If food takes up to a day to go through your digestive system, how can spicy food/Taco Bell make it out in record time?
In: Biology
To make a long story short, it doesn’t go through any faster or slower. Any timing difference is 100% your own perception.
I was under the impression that it took 15 hours. But I’m not a scientist so my information could be wrong.
Either way, unless you have food poisoning or something similar, then your body is just pushing old food out to make room for the new food. An exception might be like drinking coffee on an empty stomach. Since the coffee goes through quickly and your stomach has nothing to digest it gets into the small intestines faster. Again I’m not a scientist this is just based off experience and word of mouth.
However things like corn are indigestible so they pass quicker. I can eat corn at 7pm and by my morning coffee dump at 8-9am it’s in the poop.
Gut Transit Time is about 30-40 hours but varies.
There are dozens of things that can alter the transit time of food through your digestive tract. It all comes down to motility of the gut, which is how fast it’s churning and using peristalsis to move food along. It also is affected by how easy the material is to move along the digestive tract. So someone had mentioned diarrhea earlier, that’s due to the gut failing to absorb as much water and even pulling water into the gut to keep things moving along at a rapid rate.
There are medications that can increase motility like Metoclopramide as well as some dietary choices. There are also medications that decrease motility like Morphine and Heroin. There was a good scene in Trainspotting about that last one.
I don’t know about Taco Bell specifically, but spicy foods that are chemical irritants can increase motility and make the trip in shorter time than foods that take longer to digest. A Ghost Pepper you eat on Friday night may well be felt exiting on Saturday.
Supplementing OP’s incongruent findings, how would a 15 hr minimum digestive time explain some lettuce passing through 2-3 hrs after ingestion? When the previous lettuce ingestion was at least a week prior?
Not saying there’s not an explanation that covers both, I just havent heard it yet.
Any food that is irritating to your stomach/intestines will cause the bowel muscles to contract at a “too fast” rate, in the hopes that it can eject the offending matter as quickly as possible. What you’re seeing is the ejection of all the stuff you’ve eaten since your last bowel movement, maybe (or maybe not) the actual spicy food.
There are nerves in the whole body that respond to “danger”. Most of the time, these nerves respond to the junk leaking out of broken cells, as if saying “We broke something! There is damage! React! React!”. In the bowel/stomach, these nerves react by triggering contractions of muscle (peristalsis) to move the stomach contents along faster. It could be that you vomit, or that you get bowel cramps and diarrhea to save yourself from more damage. Capsaicin (found in spicy foods) triggers the same response from the same nerves. It’s a false “damage!” trigger, but the body reacts the same as if you ate ground up glass or literal fire.
Obviously, some people’s nerves are more sensitive to capsaicin than others: if you are very sensitive, you will get bowel cramps, diarrhea, and/or vomiting. If you are not very sensitive, you may just feel it as a “warm” sensation in your belly for a while. I know several people who can eat insanely hot food and they just feel a “warm sensation” throughout the whole gut for a day or so until they use the bathroom to “get rid of it”.
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