Gross topic, but curious. How does eating “bad” or greasy food result in immediate diarrhea when it takes up to 24 hours for the food to actually digest?
In: Biology
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Digestion time varies between individuals and between men and women. After you eat, it takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through your stomach and small intestine. Food then enters your large intestine (colon) for further digestion, absorption of water and, finally, elimination.
Cramps in your stomach and gut, diarrhea, and vomiting may start as early as 1 hour after eating tainted food and as late as 10 days or longer. It depends on what is causing it.
The body knows straight away that there’s something wrong. But to get rid of that, everything else in front has to go too.
Think of your GI tract like a race track, and the food you eat like race cars. The finish line is a bowel movement. The fastest race cars are the ones your body has marked as waste or unwanted. So something your body doesn’t like is going to win the race.
It’s different for bad food and greasy food.
For bad food, basically your body notices there is something wrong with the food and wants to get it out as fast as possible. If it’s very bad and you notice it while it’s in your stomach, you throw it up. If it’s not as bad or it only upsets your bowels, your body says “expel it FAST”, so you skip steps such as withdrawing water from your feces and you have diarrhea. Certain substances aren’t harmful, such as hot spices, but they still upset your GI tract and so they have the same effect.
If you instead eat too much fat food, your body can’t produce enough enzymes to break down all that fat, so part of it isn’t digested and absorbed by your guts. Your body notices it and it doesn’t want the bacteria in your guts to feast on all that food – it produces lot of gas and it can mess up the ideal amounts of different strains of bacteria – so you also fast track it to the end.
Side note, eating lot of zero calories sweeteners makes you fart more because your guts can’t digest and absorb them, but bacteria in your guts can and this produces lot of gas.
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