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
Gut Transit Time is about 30-40 hours but varies.
There are dozens of things that can alter the transit time of food through your digestive tract. It all comes down to motility of the gut, which is how fast it’s churning and using peristalsis to move food along. It also is affected by how easy the material is to move along the digestive tract. So someone had mentioned diarrhea earlier, that’s due to the gut failing to absorb as much water and even pulling water into the gut to keep things moving along at a rapid rate.
There are medications that can increase motility like Metoclopramide as well as some dietary choices. There are also medications that decrease motility like Morphine and Heroin. There was a good scene in Trainspotting about that last one.
I don’t know about Taco Bell specifically, but spicy foods that are chemical irritants can increase motility and make the trip in shorter time than foods that take longer to digest. A Ghost Pepper you eat on Friday night may well be felt exiting on Saturday.
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