What eating habits can lead to gallstones?

Stones form due to diet and lifestyle

Doctor Cao Hong Phuc, Hospital 103, said that gallstones bring countless troubles to patients. In addition to abdominal pain, digestive disorders, diarrhea, jaundice, itchy skin..., gallstones can cause dangerous complications such as cholangitis, biliary hepatitis, biliary cirrhosis, and abdominal inflammation (biliary peritonitis).

Gallstones are formed when there is infection of the bile duct; stagnation of bile;parasite(roundworms crawling up the bile duct); lipid metabolism disorders and especially when high cholesterol levels in the bile are not balanced with bile acid secretion.

Gallstones are also easily formed if the patient eats too salty food, has a habit of drinking little water, is lazy to exercise... Therefore, people with obesity, diabetes, chronic liver disease, intestinal disease, and constipation are often at higher risk of gallstones.

According to Professor, Dr. Duong Trong Hieu - former head of the General Department, Traditional Medicine Hospital, in addition to an unhygienic diet, high in cholesterol, the habit of eating cold food, living in a cold environment, being angry... are also risk factors for disease.

According to oriental medicine, the factors that form gallstones are due to depression in the liver (suppressed anger, resentment...), the spleen does not metabolize food well when it meets cold blood and coagulates into stones. Therefore, to prevent and treat gallstones, you must eat and live a moderate, clean life, avoid worrying, live happily, avoid eating cold food and when the weather is cold, you must wear enough warm clothes...

Modern "favorite" dishes that can easily cause gallstones

According to Dr. Phuc, there is currently no special diet to treat gallstones. However, a balanced, healthy diet low in fat always ensures general health and reduces the symptoms of gallstones in particular. In addition, gradual weight loss for overweight people also has a significant effect.

In particular, to prevent gallstones, you should adjust the following unscientific eating habits that cause the disease:

- Eat raw and salad: This is the food group that is most susceptible to parasitic worms and worms are the cause of gallstones. Pathogens of food-borne worms enter humans through the digestive tract passively when the host (human) eats food (meat, fish, shrimp, crab, dry vegetables and aquatic plants...) containing live worm larvae.

Some parasitic pathogens attach to food to infect humans such as intestinal worms, intestinal protozoans, and fungi.

For people infected with worms, it is entirely possible for worms to enter the bile duct. When the worms die, they can become a place where bile sticks, gradually forming gallstones. This is also a common cause of gallstones in our country.

Therefore, to avoid gallstones, do not forget to deworm regularly twice a year. Limit raw foods, salads, etc. Wash fruits and peel them before eating to avoid parasitic infections in the body.

- Eat less vegetables:People who eat few vegetables are the second group of people who are susceptible to gallstones. The reason is that when eating few vegetables, intestinal motility is reduced, along with reduced biliary motility. Bile often stagnates and forms mud stones that can easily cause biliary obstruction.

To prevent gallstones, you should actively eat vegetables and fruits. Vegetables and fruits do not change the composition of bile but have the effect of stimulating bile circulation, helping to reduce the risk of gallstones and prevent inflammation of the bile duct. For people with biliary stricture or bile duct tumors, they should eat more vegetables and fruits, should use 500g of green vegetables/person/day.

- Eat a lot of fat:Regularly eating fatty foods will change the composition of blood lipids, thereby changing the composition of bile, specifically increasing triglycerides andcholesterol.

When the concentration of these two substances in bile is too high, they will precipitate and form deposits of the stone core, forming gallstones. Moreover, fat affects the function of the liver, gallbladder and stomach. When eating a lot of fat, bile does not flow evenly into the intestine, stimulating the gallbladder to contract too strongly, and part of the bile joins with cholesterol to form stones.

Therefore, to avoid the disease, limit the intake of animal fat, do not eat too much fried or roasted food, especially for people who have had gallstones. For office workers and people who do light work, they should not eat more than 50g of fat per day.

- Eat supplements and refined foods:The trend of eating refined foods and supplementary diets is to eat refined, nutritious foods such as chicken porridge, broth, bone broth, milk, canned foods... but less raw foods such as whole grains, vegetables and fruits, which is also the cause of disease.

This causes intestinal motility to not be stimulated enough to create a strong enough motor effect, creating conditions for gallstones to form. It is advisable to increase raw foods to provide more fiber to the body to activate bile duct movement.

In addition, there are some foods that are good for the gallbladder such as turmeric, lemon leaves... that can be used. To stimulate the gallbladder to contract gently, you can use a little bit of easily digestible fat such as butter, raw herbal oil, chicken or duck fat...

When you have gallstones, you need to treat them, but the big problem to note is that after treating the gallstones, other stones will recur. Currently, there is no way to prevent the stones from forming again. Gallstones are formed due to a metabolic imbalance in the liver.

Research shows that about 30 - 50% of patients will have stone recurrence after treatment within 5 years. Therefore, implementing a nutritional regimen to prevent and prevent recurrence is very important.