How does the stomach work in space? Do astronauts feel constant need to throw up since the contents are bouncing around inside?
In: Biology
A stomach is also more a wet bag than a box or bottle. There’s no big open space to fill. The contents can slosh around when you fill it up.
You have a sphincter (round muscle like your butthole) that holds things in at each end. There’s a lower esophagal sphincter at the top of the stomach that keeps the digesting food down, and a pyloric sphincter at the bottom that lets it into the intestines when it’s digested enough to move on.
When that esophagal sphincter gets weak, the result is reflux. It would be very unpleasant to be in space and have that aggravated.
Our intestines are actually kept together by a membrane called peritoneum, so even on Earth they’re not moving around that freely. In space, due to the absence of gravity, organs do tend to go slightly upward.. however nausea isn’t caused by the “organs moving around”, but by the brain that has to adapt to the no-gravity condition and causes us to have balance and coordination problems. And honestly the major problem for astronauts is that if they don’t do workouts while in space, they’d weaken their bones and muscles.
Edit: I realized that my answer was not pertinent, hope this answers your question.
When we ingest food, the muscle force that on Earth pushes food down to our stomach is strong enough to do it when we’re upside-down or even in space. After that, food reaches the stomach: processes that transform food into a sort of fluid (while breaking up fats and proteins in their simple forms) actually works the same even without gravity and the food they eat is full of nutrients but is pretty light, to prevent nausea…
English is not my first language, I apologize in advance for any mistakes…
Óir bodies are very good at keeping everything compact. While aided by gravity, one can digest anything in 0-G, and even upside down, since the entire process is muscularly controlled.
But no – astronauts get extensive training to *not* throw up. Most are/were former fighter pilots and have really good control.
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