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
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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