Serious question about taking a dump.

I don’t know a nice way to pose this question so I won’t even try.

Sometimes it seems like certain food you eat gets on the “fast track” and craps out before a meal you ate even earlier. I’ll give you an example, I notice this when I eat japanese food. Now I might have McDonalds for lunch, and japanese for dinner. The McDonalds won’t come out until the next day, but the japanese takes the Tokyo Express right out of me a few hours after eating the meal. It’s like the food “skips ahead” of the earlier meal. Is this what happens? It hardly seems possible given the nature of the digestive track.

I sincerely doubt that anything you consumed at McDonalds remains recognisable as such when it appears at the other end; how exactly are you able to match input and output with any kind of reliability?

What may be happening is that the Japanese food gets your bowels moving due to the spice or whatever. You then shit out the McDonalds and anything else you had over the past 24 hours before it is ready to go. It is sloppy and has some “splash back”. You assume it is the Japanese food. But that food actually gets expelled the next day.

^Yep, no line cutting in the gastrointestinal tract.

Not even with live octupus sushi ? :wink:

While I’m not sure that this would work with the examples you provided, “fast tracking” is possible with certain foods. Foods with substantial components that are indigestible (either generally or for you personally) but are readily liquified by the stomach, for example, can flow past more solid masses (e.g. a high fiber meal)

Often unfamiliar foods are less digestible, simply because they are digested and absorbed by inducible elements (like cell membrane enzymes) which you don’t happen to have “in stock”. If you ate them regularly, you’d develop a higher capacity to process them. Some years ago, I went on a low carb diet [to excellent effect, i might add, but I believe that different weight loss diets suit different people], and being the kind of person I am, I aimed at 5-10 grams of carbs, on the assumption incidental intake would fill the rest of my “alloted” 20 g. After just a few months I found that my capacity to process potato starches, in particular, dropped to almost nothing. However, as a lifetime consumer of potatoes, the relevant enzymes or transport proteins regenerated on demand withon a week or two once there was a demand for them (the cells of the intestinal mucosa can experience a complete turnover in as little as 3 days) In the years since, I’ve pretty much given up potatos, except in the summer, so I get to observe this initial inability, and rapid development of tolerance every year. YMMV, of course.

In principle, I suppose this principle, or something similar, could apply to chitin (e.g. shrimp or lobster stock, if you rarely eat shellfish products), or spices that are either irritating or stimulating to your personal gut. While this might cause a general “speed up” in some cases, it’s possible that a highly water-soluble or tightly bound agent might simply pass along, taking its effect with it, before it can substantially affect certain more accustomed foods.

This is largely plausible speculation, based on various experiences, reports, and my knowledge or medicine and moleculr biology. It shouldn’t be mistaken for science, which involves actual research and stuff. (but if I’m going to go talking out of my a$$, at least it’s a suitable thread)

Oops, I meant to cite some medical conditions where this is very specifically observed, but since I forgot, I’ll just note the grandaddy of them all: intestinal obstuctions. You might expect the symptoms or constipation (and you’d get them), but many, perhaps most, patients also present with diarrhea from “bypass”. Semi-liquid material is quite normal in the small and large intestines; one of the primary functions of the terminal colon is resorbing most of the water from the leftover mass, before it is expelled.