four hours sleep. six hours of class to get through. a big cup of coffee.
after consuming said cup of coffee, i spent the rest of said class time either a) holding it (and i mean HOLDING it) or b) hurrying to the bathroom.
now i know caffeine is a diuretic (sp?) but my question is: how the heck did it get through my system so fast? i was always under the impression that anything you put in your mouth took atleast a day or two to come out the other end. does a diuretic make your body flush out any extra water it already has in it, and that was what i was peeing, or does anything with caffeine get a green light through your system?
on a similar note: i have a friend who, about an hour after eating a lot of really sweet food, get da shits REALLY badly. there is no holding it in for this poor soul. (come to think of it, this happens to my mom too… anyway) i know the whole idea of what makes you shit was covered in another post, but how in the world can what she eats for dessert influence her bowels before she is ready to go to bed? is the ‘a few days to digest’ rule a bunch of (bad pun heartily intended) crap?
I had a friend who would get into “urgent” situations frequently. I don’t know if a particular thing set it off, but I do know he was diagnosed with “spastic colon”.
Stuff can go through you pretty fast. If I drink a lot of water, I have to piss within the hour. If you don’t drink enough water (your piss should be close to clear, if it’s not, you probably are not drinking enough) then most will probably stay in your system, so you don’t notice the correlation.
But seriously, there’s two things at work here. First of all, of all the things that the body gets out of food, water is the easiest and quickest to process. It’s already in the form that the body uses; at most, it needs some solutes filtered out.
Secondly, a substance you eat can cause effects in otherparts of your body. Sugar, for instance, (which is also quickly digested), can make a person hyper, and I suppose that that hyperactivity could affect the bowels as well as the rest of the body. The sugary food doesn’t necessarily have to travel via the slow intestines to get there; it can be carried by the bloodstream.
By the way, I think that the figure of 2-3 days only applies to proteins and fats.
Caffeine stimulates your kidneys and that creates the need to urinate. It’s all part of the big central nervous system excitement you get from caffeine.
Caffeine can have a similar effect on your bowels as it does your kidneys, so be careful.
Depends on how quickly you digest food. Try this experiment. You will need some milk, and a huge bowl of all bran. Pour milk into all bran and consume. Time how long it takes you to have a rather more thorough than average bowel movement.
Or you could do the squid-ink sauce pasta trick (linguine alla seppia or something like that, the actual sauce has to be made with squid ink). You can’t miss it as it comes out, it makes your stool look rather unusual. Just time how many hours between ingestion and excretion, and you have the answer to your question.
Water just whizzes through your system, in a matter of an hour or two it should be absorbed and excreted as well.
The one-day rule is only for solid food, and only under normal circumstances. With the right (or wrong) kind of food, it can pass within a couple of hours. A friend of mine BBQs really greasy pork ribs, and within 90 minutes he and his guests have severe gas pains and must evacuate immediately. Also, the first time my baby daughter ate strained carrots, they were pooped out in about two hours.
Water balance is a tricky thing. Water (as well as alcohol) is absorbed directly into the bloodstream from the digestive tract. So excess water can build up very quickly. Team that up with a diuretic, and you’re ready for a pissing match.
Diuretics basically shut down the water balance mechanism of the kidney. The kidneys are very salty, so water in your less-salty blood tends to leach into them, via osmosis. It takes action by the kidney to prevent water from leaving the blood too quickly.
Alcohol is also a diuretic, so beer drinking is going to really bump up urine production.
The osmosis process is what is deadly about drinking ocean water if you’re adrift at sea. You drink water that’s saltier than your blood, and the water will come out of your blood much as it does in the kidneys. With a lower water level in your blood, your body increases the thirst desire. So you drink more sea water. More water out of your blood. Vicious circle. You’ll finally die from dehydration, but your intestines will be filled with water.
Since no one seems to get grossed out here I’ll ad my dos centavos. The rapid pee reaction doesn’t mean that the liquid in urine is the same liquid you drank. It’s just speeding thing though the system, flushing the blood as you fill the stomach. OTOH I had a flu last year that nearly wiped me out from dehydration. I drank several gallons of gatorade in the course of a day to keep my electrolytes up. When I drank a quart it would flush throug my bowels in a matter of one or two minutes for a while. It seemed my digestive tract was flushed of all contents including the stuff that makes it work properly, mucous, bacteria. It was over two weeks getting back to normal.
Bobby, my man!
I was thinking corn all along, than came to your incredibly wise post. Corn from one evening’s dinner turns up in the bowl the next a.m. for me. Probably right around 14 hours.
How about asparagus? When things are getting boring around casa Dinsdale, we’ll cook up a big pan of asparagus, and then race to see who is the first to make “asparagus pee.” (Once, one of my little darlings got all excited and was shouting, “Asparagus pee! I got asparagus pee!” Of course we had company over at the time.)
I was having a procedure done to look at my small intestine with some kind of radiology thing. The day after a night of prescription laxitives, my system fully evacuated, they had me drink a pink, pasty barium solution that would be detected by a monitoring device…
Well, to make the disgusting story short (too late), the “stuff” was in my intestines within the hour, and fully gone within 3 hours.
