's another function. Stomach adds acid to digest. But once that work is done, you do not want all that acid eating at your gut. Or the bacteria in your gut which play a major role in releasing tough foodstuff. Bile is very alkaline. The gush from gall bladder neutralizes the excess acid quickly.
Without a gall bladder, I -guess- your intestines must deal with acid and fats. Which they are not very good at; that's why we (most vertibrates including humans) have bile and bile-storage. Horses and rats don't; horses eat semi-constantly and I suppose their liver makes bile as fast as food comes through. Dunno what rats do. Wild people did not eat every day, so when they did, they pigged-out; they needed an infrequent gush of bile. Agricultural people eat one main meal a day because grains are dried for storage and must be cooked for eating; again a reason to store bile for quick release. Without the bladder, you have a slow trickle, which is not enough to handle a pig-out.
Which is why you are told both to limit fat (and avoid alcohol!), and to eat several small meals throughout the day. You lost the "batch processing" add-on which allowed you to eat a whole groundhog every other day, or a 12-ounce steak dinner. Your total through-put is about the same but it must be ingested slow and steady, at the pace of bile production. You may be cutting your turkey sandwich into 8 parts, and noshing one every couple hours.
Topic: ISOTone is in the hospital (Read 13448 times)