Also, about how long does the process take?
In: Biology
drinking -> stomach -> intestines -> blood -> kidneys -> bladder -> peeing
Water is inert, nothing really happens to it, it just goes through you and everything else is suspended in it. Also, it’s pretty difficult to define how long the process takes as your blood (and body in general) is a large water reservoir and the ‘specific’ water you just ingested might be partly excreted through the kidneys rapidly or stay in your body for a bit while ‘other/older’ water is excreted. How fast the kidneys excrete water also depends on how much you drank as they work to keep your blood pressure relatively stable by managing the amount of water in your blood, but it is a constantly working process.
The water is absorbed by your intestines into your blood, where it forms the majority of the mass of your blood. It circulates through your body. For any cells, it also serves as the fluid that, among many other things:
* Provides cells their filler
* Allows cell membranes to form
* Provides a medium for chemical reactions to occur
* Works as a lubricant between cells
* Serves as a coolant (via blood or sweat)
* Helps deliver oxygen/nutrients and remove waste (again, via blood)
* Carries materials in lymph system
* Serves as a medium for ions in nerves/muscles (allowing you to think/move)
and finally
* serves as a carrier to urinate out toxic waste products.
How long does water stay in you? Until you die. (It’s not really reasonable to say “this water goes here and stays for X time,” since it’s always mixing. You could theoretically have some of the same water you had since you were born.) You literally use water in every single process of life. Without water, **EVERYTHING** starts failing.
The other answers to this explain it pretty well so here’s a Fun Fact: 140 L of blood pass through the kidneys each day (assuming fully functioning kidneys). You have about 5 L of blood in your body. So each drop of blood passes through the kidney ~28 times per day. So water is being constantly filtered from the blood, then reabsorbed in the kidneys at an extremely quick rate
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