Stepping stones
Nutrient reduces the risk of gallstones by more than 30 percent
Dr. Wright has been telling his patients and Nutrition & Healing readers for years that 99.9 percent of all gallbladder attacks can be cured without surgery, simply by eliminating the foods you’re allergic to from your diet. But, as effective as it is, his approach has met with some criticism. Years ago, he received an angry letter from a physician who accused Dr. Wright of putting his patients at risk for serious health complications by recommending that they forego gallbladder removal surgery in favor of the simpler — not to mention much less invasive — approach of allergy elimination. This physician claimed that if a person had gallstones and didn’t have their gallbladder removed, those stones could potentially slip, obstruct the bile ducts, and lead to more dangerous emergency surgery.
The fact is, “routine” gallbladder surgery is actually more dangerous than the emergency surgery the physician referred to in his letter. But perhaps some new research will put his mind at ease. According to a study conducted at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, there’s another completely non-invasive, natural approach for reducing the risk of gallstone formation in the first place (which would decrease the “need” for gallbladder surgery even more) — magnesium.
The researchers looked at data collected over a 16 years from more than 42,000 men enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. During the course of the study, 2,195 of the men were diagnosed with gallstones. When they compared that statistic to the amount of magnesium the participants reported getting from foods and supplements, they found that the men with the highest magnesium intake levels were 33 percent less likely to develop gallstones than men with the lowest intake.
While allergy elimination is still, by far, your best bet for putting and end to gallbladder attacks and avoiding surgery, getting more magnesium is a good idea anyway. And if it increases your chances of going under the knife to 99.99 percent, so much the better.
To read more about Dr. Wright’s allergy-elimination approach for gallbladder attacks, refer back to the October 2004 issue of Nutrition & Healing. Subscribers can download this issue for free by visiting the Archives portion of the website, www.wrightnewsletter.com, and logging on with the username and password listed in your most recent newsletter. And if you’re not already a subscriber, the website also offers information on how you can get access to this and much more health-changing information by becoming one.
Source: “Magnesium may cut risk of gallstones,” Reuters Health News, 2/22/08
