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
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Normally, the small intestine absorbs most of the nutrients and the large intestine absorbs water. Diarrhea can happen for a handful of reasons:
* You eat something nasty or toxic, if your body “detects” that, it makes you throw up and/or makes so the food goes trough your guts as fast as possible, in order to absorb less of the toxic stuff. This also means there is less time to absorb water.
* Bacteria and viruses can cause your cells to suffer or go into “defense mode”, which causes them to work less, so they absorb water at a slower pace.
* One of the effect of inflammation is dilating blood vessels and the gaps between cells, so that your immune system cells can exit from your blood and fight better the cause of inflammation. It is generally helpful, but if the inflammation is very bad, they dilate so much that lot of water goes trough those gaps, so not only you absorb less water, but you also lose water
Diseases like cholera generally kill you because there are so many bacteria and inflamation in your intestine that it’s no longer able to absorb water and you even lose some water trough it, so you die of dehydration.
The opposite of diarrhea is constipation, in some cases, if the intestine is too long (very tall people) or lazy (old people), the food travels too slowly trough the intestine, which absorbs too much water and causes poop to become very hard, which makes it difficult to expel it. In some cases it becomes hard as a rock (coprolith) and impossible to poop, which can also kill you.
Food in stomach is liquid.
Normally it moves slowly through your guts.
Guts absorb water making poop solid.
Food in stomach is liquid
Stomach detects something bad.
Stomach hits flush.
Guts no time absorb.
Poop still liquid
This is a lot more complicated that can be put into an ELI5 post
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First and foremost, fun fact, from your mouth to your anus, the space inside you is outside of your body.
We are tube, the outside is the skin, the inside are the intestines, the stuff between them are your body.
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Water is absorbed in the small intestine, right after the stomach. It is a constant process occuring while the mushed food+water moves trough the intestines.
Normally food is inside you enough time that the water is absorbed.
When your body detects an issue in the digestive tract, at first it signals to move things along faster, there is no time for anything to be absorbed, so anything problematic is flushed. Bad food, bacteria or something irritating or something blocking the intestines
But there is a second stage to this when the small intestines start to secreate water to flush your insides.
So the bad stuff is digested
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The problem is that humans don’t have much excess storage for water, we can only survive for 2-3 days without it. So even with mild diarrhea, when water absorption stops that could be very dangerous, because you can’t hydrate yourself normall, just with IV solution directly to blood
Also the weakness comes from, nutrients not being absorbed. We have more storage for chalories, just remember if you miss 1-2 meals you feel run down. We got used to haveing plenty of food.
How does body decide if diarrhoea or vomit is the best thing?
Normally your guts take a lot of the water from the food you put in them.
If your body has something in it it wants to get out fast (you ate very spicy food, or you ate something your body doesn’t like, or you ate something that will make you sick) your body will instead put lots of water into your guts flushing them out.
Not having this water (and lots of other important stuff that goes along with the water like salts) along with the work your body does to move the watery poop through your guts is what makes you feel tired and weak.
Your body keeps doing it even when you are tired and weak because it still has stuff in it that it doesn’t want there and the parts that make your guts clean out are not the same parts that figure out if you have the right levels of water and other stuff in your body.
(That was difficult to write without using large health related jargon words.)
Throughout your digestive tract, water is constantly absorbed from the contents until it reaches your bowel, at which point there should only be enough water left to pass the stool. When you have diarrhea, everything is moving too quickly through your digestive tract so it can’t absorb as much water. Whatever the diarrhea is caused by is effectively making your digestive tract push everything through too quickly.
Answer: during normal digestion, your stomach fills with acid to break everything down. From here, it passes through the pyloric sphincter and enters your small intestine. The small intestine goes to work further breaking the food down into nutrients your body can use and those pass through the intestinal wall into your blood. Anything that’s leftover mixes with bile from your liver and gallbladder which then passes into your large intestine. Here, the large intestine is mostly just soaking up any unused water and lumping on waste products.
When you have diarrhea, your body has recognized the need to expel whatever is in your stomach ASAP to try and protect you. It does this by bypassing all these steps and leaving the waste as liquid so it goes through you as fast as possible.
Your body is pushing water into your digestive system to flush your poop out (and anything else that may be problematic).
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