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Readers Summary:

  1. Why is bad living tied to mediocre thinking?
  2. What does a modern human need to know about gallbladders?

You must become aware of the high cost of low living by cheap thinking. In biology, we often get what we deserve when we forget this. Today’s CPC will illustrate that point for you. Wasting your time doing things that do not get you to Optimal is causing you to miss out on the opportunity to improve yourself. Today, and every day from here, become very aware of time. Be wise in the use of time. The question for living an Optimal life is never how much time do I really have, it is in how you use the time you have, and realizing you can reverse the errors you made in that time by starting NOW.

There is a great lesson here for those willing to think. I hope the sharpness of this message strikes you in the correct fashion. When you think average, you get average. Reject mediocre… demand optimal from me, your loved ones, and most importantly, yourself. When you get this lesson, you will understand why there is much harm in wasting your most valuable asset: Time.

On to the Science and Medicine

Removing a gallbladder is one of the most common surgical operations done in the USA. The reason for this is two fold. If you eat a standard western diet, you are helping cause an ‘epigenetic signal’ to our gut that favors gallstone formation. The second one is that since this diet is so common, it leads to major neolithic disease and symptoms that show up in our ERs and provoke surgeons to do ultrasounds and HIDA scans to find the stones and sludge. Once they see a stone or sludge, you will be loaded onto the medical conveyor belt for having your gallbladder removed faster than you can think about this comment. You will be told how simple the operation is and how slick it is. These are both true, by the way. You will recover quickly and your risks are low from the surgery.

But what you won’t be told is that once your have no gallbladder, you become a ticking time bomb for the development of neolithic disease because you begin to concentrate a hormone slowly, chronically that will eventually limit your longevity and kill you in some fashion. You also lose your ability to recycle Vitamin K2. This sets the stage for the development of heart disease and atherosclerosis. Remember: heart disease is still the number one killer in men and women today.

Something simple and unobtrusive with low short term risks can morph into something that scares the shit out of you. I want you to pause and think before you sign the consent form for having your gallbladder out:  is the gallbladder really the cause of the disease? Stop eating a standard diet and move to paleolithic diet that can REVERSE GALLSTONES over time, slowly. It won’t be the easy choice when you’re miserable in pain, but I can assure you it is the an option you need to seriously consider.

Some general surgeons believe the gallbladder was put there for them to remove. Many view it as useless. I do not believe that at all. I look at the gallbladder as the pacemaker of the gut…the most important thing it does for us is releases massive amounts of CCK, the pacemaker that sets up the amazing coordination of digestion of fats. It works in concert with leptin. There is a receptor in the mouth called CD36 (we heard about in the CT series) that is the first fat sensor…it is the canary in the coal mine for the gallbladder to tell it to get ready, a meal of fats is coming. Eating fats at dinner is critical, and they should be part of an ancestral template. Try to concentrate on 10-18 carbon fats because these are best at stimulating Cholecystokinin (CCK) that destroys the nighttime appetite. I use coconut oil, ghee, pastured butter, and bacon lard to get this effect. I use the fat to cover the carbs and the protein most times in sauces.

CCK signals the liver to begin to make bile to emulsify the fat in the meal. People who get gallstones tend to eat a high carbohydrate and low fat diet. The best evolutionary adapted diet for all mammals is a Epi-Paleo diet. I have laid out why that is the case in my book. Most vertebrates have gallbladders, whereas invertebrates do not. There is a damn good reason for this evolutionary novelty, tied to the reason we are best adapted to this diet. Within the broad boundaries of this diet lies the best type of diet for us……the ‘ketogenic’ Epi-paleolithic version of it. This is the one that confers to us the most evolutionary adaptations for maximum survival, in my opinion. It is also one that has the highest amount of fats, like DHA, within it.

Becoming a lipophile allowed us to shorten our guts from our primate ancestors and increase our intake of fat to form the most amazing biologic machinery ever created by evolution: the human brain. The evolution of the human brain has speed up the speed of evolution by a factor of 100 according to most evolutionary biologists. If this is true, than having a gallbladder becomes one of the most important things for the human GI tract because without it, we become suboptimal, unable to properly use the diet that is best adapted for our gut.

If you look a medical text book of risk factors for gallbladder disease, you will see these words somewhere in the chapter… FAT, FEMALE, FORTY, and FERTILE. Every medical doctor on the planet knows this information. You know what they do not appear to know, though? Why is it that those four things really cause gallbladder disease? All four symptoms have one common tie: excessive estrogen production. The most common type of estrogen in people with gallbladder disease is estradiol, what we call E2 in medicine.

