How do our bodies swallow foods/liquids when upside down without it coming back up
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You have a tube that connects your mouth to your stomach. Its called an esophagus. It has muscles which push everything to your stomach.
Your esophagus is made of epithelial tissue and is controlled with simple muscle like when you wheeze a toothpaste tube down or up. Same concept.
Both ends of the esophagus has circular muscles called sphincters. The whole esophagus is also just a long tube of muscle. So after you swallow, the top sphincter closes, this prevents food from coming up. Then the tube rhythmically contracts top-to-bottom to push the food down. Once it gets to the bottom, the bottom sphincter opens up to let food go into the stomach and quickly shuts to prevents gastric juice from leaking backwards.
These sphincters are always closed and only open to let food pass. So doesnt matter if you’re upside down or in outer space, nothing really comes back up unless (1) you never swallowed it fully or (2) something’s wrong with the muscles in general or (3) theres is immense pressure pushing it back up like when you vomit.
Imagine the inside of your body squishing stuff down like how the outside of a slug slithers along the ground. That action is called peristalsis. Swallowing stuff and pushing stuff out from your butt are very similar movements. When you puke, you do as a slug would walk backwards on the inside.
because swallowing isn’t dependent on gravity. Your esophagus has muscles which contract to push food down into your stomach. This works if you’re sideways, upside down, or even in zero gravity.
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