How does your stomach determine when to throw your food back up? (Like for food poisoning or something) and how come it’ll digest the food but then you have diarrhea instead? If it was bad, shouldn’t you have thrown it up before it got to the intestines?
In: Biology
For substances that are perceived as acutely toxic to the stomach, you will throw up immediately (e.g. syrup of ipecac will irritate the gastric mucosa). For substances that trigger the CTZ (described in another post), they will induce vomiting a little bit later because the substance needs to enter the bloodstream first and cross the blood brain barrier.
For the remainder of “things that make you sick,” – which is largely limited to infections – they will often produce a ‘toxin’ of sorts (e.g. C. diff) which only is released once the substance makes its way into the small bowel/colon (remember, food doesn’t sit in your stomach for very long. Very little absorption happens there). Bacteria that aren’t killed off by the stomach acid will multiply rapidly in your GI tract. So by the time the bacteria/virus/toxins start to cause their damage, they are well in their way into the small bowels. You can’t purge your bowels north, so you purge them south.
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