If the liquids we drink end up in the stomach, how does our stomach acid not get thinned down by the constant flow of liquid?
In: Biology
Because stomach acid is many thousands of times stronger than water, so you really can’t consume enough water with a meal to cause any meaningful change in pH. The stomach can also secrete a lot of it to keep up with depletion.
If you’re consuming water alone, it won’t matter anyway. The acid already in the stomach will just pass through with the water into the small intestine where it’s neutralized and reabsorbed.
It does get diluted, but the stomach walls just add more concentrated acid back in. Even if you weren’t drinking anything, purely solid food is mixed with the acidic liquid-y contents of the stomach and sent on to the small intestine together, so you “lose” acid over time regardless. The stomach would lose its function very, very quickly if it couldn’t maintain its contents’ proper acidity.
It does thin down, it gets replaced though.
However if your body can’t keep up or keeps up too much you end up with indigestion or gastric reflux aka heart burn.
It was also once though stomach ulcers where caused by over production of stomach acid, but was actually caused by a bacteria.
In short, proton pumps! The cells lining the stomach contains many proton pumps which can actively sense their environment (say fluctuations in ph) which then respond by increasing the export of H+ ions and eventually restoring the proper ph.
Edit: export not influx
I always wondered where my stomach was finding chlorine to make the hydrochloric acid, but of course where else but salt!
I have a kooky friend who swears alkaline water is healthy because it “helps the liver remove toxins.” I told her I assumed alkaline water simply neutralizes in the stomach. Is that true? What happens to alkaline water in the stomach?
The stomach just produces more acid. When we eat or drink, it does dilute, which is why people with stomach ulcers get some relief when eating.
It does. Have you ever had a heartburn? Or gastritis? All these things happen when acidity of our stomach is not in balance and often it can happen when drinking too much fluid that doesn’t have minerals. Specially if you don’t eat enough.
So if you feel sick and don’t eat properly / enough, and you drink too much water, your stomach acids get messed up so they don’t stay down and instead they rise up (even to your throat).
That is why when people puke they drink rehydration drinks, so they can replace minerals and electrolytes. That is also why people take probiotics when they use antibiotics.
Basically our stomachs are most important organ after brain and heart because if your stomach gets messed up it messes almost every other system and organ in our body. You feel weak, your vision blurs, your skin gets horrible, your heart has to work twice as hard, your brain gets foggy, your kidneys and liver have to work double shift, you may experience vertigo, Merniere disease and tinnitus. And it takes almost as long to recuperate after stomach issues as it takes to recover from other serious conditions.
Off: i speak from personal experience where it took me almost 3 months to get my body to normal state after bad gastritis episode, and because of which I thoroughly researched gastritis and stomachs and everything about them
What happens to the acids we lose? Do we just redigest them?
How does our stomach even make acid? I don’t want to hijack the thread but still wondering.
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