I guess you could call this a shower thought but out of the blue I thought about this. How does our stomach acids not float up our throats in zero G? I’m not familiar with how our bodies work in space and would love to hear an explanation
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A biological process called peristalsis. Although we feel no sensation of it happening, there are smooth muscles along our digestive system that involuntarily contract in a wavelike sequence. These contractions act like our hands on the outside of a tube of toothpaste, pushing the contents of the tube farther down the tube. Thanks to peristalsis, we don’t need gravity to eat or drink. This is important, even on Earth, because our digestive system isn’t always vertical and for many of our animal colleagues, much of it is horizontal.
But, not all animals have peristaltic capability and some thus struggle in zero-G. The Russians learned this the hard way trying to raise quail on the space station Mir. If you observe most birds eating or drinking, you will see that they tilt their beaks upwards to swallow their food or drink, so that gravity will cause the substance to go down their digestive tract. An exception is pigeons, they can eat with their heads down.
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