Purely a hypothetical.
Let’s say that a person develops a system to cause a full meal-sized amount of food to enter their stomach while asleep (e.g. a food pack suspended in the esophagus on a timer), halfway through the night.
Does anything untoward occur? Or we would expect that everything just proceeds as normal and you’ve simply gotten more nutrition into your day?
How is that different from finishing a meal just before falling asleep?
The digestive system certainly works also while you’re asleep. It has to, because digestion takes a surprisingly long time: Food will stay in the stomach for anything between 40 minutes and three hours (says Wikipedia). After that, it passes to the duodenum and onwards to the intestines. The entire process takes many hours, so chances are that every night, your body is quite busy processing the dinner you’ve had.
Also, sleep eating (as in eating while sleep walking) can cause problems, but not because of the eating food part. Well, there may be weight gain…
I thought at first that this thread was going to be about chewing food while asleep, or half-asleep, which is something that my grandma used to do.
There are people, usually with cystic fibrosis or some kind of malabsorption issue, who have a feeding tube attached to a pump that delivers some kind of nutritional formula through a stomach tube while they sleep, because they just plain old cannot eat enough food to maintain their body’s needs. Would this count?
There might be a problem if the subject has reflux disease.
~Max
Could be useful to get kids to eat their vegetables.
This is the info I was going to contribute.
Problem is, they wake up from “eating” all night with a very full belly and sometimes struggle to eat enough during the waking hours.
mmm
I would think that would be due to the position rather than the state of being asleep.
Emotionally, for me, it would. Should eating be nothing more than a methodology to gain sustenance, or should it be a social as well as a culinary pleasure? For me, I can actually classify the latter as a “need”.
Right, I assumed sleeping lying down.
~Max
I thought it was going to be about a Seinfeld episode where George experiences sleep-eating.
Yes, digestion continues very nicely while you’re asleep. It might even be more efficient, since blood flow isn’t diverted away from the G.I. tract to facilitate waking activities like fight, flight and Internet browsing.