Gastric Bypass Surgery

How Does Gastric Bypass Surgery Work?

For many people endless months, or even years, of dieting simply doesn't result in the weight loss that they are seeking and, in many cases, actually adds to their growing weight problem. In the end therefore, and with the agreement of their doctor, they turn to gastric bypass surgery. But just why does gastric bypass surgery succeed where dieting has failed?

The secret lies in the digestive system. Food travels initially into the stomach where a strong acid solution begins to breaks it down. From the stomach the partially digested food moves on into the first part of the small intestine, known as the duodenum, and pancreatic juice and bile continues the process of digestion. At this point the body also absorbs both iron and calcium from the food.

Continuing on down the small intestine, which is about 20 feet long, the food passes through the jejunum and then through the ileum and during its travels the body extracts the bulk of the calories and nutrients contained within the food. Finally, any food that cannot be digested passes into the large intestine where it is stored until it is passed out of the body.

Weight gain is the simple result of eating food which contains more calories than we need so that the body, after it has used up the calories that it requires, stores any left-over calories as fat which is deposited throughout the body.

Gastric bypass surgery works by interrupting the normal digestive process and does this in one of two ways.

In the first form of gastric bypass surgery, which is known as restrictive surgery, a physical restriction is placed upon the quantity of food that you can eat so that you cannot consume as many calories as the body needs, thereby forcing the body to start burning off its reserves of fat.

In the second form of gastric bypass surgery, known as malabsorption surgery, the quantity of food that you can eat is not restricted but a new digestive passage is created to bypass a substantial proportion of the small intestine thereby preventing the body from absorbing the calories that it needs and again forcing it to dig into its fat reserves.

In many gastric bypass operations these two forms are combined to both restrict the intake of food and reduce adsorption by re-routing the food past much of the small intestine. In fact, today there are a number of different gastric bypass operations that are routinely performed and each has its own advantages as well as its disadvantages.

Gastric bypass surgery provides a powerful answer to the problem of obesity but it also carries with it a number of risks and these must be carefully considered. Surgery also results in some very significant changes in eating habits and lifestyle and can often give rise to significant problems in adjusting to both.

Perhaps most important of all however is the fact that gastric bypass surgery is not a magic cure for obesity and that failure to adjust to your new digest system and abuse of it can result in your putting weight back on again if you're not careful.