Coffee and Gall Bladders

Over time, I have come to the realization that most of my so called reflux issues are more related to poor digestion not reflux. I have always had digestive issues to some degree but my digestive issues were greatly exacerbated after I had my gallbladder removed. Another thing that I learned, as a consequence of having my gallbladder removed, is that surgeons, or medical practitioners in general, are typically not that interested or concerned with what happens to the patient after their health condition has been resolved.

For instance, I had an acute gallbladder attack and the surgeons response was to remove the gallbladder, which is what you would expect a surgeon to do. I later found out that there were alternate strategies to deal with a gallbladder attack but that bit of knowledge was not acquired until long after my gallbladder and I had parted company. At any rate, the surgeon did an excellent job of removing my gallbladder, I suffered minimal pain and the scars disappeared all too soon. I was somewhat entertained by the public reaction to the scars. When I travelled and used the pool in hotels I always received a second, furtive glance at my stomach because the scars looked like three evenly spaced bullet holes that had healed over. For a short period of time I had the air of being a real 'bad-ass". It was amusing  while it lasted. Today, there is no trace of the scars so I can say that the surgeon did an excellent job.

What the surgeon failed to do was to educate me in the fact that the gallbladder was an essential organ when it came to digestion. The gallbladder keeps a store of concentrated bile from the liver so that when the stomach is full of food, especially fatty food, the gallbladder will inject its store of bile into the small intestine to help break down the fatty food and make it easier to digest. 

I am just a layman with a generalist's knowledge of biological science, mostly what I learned in high school. I did not learn very much biology in industrial engineering! But, I know how the gallbladder works and I can safely assume that my surgeon knew way more about the function and importance of the gallbladder to digestion than I would ever know but yet he failed to counsel me, even in the slightest, about how I should compensate for the absence of my gallbladder. Maybe he didn't think of it. Maybe he didn't think it was his place to counsel me in this area. maybe he just didn't know. I am amazed at how little education that medical doctors have in the area of nutrition. At any rate, I was  on my own.

It did not take long before I started to develop issues with eating. Actually, eating was not the problem, at least not in the beginning. The issue was what happened after I ate. I began to realize that it was taking my longer and longer to digest food and I was becoming less and less tolerant of fatty foods. Not eating lots of fatty food is probably not a bad thing but our bodies do need a certain amount of fat to facilitate certain key bodily functions. For instance, fat is the carrier for vitamins as they travel through our digestive system and blood system. So, we do need fat. When I became ill due to working in an unacceptably stressful environment for a horrible boss the stress compounded the issues caused by the lack of a gallbladder and I developed a severe digestive condition that was initially diagnosed as gastro-oesophageal reflux. 

I started to lose weight, a couple of pounds, five pounds, ten pounds and then fifteen pounds. Most people would say that's a great plan and where could they sign up for that! I would not recommend it because I was not only losing weight but my body was not absorbing basic nutrients that I needed for daily living. The situation was not looking good for a long term retirement!

Once I started to understand what the real problems were I was in a position to make some positive changes in my life. The first step was to run away from an unacceptably stressful job as fast as I could. The funny thing is that I have wound up with a much better job with far less stress. Go figure!

The second thing was to educate myself as much as I could about what the problems were with my stomach. Alternative medicine for all the bad press that it gets from pharmacological medicine showed me the way to heal my stomach. 

By the time I got to this point my stomach was in bad shape. My microbiome was not healthy or happy. There were way too many of the wrong types of bacteria and too little of the good types of bacteria in my stomach. I had to take a two pronged approach to dealing with this problem. On the one hand I need to feed my stomach with foods that it needed as much as I could so that I could feed the rest of my body. 

I started consuming as many prebiotics and probiotics as I possibly could. I drink Kombucha everyday, in fact my wife and I make it. I eat sauerkraut, and kimchi, and everything else that I can find that will move my microbiome in the right direction, and...it is working!

The second prong of this strategy is to consume things that will aid in digestion that actually helps to break down the prebiotics and probiotics so that they can be used more efficiently and effectively by my stomach. I have written about apple cider vinegar and bile pills in a previous post but there is another thing that helps, something very common. Something so common that people consume it everyday but most people adulterate it to the point where it actually works counter to the good that it can do. That other thing is coffee.

Coffee can be a double edged sword depending on the health condition that you are dealing with. If you truly suffer from gastro-oesophageal reflux because you actually have too much acid in your stomach, which is not as common as it is diagnosed, then you may want to be careful with my coffee suggestion. For me, because I actually have low acid in my stomach, it works wonderfully. Coffee is a stimulant so it stimulates the body when you drink it, that is pretty straight forward. More specifically, coffee stimulates the production of gastrin and promotes the release of gastric acids in the stomach. All of these events work wonder for me after I eat a meal. 

I learned about the wonders of coffee when I attended a talk about gastrointestinal issues. The speaker, who was a naturopath told us that one of the simplest ways to deal with problems after the removal of a gallbladder or simply dealing with digestive issues was to drink coffee. But, she cautioned, only drink black coffee, no milk and no sugar. I would also add that drinking a dark roast, as dark as you can tolerate has the greatest benefit. For me that was no problem because I love the taste of black coffee. In fact, I cannot think of drinking coffee any other way. Drinking black coffee also lets you know if the coffee that you are drinking is of good quality or not because there is not milk or sugar or anything else that people use to adulterate coffee. There is just the taste of black coffee, for better or for worse. 

When I am home, I can use apple cider vinegar or take my bile pills with a meal. But when I in a restaurant or at someone else's home or traveling I certainly do not have apple cider vinegar available and sometimes I forget to bring my bile pills and if I am traveling for any length of time I could run our of bile pills. But there is no where on this planet earth that I have been and I have been to most parts of this planet, where coffee is not available. No matter where I am, I can always have a cup or two of black coffee after a meal to help me digest the meal .

All I can say is that if you find apple cider vinegar, and bile pills helpful with your digestion issues then you will probably benefit from drinking black coffee after a meal.

Update for 2019 - Apple Cider Vinegar and Bile Salts

I have not been diligent in updating my blog on acid reflux and for that I apologize. I did not realize that it has been a year since my last post. How quickly time goes by. a lot has happened over the past year. with regard to my, so called, reflux, the most important thing that has happened is that I left a job that was causing me a great deal of distress.

Looking back from the perspective of three years I can now see that working in that company, for that manager and dealing with those customers was the root cause of my reflex issue. It has been over a year now since I have left that company and slowly by slowly, I have recovering from this illness and regaining a more normal life with respect to eating and digesting food.

One of the big things that has happened is that I can now eat many of the foods that I was completely unable to eat three years ago. Three years ago I could not eat tomatoes, or any part of a raw salad. Now I can eat salad, a small salad but nonetheless, I can eat a salad which is a major achievement for me. I still have difficulty with anything that has a thick skin that will be difficult to digest, such as the skin on cherry tomatoes if it is too thick of the skin of a pear or even blueberries. My stomach will simply return the skins to my mouth so that I can spit them out as if to say, "I don't know you insist on sending these thick skins to me but they are inedible so please dispose of them". It is true, your stomach does have a mind of its own!

I have developed a few key things that help me to digest food. These are the things that I learned from attending a seminar at Goodness Me in Burlington, Ontario with a local Naturopath doctor. I am sorry that I cannot remember her name but I remember her recommendations. The first one was that I needed to replace the acid in my stomach that was missing because of the damage done to my microbiome and that fact that I had my gall bladder removed which eliminated the stored supply of bile that my gallbladder would hold to help digest food. Most people have their gallbladder removed and they gain weight. I had my gallbladder removed and I lost weight.

Here are her recommendations. 1) About ten minutes before a meal drink apple cider vinegar. That is live apple cider vinegar that has a mother in it because it will provide the acid in the vinegar as well as the nutrients that are created by the mother in the vinegar. The naturopath said one of two things would happen. If you had too much or even a sufficient amount of acid in your stomach you would get the worst reflux of your life. In that case you should not be drinking vinegar. In the second case, if you did not have enough acid in your stomach, nothing will happen when you drank the vinegar. Which is exactly what happened to me. So now, I drink vinegar every morning before breakfast and I try to drink it before lunch as well. The amount that I drink is not large, one teaspoon of vinegar to two tablespoons of water. At first I would measure the amounts precisely with a measuring spoon but now I measure by eye and it works fine. Do not get me wrong, drinking raw vinegar takes a bit of getting used to. It is like downing a shot of whiskey without the beer chaser. It is a bit bracing but for me, it is worth it. It have seen the difference for me between drinking vinegar before a meal and not drinking vinegar before a meal. It is difficult to quantify the difference but I can tell you that my stomach is a lot happier after I drink vinegar.

The second thing that I learned from the seminar I attended with the naturopath was that losing my gall bladder significantly reduced the amount of bile that I had in my stomach. She recommended that I take bile pills. Bile pills are disgusting, black pills that taste like, you guessed it, they taste like bile. You can buy bile pills in any drugstore, supermarket with a health food section. I would try to buy bile bills where they list Ox bile as the first ingredient (Bos taurus). If you take a pill at the beginning of a meal it will greatly aid in your digestion. I always make sure that I have something to drink immediately after putting the pill in my mouth, it is truly disgusting but it works.

All of these things are not really pleasant but it is an old adage that if the medicine is not bitter it is probably not effective!