what happens to your body as you starve to death (no food no water)
In: Biology
No water isn’t actually starving to death–that’s death by dehydration, which is *much* more rapid. You can survive for weeks without food. Take away water as well, and you’re dead inside three days as the metabolic processes mentioned by djdunn start to fail.
Without water, your body doesn’t have a key ingredient for many of the metabolic processes that take place in your body, and will have a more difficult time removing waste from your body. So you will exhibit growing weakness and disoriented thinking, while toxins build up to lethal levels in your body.
Normally your body uses energy sources in the order of complexity to turn into energy, sugar first, then complex carbohydrates, then protein then fat.
When you’re body can’t get enough fuel burning fat, it begins to breakdown your muscles to get protein for the energy it needs to survive.
Your body begins to digest your muscles once all your body fat is gone. You’ll die much sooner from dehydration as your kidneys will not be able to filter out toxins and other stuff.
Your body is made up organs and they’re made up of tissues which are made of cells. For this example, I’ll just mention the stomach as an organ. The stomach is made up tissues (glandular, epithelial etc…) but they are all made of cells. The cells do their job using energy. They use energy to move or produce something or remove something etc. So in the case of your stomach, some tissues contain cells that churn food (crush it). They need energy to move and eventually crush your food.
Energy (according to the 1st law of thermodynamics) cannot be created nor destroyed, so it must come from somewhere. Food. The energy is supplied by the food, as minerals as vitamins, so without them your body doesn’t have the building blocks for changing the food into energy, as a result it breaks down fat (made of sugars) into the building blocks required to convert into energy. Hence why you lose weight if you don’t eat.
Your cells all contain water, and constantly lose water, through something called osmosis. This causes water loss through urine and sweat. Eventually when you lose enough water, your cells become flaccid and can’t do their job using energy from the food, so they die and this keeps on happening until your vital cells die (liver, heart, lung, brain) and you die. Hence why the breakdown of fats and muscles as building blocks for energy allows you to last longer without food than water.
Water = 3 days approx. and food = 3 weeks approx.
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