I threw up last night because I scraped my tongue a bit too far back and it activated my gag reflex. I’d been at dinner with a friend, and I’d had a fair amount of wine, but when I threw up it was only the food that came up and not the wine? Why is this?
In: Biology
It’s a bit like a traffic jam in your stomach and the things closer to the exit show up first when you feel like you need to vomit.
Liquids absorb, solids digest. Liquids are absorbed into the bloodstream quite quickly (hence blood alcohol level shortly after consuming liquor), likely you had already absorbed the wine but not broken down the food
Solid vs liquid?
That’s really simple. The stomach is there to hold back solids for processing and work a bit on turning them into a fluid in the meantime. It will let fluids through without much resistance. The intestines can do something the stomach cannot, they can remove water from the food that comes in. In the stomach, that extra water would just be in the way as it dilutes the gastric juices.
Or, in a simplified fashion: What we eat is first put into a strainer, then that strainer turns into a pot and acid is added to break stuff down.
In this scenario at Club GI, the wine was able to splash its way past the bouncer (pyloric sphincter) to get from the main floor (your stomach) to the VIP area next door (small intestines) and be absorbed. The solid food though has to wait to be small enough before the bouncer will let it enter VIP. Then when Club GI got shut down later in the evening by the authorities (your finger/gag reflex) everyone left in the main floor got sent outside and everyone in the VIP area left though “the back doors” (normal bodily functions).
Not related but why were you scraping your tongue?
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