If food takes up to a day to go through your digestive system, how can spicy food/Taco Bell make it out in record time?
In: Biology
Any food that is irritating to your stomach/intestines will cause the bowel muscles to contract at a “too fast” rate, in the hopes that it can eject the offending matter as quickly as possible. What you’re seeing is the ejection of all the stuff you’ve eaten since your last bowel movement, maybe (or maybe not) the actual spicy food.
There are nerves in the whole body that respond to “danger”. Most of the time, these nerves respond to the junk leaking out of broken cells, as if saying “We broke something! There is damage! React! React!”. In the bowel/stomach, these nerves react by triggering contractions of muscle (peristalsis) to move the stomach contents along faster. It could be that you vomit, or that you get bowel cramps and diarrhea to save yourself from more damage. Capsaicin (found in spicy foods) triggers the same response from the same nerves. It’s a false “damage!” trigger, but the body reacts the same as if you ate ground up glass or literal fire.
Obviously, some people’s nerves are more sensitive to capsaicin than others: if you are very sensitive, you will get bowel cramps, diarrhea, and/or vomiting. If you are not very sensitive, you may just feel it as a “warm” sensation in your belly for a while. I know several people who can eat insanely hot food and they just feel a “warm sensation” throughout the whole gut for a day or so until they use the bathroom to “get rid of it”.
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