52 Achieving pH Balance to Treat Specific Ailments
Margaret’s and John’s only source of fatty acids was olive oil in the salads
they had every night with their dinner. Both suffered from constipation.
When John graduated from college and moved to his own apartment,
he ate out every night at fast-food restaurants where he invariably ordered
a cheeseburger and French fries. Nevertheless, from the day he left home
his constipation vanished. John was now eating saturated fats, and this
change in diet, despite its nutritional defi ciencies and chemical additives,
had solved his elimination problem. His younger sister, Margaret, how-
ever, continued to have the problem after she moved away from home.
Like her mother, she avoided butter and trimmed the fat off meat. She
also took birth control pills. Five years later she stopped taking them
long enough to become pregnant. About a year after she had given birth
to a son, she went back on birth control pills. One night she woke up in
agony. Pain from a spot under her right rib cage, where the gallbladder
is located, radiated into her chest and down her left arm. Afraid that she
was having a heart attack, her husband rushed her to the hospital where
an MRI revealed gallstones. One of them, half an inch in diameter, was
blocking her gallbladder duct. The bile, trapped in the gallbladder by the
obstruction, had been diverted into the bloodstream, giving her skin and
the whites of her eyes a yellowish tint. Because the gallbladder was badly
infl amed, the doctors removed it.
Margaret met three of the criteria that have been linked to gallstones.
She had been on a low-cholesterol diet for years, had been constipated
for the same period of time, and had been taking birth control pills. A
low-cholesterol diet, by causing constipation, can pave the way for gall-
stones. Cholesterol is one of the raw materials out of which bile salts are
made. Bile salts stimulate peristalsis—the alternate contraction and
relaxation of the muscles in the intestinal tract that helps overcome
elimination problems. Thus a diet low in cholesterol can result in a
defi ciency of bile salts with the consequent slowing up of the movement
of the muscles in the colon, making elimination of stool more diffi cult.
Constipation increases the likelihood of gallstones by causing the
waste matter in the colon to putrefy and give off toxins. If these toxins
can’t be detoxifi ed by the liver or kidneys, the liver incorporates them
in bile. The bile is released into the gallbladder. There, it bonds with
cholesterol and hardens into stone. A case control study by F. Pixley,
originally published in Gut, titled “Dietary Factors in the Etiology of
Gallstones,” showed a relationship between stone formation and super-