Eli5 if you were to drink a sip of coffee and then have a sip of water how does your stomach process that. Like coffee and water separately or diluted coffee.

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Always felt dumb for having coffee at work and then realizing I’m jacked, and trying to compromise with water directly after.

Edit: I am not really concerned if I’m cutting the caffeine but rather how does your stomach process two different liquids at the same time. Obviously they mix but to dumb it down does the stomach put the coffee in one pipe and the water in another?

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your body is really good at removing water from foods and drinks. There are only a few substances that can be directly absorbed through your stomach wall (water, aspirin, alcohol, and maybe a few other things) since your stomach is meant to break down food, not absorb nutrients. So by the time the coffee makes it to your gut, it’s likely to be more concentrated anyways. If you’ve had food with your coffee, that might be the best way to prevent jitters, but water alone probably won’t do much to prevent them. Eating even a small snack with your coffee will slow the absorption and prevent that wired feeling, but once you feel jittery, you might just have to wait it out.

Side note, coffee is a diuretic, meaning it makes you pee, so drinking water with it is not a bad idea since it has dehydrating effects

Anonymous 0 Comments

There can be some effects of mixing foods, but it’s done on a case-by-case basis. Water and coffee don’t really have any special interactions with each other in your stomach. But some things do.

For example, we’re not sure why but if you take certain medicines with grapefruit juice, you don’t absorb as much of the medicine. So those medicines tend to come with warnings to take them 30 minutes before or after having a meal with grapefruit juice. Activated charcoal has a similar effect. It sort of “clogs up” the parts of your digestive system that absorb things, and that’s useful if you’ve eaten something bad like certain poisons.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The body will not differentiate between the two!
They will mix and travel through your digestive system.. caffiene/nutrients/etc will be absorbed in your small intestine and the water will be absorbed and reabsorbed several times in the small intestine, large intestine, and in the kidneys.. depending on how hydrated you are

The stomach really has nothing to do with digesting either one. It’s primary purpose is to breakdown proteins with stomach acid (chemical digestion) and mechanically breakdown the food we’ve swallowed into a liquid form (mechanical processing). Coffee and water are already liquid so they just pass through to the intestines.

You’ve only got 2 pipes, 1 for air and 1 for food 😀
The food pipe IS open at both ends so everything we eat will end up mixing together

Anonymous 0 Comments

Think of it like a hose with tiny holes.

The holes can only go a a certain rate, but you can fill the hose with whatever in whatever order. It may mix, it may not, but that doesn’t matter. Total amount of caffeine ingested would be the same.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It won’t do anything. A cup of coffee versus cup of coffee and adding a cup of water has the same amount of caffeine.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Are you asking if the water will lessen the affects of caffeine from the coffee?