How can certain foods pass straight through you when your intestines already have digesting food in them from previous meals blocking the path?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s not the “triggering” food that’s being specifically flushed – your body isn’t smart enough for that. It’s everything past a certain point.

There are three stages in digestion, broadly speaking. Stomach, small intestine, large intestine. Stomach turns food into liquid sludge, small intestine extracts most of the useful parts from the sludge, large intestine extracts a few more and most of the water, then the remnants are dumped.

If you eat something, and your body decides for whatever reason that you shouldn’t have eaten it, priority A is vomit. Vomiting immediately empties your stomach via the most direct route and prevents further damage.

If you eat something and immediately need to go to the bathroom, you either ate something that irritated your stomach in a general way and it’s decided to move the train to the next station early to try and alleviate it, or you already had quite a lot of passengers on the previous train still travelling through you, and your body needs to clear space for the incoming meal via the only method it has.

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