Function
When food containing fat enters the digestive tract, it stimulates the secretion of cholecystokinin (CCK). In response to CCK, the adult human gallbladder, which stores about 50 millilitres (1.7 U.S. fl oz; 1.8 imp fl oz) of bile, releases its contents into the duodenum. The bile, originally produced in the liver, emulsifies fats in partly digested food.
During storage in the gallbladder, bile becomes more concentrated which increases its potency and intensifies its effect on fats.
In 2009, it was proposed that the gallbladder can produce several pancreatic hormones, including insulin.
Read more about this topic: Gallbladder
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)