It takes ~36 hours from the moment you bite into your meal to when you’re pooping it out. Meaning, your digestive tract has 36 hours worth of meals it’s currently digesting at any given time.
When you eat something bad, it seems that you’re on the toilet pooping it out within the hour. How is that even possible if the pathway is blocked by 36 hours worth of meals?
In: 308
It a little more complex than that. Your digestive system starts to respond to food when it enters your mouth, whether that’s triggering nausea from a bad taste or releasing digestive enzymes.
If you eat something and have to go to the bathroom, it’s your body triggering a response.
For instance, instead of your small intestines absorbing fluids and nutrients, it may reduce the absorption rate, increasing the speed of the digestive process, even if the food your body is intolerant of hasn’t made it to the small intestines yet. Your intestines create protective mucus. In a disturbance, it may create more of it to hurry along a bowel movement so what is in your stomach can move forward to less sensitive parts of your digestive tract.
So, your stomach sends a signal to your brain and says, Charlie ate that bullshit again, please relay the message to the large intestines to get all fucking slimy so he can shit and this lactose that feels like a bundle of barbed wire can push on through to the small intestines and eventually make its way out.
So the initial irritant may not take 36 hours to pass through, but it’s not going straight through you.
Another example. Think of it like coffee. A lot of folks go to the bathroom within 30 minutes of drinking coffee. That’s because your body is processing the caffeine, a stimulant, which speeds up the digestive process. The coffee isn’t running through you. The caffeine is being absorbed by your mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestines, and so on.
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