My digestion of fat is not good. What might be a medical reason that it isn't?
1 Answer
A blocked bile duct
Explanation:
Within the digestive system, there are different organs that work to digest different types of foods and material.
Fats tend to like to blob together (when you put oil into a pan, it likes to blob together. You have to actively spread it out to have it coat a pan). In the body, fats glom together. And so there needs to be a mechanism so that they can be digested efficiently.
The small intestine agitates the fats so that they separate. The liver releases bile (which is stored by the gall bladder until it's needed) so that they stay separated. And the pancreas releases an enzyme that actually digests the fats.
Where then to start looking for the problem? A common problem with fat digestion is that bile doesn't get released in a sufficient quantity - and the reason can be a blocked bile duct (bile contains bile salts and those can build up and block a duct) or even gall bladder stones (the salts condense inside the gall bladder, reducing the effectiveness of that organ).
And so a reasonable explanation would be that there is insufficient bile being released and a reasonable explanation for that would be that the bile duct is clogged with bile salt.
For more about fat digestion, check out this link:
