I have read somewhere that it is normal to defecate about once a day. This leads me to think that it takes about 24h for food to pass through the body under normal circumstances.
Now lets say you eat some bad sushi that triggers “the runs” within an hour.
When you then defecate, is it the actual sushi that comes out or is it just the food you ate before the sushi?
Also, how fast could food theoretically go from mouth to anus?
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I first read this “How can fast food pass through the body?” and thought to myself “Ya know, that’s a good question”.
How fast do you want food to pass through your body? 😂😂😂
There are foods and beverages that can influence the duration. There are natural diuretics and natural anti-diuretics. So it can be anywhere from minutes to days.
I imagine some canned vegetables could pass through a person really quickly depending on how fast it was launched.
If your body reacts it can be in and out for example I can not eat my local Hardee’s it is from table to toilet less than 2 hours. And last time I tried I saw undigested fries in what can charitably be called stool.
I have IBS, which can cause severe, instant, diarrhea.
I have personally had to stop eating a salad because I was starting to get stomach cramps, and within 20 minutes, the salad had gone all the way through and out the other end. The lettuce was still green.
So, in severe cases, you can go from mouth to toilet bowl in under 20 minutes. It’s quite painful and I don’t recommend it.
If I eat collard greens, they’re in the toilet within an hour. My body simply can’t process it. Like the greens will be completely intact
I am a Radiologic Technologist. We do a study where people, swallow a capsule full of little metal rings, and we take periodic abdominal x-rays. Called a Stzmark study, it measures this exact thing.
My record is seeing someone take 18 days to completely eliminate all the rings from their system.
On the other hand, I once had food poisoning (I think) so bad that I lost 22 pounds in four days). I vomited a bunch overnight, then my butt turned into a firehose, and nothing I drank was being absorbed. Literally, I could feel anything I drank work through me, followed by clear diarrhea.
During that illness, just before I went to the ER for IV fluids, I did a little experiment where I swallowed a couple of hard vitamin pills and a lot of water and Gatorade. They left my system in just under twenty minutes.
When performing intake on a person and asking about Ins and Outs you follow the general rule of “Once every three days or three times in one day and everything in between.” It’s the general rule for how often is normal. When it breaks that rule you ask more questions: what prescription medications do you take. Changes to diet. Stress. Dehydration. Trauma. Etc.
In my experience with a gut disease (salmonella for a week or two) I ran an experiment to see exactly that by adding hard-to-digest food items to my diet deliberately at a specific time. My timing came out to 2.5 to 3 hours, but suffice it to say the roads were already cleared so I don’t know what time timing is like for a healthy colon with a sudden eviction notice.
I used to drink massive amounts of alcohol on a night out and the next day, everything I ate went straight through me due to having murdered my gut bacteria. Especially greasy food. Sometime not even an hour later it was already coming out the other end
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