Don’t laugh, this is a serious question.
About an hour ago I ate a meal, I didn’t have much time - it was just noodles with prawns and some random stir fry sauce, (I’m a student, sue me).
But literally the moment I finished eating I needed to ah, expunge myself.
Which makes me think, did i actually get any nutrition from that meal? Or did it just go in one end then out the other - yet I don’t feel hungry.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Not that fast. Even when I’ve had picolax, a pre-op “bowel cleanser”, it’s taken half an hour to an hour to start doing it’s thing.
Pretty damn fast. Under certain circumstances (such as extremely hypermobile bowels, or at the other extreme, unblocked ‘lead pipe’ bowels) some substances can go thru in minutes.
From mouth to anus in minutes?
Yep. Often, the limiting factor is gravity.
Imagine a lax GI tract, with all valves pretty much open, and GI contents empty, without any bowel contraction going on to impede it. This situation arises in certain forms of gastro-enteritis and other GI toxin exposures.
Pour water in the top, it will reach the bottom at a rate more dependent on slope and incline than on any physiologic processes.
The GI docs refer to this as “lead pipe syndrome”.
Less speedy, but still quite rapid (think 10-15 minutes) are hypermobility syndromes. The stomach churns, pushing contents into the small bowel rapidly. The small bowel, irritated, pushes things along quite quickly, and when they hit the colon, it too decides it doesn’t want to waste time extracting all the water from the contents, it just wants it out!
This often happens after a viral diarrhea, which causes the bowel to slough off a lot of its surface. Ingested food is then both an irritant and a substance which pulls fluid out of the bowel, and the body’s response is to move that load through! Inadequately digested fat and irritants like capsaicin also speed this along.
What would be the general condition of a patient with either condition, I presume they wouldn’t be posting here.
I’m guessing with a thread title like that, you don’t really need a TMI warning…
I have IBS and find that eating in the morning brings on the need to urgently defecate. It’s not the food I’ve just eaten that is coming out though, it’s the previous evenings dinner. It’s almost like the newly introduced food tells my bowels to ‘wake up!’
Our esteemed physician is correctly answering the “how fast” part of the OP. But nobody should get confused and think that the noodles were what were exiting the OP at the end of the meal.
Hypermobility syndromes are the fun stuff. The more prosaic answer is the Gastrocolic reflex.
Food sends out a signal to the colon to get activated. Sometimes that causes an immediate reaction. The stuff being evacuated is the remains of the last 10-24 hours worth of meals, along with other waste, just like almost always.
Our esteemed physician is correctly answering the “how fast” part of the OP. But nobody should get confused and think that the noodles were what were exiting the OP at the end of the meal.
Hypermobility syndromes are the fun stuff. The more prosaic answer is the Gastrocolic reflex.
Food sends out a signal to the colon to get activated. Sometimes that causes an immediate reaction. The stuff being evacuated is the remains of the last 10-24 hours worth of meals, along with other waste, just like almost always.
Damn. The one thing I remember well from my GI physiology class, and not only does someone beat me to it, you beat me twice!
Heh.
Very true. I was addressing the thread title, and ignoring the OP’s description of his experience.
Yeah, here’s some more TMI, but I doubt you’d be reading this far if you were going to be offended.
I’ve recently discovered my intolerance for lactose. If I drink a couple of glasses of milk*, it takes about 20 mins for explosive evacuation at the other end. I can’t tell you whether or not what’s going out is what was going in, I’m just saying it doesn’t take very long for milk to activate that response with me.
*I became LI in my mid twenties. This is when I was still figuring that out that I was still drinking milk.
What a lot of responses…
I feel relieved now (pun intended), it seems like that it was yesterdays meal exiting my body and my noodles and prawns are still in my body digesting normally.
Disaster averted 
Thanks everybody!
I have Crohn’s, and if I eat a normal-size helping of any kind of cooked vegetable, such as spinach, carrots, or beets, they reliably reappear, only slightly transformed, in 45 minutes. You can set your watch by it.
Lact-Aid totally rocks, if you didn’t know it already. Tastes and cooks just like regular milk. They sell it at Wal-Mart and Kroger right next to the other milk.
Several years ago I had a friend that would take laxatives as a weight loss method. I told her I had read that the laxative did nothing but rush food through the body that had the calories already extracted, utilized or whatever. From this description, it seems that if laxatives cause hypermobility then she would have been correct. (Although if this is the case, I am not going to mention it to her). Just wondering.
There could be another sort of event that would mimic this. Suppose for the sake of argument that something like caffiene makes ALL your muscles a bit jumpier, including the bowel. All you have to do is absorb some of the caffiene into your bloodstream and get it to wherever bowel muscle activity is regulated. The fact that consuming something gives one diarrhea doesn’t necessarily mean that the something has traveled all the way there yet.
Oh good. :dubious: So I wasn’t hallucinating a couple of months ago when I ate something visually distinctive for lunch and 40 minutes later it was coming out the other end. At least it was a one-off situation with no apparent long-term effects.
Isn’t normal transit time more along the lines of 18 hours?