Effects of bile salts on glucose metabolism by slices of hamster small intestine.

Bile salts are known to be essential for the effective absorption of fat from the intestinal tract (1). They have been shown to stimulate the action of pancreatic lipase (2) and have an important emulsifying action on water-insoluble dietary triglycerides that is probably related to their ability to form micelles with fatty acids and monoglycerides (3). In addition to their role in triglyceride absorption, bile salts also appear to be essential in the absorption and esterification of vitamin A (4) and cholesterol (5). In previous studies from this laboratory (6), it was shown that conjugated bile salts enhanced the esterification of palmitate-C14 to triglycerides and appeared to stimulate the incorporation of glucose-C14 into glyceride-glycerol. These observations suggested that in the intestinal mucosa, bile salts influence the metabolism not only of lipid, but also of carbohydrate. The present experiments were designed to investigate further the actions of conjugated and unconjugated bile salts on glucose metabolism. These studies have been carried out with slices of hamster small intestine. In addition, because of some disagreement in the literature concerning the utilization of glycerol in the intestine (7, 8), the metabolism of glucose and glycerol by hamster intestinal mucosa has been compared.