GEEKS: People with gallbladder disease tend to be estrogen collectors in their tissues and have many estrogen dominant diseases. Estradiol is normally conjugated in the liver by sulfate and glucuronide formation and, as such, is excreted via the kidneys. Some of the water-soluble conjugates are excreted via the bile duct (think gallbladder) and partly reabsorbed after hydrolysis from the intestinal tract. This enterohepatic circulation contributes to maintaining estradiol levels.

NON GEEKS: In English, this means that when fat is broken down, it liberates E2 into our guts to get rid of the excess. If you no longer have a gallbladder, you slowly concentrate E2 in your body. The fatter you are, the worse it gets. Fat people are estrogen sinkholes. This is why many neolithic diseases are tied to obesity and high estrogen levels. This is the main reason for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer in older females. Humans become estrogen dominant (both male and female) when they eat the standard Western diet. You need a gallbladder to rid your body of excess E2. It is a critical point. I could write 2000 diseases right here that all have estrogen dominance as a cardinal feature. This is how an innocent error can lead to a magnificent mess twenty years later when you get diagnosed with some new neolithic disease. It seems few in medicine  see the link between removing a gallbladder and that mess. If you show them this blog, they will downplay it and tell you there are no good studies to prove this might be true.

They are right, but I contend that they really do not want to know the answer and that is why the study will never be done by modern medicine. If you don’t look for something, it is awfully hard to find the answer. Evolution put your gallbladder there for a damn good reason, and to remove it, you better have an even better one in my view. Remember, most modern doctors will default to the standard RCT excuse. We saw in the Atlantic magazine article, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” that most RCT are not worth the paper they are written on. Most Ivory Tower doctors still tell you RCT is the gold standard. Remember what I just told you in CT 10 about Ivory Tower docs and calls for moderation. I’d like you to recall what veteran medical researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis, had to say on this from the article in The Atlantic I linked above. This article made it easy for me to question everything I believe and learned to be true in my medical career. It caused me to erase myself many of the beliefs I held as dogma. I do not believe any article I have read has ever made a greater impact in my life.

Now you can see why it’s important to understand how one system ties into another, leading to a biologic mismatch, altering signaling and causing cancer, heart disease, and atherosclerosis over time. The next time someone says, “let’s just remove your gallbladder,” I want you to rely on your own primal instinct and not on the RCT that any medical student can recite as you are doubled over in pain in some ER. You won’t hear this naked truth from my profession. Remember, they honestly believe that God put the gallbladder there for us to remove when it has stones or sludge in it. I cannot tell you how many time I have heard this in my training and from many surgeons with whom I’ve worked.

You might be thinking, how in the world does this iatrogenic error happen?

The reason is simple: most doctors and surgeons have no idea about the connectiveness of the delicate micromachinery of how our gut evolved, and why it shortened from our primate ancestors. There is no course in any doctor’s training about how all the information they cram into our heads integrates and works like a symphony. We are left to figure that out by trial and error and thinking. Most surgeons honestly believe the gall bladder has no real purpose because that is what we were taught. Do not blame them. I learned this crap, too, as a surgery resident, and fell prey to it more than I care to admit. The system propagates this nonsense. Reading the truth serum Dr. Ionnidis provided me years ago allowed me to question everything and to look for the real reason why gallbladder disease shows up so often.  I believe it is best treated using an evolutionary medicine perspective.

If you’re missing a gallbladder, consider supplementing NAC, MSM, and DMSO to speed up the removal of the serum estrogens like E2. You might re-read my Vitamin K2 blog, too. The links made here to heart disease and atherosclerosis are critical  for you to understand because your doc will minimize them. You can even do a test to check your clearance of estrogens from the liver. When it builds up in men, this is how they get man boobs.

Those lacking a gallbladder would do well to get a lot of sunlight too.  Living in a low quantum yield world of blue light makes your new “organless” existence more tolerable.  Sunlight lowers estradiol on your skin in case you did not know this.  You need to expose a lot of skin and eye to get rid of your estrogen collection if your gallbladder is in a surgical pan.

To become optimal, you must handle dietary fats like a true champion. This requires a functional gallbladder. Always guard your guts from bad foods, bad diets, and bad medicine. Remember that iatrogenic medical thoughts of omission from my profession might lead to proximal harm as you age, as I outlined here. That is my best advice to you on why this organ is critical to a primal life. Protect your gut and it will protect you.

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Additional Resources


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