So after googling, the normal food you eat is supposed to take 2-5 days to go through digesting all the way to defecation.
I know eating spicy noodles will give me diarrhea but I still eat maybe once a couple months because I love them so much.
It takes only 5-6 hours before I get abdominal pains and have to relieve it at toilet.
So how does this spicy noodles skip everything in my system and kinda pushes in front of the queue to leave the body, it just doesnt make sense?
Edit: thanks for all the answers guys. I didn’t know the body could do that. It really is amazing. And now I feel kinda stupid for not figuring this out for so long.
So now I guess eating spicy noodles doesn’t only give me an unpleasant trip to the toilet but it also gets rid of all the nutrients my body was absorbing from my previous meals.
In: 1481
> So how does this spicy noodles skip everything in my system and kinda pushes in front of the queue to leave the body
It doesn’t.
When you eat something that is causing problems in your intestines, your body doesn’t have a way to selectively target it; it doesn’t even generally know exactly what the problem is. And it doesn’t need to, because it has the nuclear option: it ejects everything. And that’s diarrhea – it’s a gastrointestinal closing sale: everything must go.
It doesn’t if your body feels like something is in there that shouldn’t be, Like tons and tons of capsaicin (A chemical released by plants to make animals NOT eat them), It just ejects everything that’s inside. It doesn’t have time to solidify in your intestines after digestion so it just comes out as liquid.
Nothing jumps the line in the guts. First in, first out.
But 2+ days is the normal amount of time for food to make the full trip. When your body hits the big red button, that time drops to about 6 hours from hitting the stomach to hitting the toilet.
Reposting this classic explanation from u/jiggity_gee
So your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.
When you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn’t so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).
Now, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it’s located on the track, it’ll choose the best route.
Let’s use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.
The Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.
I hope this answers your question.
TL;DR when you get diarrhea, everything gets pushed out, one way or another. There are no passing lanes.
Source: medical student
>So how does this spicy noodles skip everything in my system and kinda pushes in front of the queue to leave the body, it just doesnt make sense?
It doesn’t. Diarrhea is the emergency eject button of the GI tract. When your body wants to get rid of something in there fast it just hits the release and everything goes all at once. The reason its watery and loose is because normally the liquid part is mostly reabsorbed by your intestines. But because you didn’t give your body enough time to do it properly it can’t absorb the liquid. This is a reason why its necessary to hydrate when dealing with longer bouts of diarrhea, its dehydrating you.
>I know eating spicy noodles will give me diarrhea but I still eat maybe once a couple months because I love them so much.
Rather than torturing yourself you might want to see if you can isolate which part of the recipe is giving you trouble so you can remove it/replace it with something else.
2-5 days? Well that would explain the smell
I feel like something important being overlooked by most responses at this point is the osmotic effect of certain things in our digestive tract.
In addition to the “eject button” everyone keeps mentioning, certain foods just intrinsically draw large amounts of liquid inside our intestines. As a result, things are thinner, more fluid, and move faster.
This is how many laxatives work, osmotic laxatives. They are just salts that draw water inside the GI tract and promote defecation.
So, depending on why your food is spicy this could be at play. As previous posts mentioned, as things move from Point A to Point B, nutrients are absorbed. But if certain nutrients or other consumed producers cannot be absorbed into our bloodstream, they remain inside the tract and make it to the colon. Here, these things have the sense effect as the osmotic laxative.
Spicy foods heavy in spices (middle eastern foods for example), or other foods with peppers and seeds (Mexican) both have indigestible things in them that will have this effect
Think of your intestines as a super long twisty playground slide. As you eat, things slide down the slide and out the bottom in an orderly fashion.
When you eat something that’s bad or disagrees with your body, it wants to get rid of that stuff fast.
So your body starts dumping water into that slide so things start moving a lot more quickly.
As you can imagine a waterslide is a lot faster than a normal slide so all the kids on that slide start shooting out the bottom at super fast speeds until no more kids are on it anymore.
Kids are splayed out at the bottom, piling on top of each other, crying, its a mess. Just like diarrhea!
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There is something called the gastrocolic reflex where the stretching of the stomach stimulates the lower bowels to make you poop. Spicy irritants make this response more aggressive
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