When we drink more fluids than we need, the body simply excretes it, but extra food is stored. Why isn’t the excess passed like fluids?

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When we drink more fluids than we need, the body simply excretes it, but extra food is stored. Why isn’t the excess passed like fluids?

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The food isn’t stored, the calories are. Water doesn’t have calories, so there is nothing to store and passes through. If you ate something without calories, like a rock, it would also go right through you. If you drank a bunch of juice or other fluids with calories however, you would store those calories and potentially gain weight.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fluids that contain calories *are* stored as excess energy, i.e. body fat.

Water is excreted because it contains no calories, but something like, milk or soda would compromise your body composition should you drink too much of it. Heck, you always hear that too much beer can make you fat, well its true.

If some smart cookie could explain how water contains no calories, that would be interesting…

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your body isn’t passing the water just because it’s excess. It’s using the water to flush out waste products like urea.

It’s also carefully calibrating how much fluid and electrolytes are in your blood. Potassium in particular needs to be within a tight ratio to everything else or the heart stops working right.

To maintain these ratios it needs to always have just a little extra of everything. It can always dump the excess if it needs to, but it can’t create them from nothing if it doesn’t have enough.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Among what has been said, we have “easy” access to water. It is plentiful and unlike plants we can seek it out so we didn’t need to store it. Why do we hoard calories like a dragon? When having a high-calorie meal required you to spend hours hunting an animal to exhaustion, which was the first success in 100 failures, you sure as hell are going to want to store that fat because who knows when you’ll get another chance