What happens to body during diarrhea? Especially the water part? Normaly, the water we drink is absorbed in the body and most part of thrown removing toxic elements via urine. But, during diarrhea body losses lot of water and we become dehydrated and weak. Suppose due to some process let’s say like Osmosis the water travels thru membrane and finally transforms into another substance, blood. So, during dehydration, does this process reverse? Why do we feel weakness? Also, when body knows it’s getting weak why it is still dehydration without absorbing any water? Someone please explain whole process.
In: Biology
Stomach find something bad
Body turns stuff in digestion system into liquid
Liquid faster at exiting body
Toilet time
Survive
Your small intestine typically has a lot of water, no matter what. Your intestinal tract has to be well lubricated to move the food along the many feet of intestines. It’s not *just* water that’s in your intestines, of course, there’s all kinds of enzymes and secretions in it, but it’s still mostly water.
Typically during a normal bowel movement, it takes roughly 48 hours from when you ate your meal for it to be defecated. When it gets into the large intestine, the “water” from the small intestine gets reabsorbed for the most part. This happens passively, and is not directly controllable. Water just flows from the intestine back into the blood stream. This way, the body keeps the intestine well lubricated, but recycles the water.
When you have diarrhea, your body believes there to be something wrong with something in your digestive system, and shoots everything out as fast as possible. It doesn’t have time to let the water slowly filter back into circulation. Better to be a little dehydrated and have to drink some water, than keep a pathogen in the intestines.
As for water transforming into blood, an important thing to remember is that blood *is* water. Blood is just water with some blood stuff in it. Your urine is just water with some waste products in it. The body doesn’t differentiate between the water that’s in blood or the water that’s in intestinal juices. It doesn’t keep them separated.
As for why your body doesn’t stop the process when it “knows” you’re getting weak. Your body is not conscious. It doesn’t think these things through. One part of your body senses a problem, and tries VERY hard to remedy that problem. And the rest of the body is playing catch up. Your body can and does hurt you, even with the best intentions. Your body is designed to survive, but sometimes it’s a little too eager and tries so hard to help that it can hurt you.
There is a tube that runs through your body, everything you eat and drink goes through that tube. The tube is designed to break down all that food and absorb the nutrition and water from the food.
For various reasons you can get diarrhea which speeds up the process of expelling the contents of your digestive system, your body doesn’t have time to absorb all the liquid which is why the stool is a wet goopy mess and also why you become dehydrated, your body didn’t absorb the water from your intestines.
It’s not pulling water from your body so much as its not absorbing the fluids you consumed, which is critical to remaining hydrated.
So, most of the answers people have talked about your body not having time to absorb the water your drink. The thing is, in addition to that for your average day your body pumps 7-9 liters of fluid into your GI tract. It’s in mucus, as a medium for enzymes, and sometimes as just water to soften things up. Generally, by the time your meal is hitting the end of the GI tract you’ve absorbed all of that liquid back into the body. When you have diarrhea, your GI tract is so busy shoveling everything out that it can’t reabsorb that liquid. So you’re losing any water you drank PLUS a bunch of water that was already in your body which is the dangerous part.
Challenge accepted.
When you eat and drink, all the good stuff goes into your blood to give you energy. The bad yucky stuff that’s left over goes into your intestines. Your intestines are like a really long hose inside your tummy that takes the yucky stuff to the potty. There are little straws inside the hose that suck up all the good water from the yucky stuff before it reaches the potty. That good water then goes into your blood to keep you healthy.
But sometimes, your tummy gets an ouchie, maybe from some bad food. Then your intestine hose works too fast and doesn’t suck up the good water like it should. All the yucky stuff with the water still in it rushes out into the potty – and that’s diarrhea.
Losing all that good water makes you feel tired and weak, like when you get really sweaty playing outside on a hot day. And your body keeps having diarrhea because that ouchie in your tummy is still there, making your intestine hose work too fast.
The best way to make diarrhea stop is to rest, drink lots of fluids so your body can get more good water, and eat gentle foods like soup and crackers that won’t hurt your tummy more. Then your intestine hose can go back to working normally and absorbing all the good water.
Borrowed from /u/reshkayden.
Reposted by /u/jiggity_gee
So your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.
When you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn’t so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).
Now, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it’s located on the track, it’ll choose the best route.
Let’s use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.
The Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.
I hope this answers your question.
TL;DR when you get diarrhea, everything gets pushed out, one way or another. There are no passing lanes.
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Diarrhea occurs when colon is unable or unwilling to absorb the water in the fecal matter in the final stages of digestion to form solid fecal matter. Often this is because some water soluble toxin has accumulated in the fecal matter and/or the body doesn’t have enough time to extract the water from the fecal matter due premature bowel movement cause by something like gas. In extreme cases the toxic will reverse the standard process actually pulling more water into the fecal matter.
In fairly benign cases that uncollected water can just be substituted for by the consumption of extra water consumption so as to drive water absorption earlier in the digestion process. In more severe cases like cholera the reversal in normal colon function can deplete your blood’s electrolytes as well making it harder for your body to retain future water.
Depletion of water and electrolytes in the bloodstream makes it harder for your blood cells to move around and do their job in supplying your muscles and nerves the resources they need to do their jobs optimally. Which leads to a feeling of weakness as your muscles maybe less able to carry out physical tasks and your nerves are less able to communicate those tasks to them.
Your body freaks out from being sick or bad food and begins moving stuff from your stomach and out of your body faster than normal. Not all the water gets absorbed. So it makes for loose and watery poop.
It also means less water is being absorbed to hydrate you. So you need to consume more to offset what’s being wasted.
Think of it like a clearance sale. The store doesn’t want that merchandise on the shelves anymore because reasons.
Your stomach (because we’re explaining as if the audience is five) detected something not so great going on so it’s time to go into clearance mode.
What do both have in common? The most ELI5 answer is “everything must go.”
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