Dr. Trisha Pasricha

It should exit your stomach, that first part, within four hours.

Four hours?

Yep.

And if it's softer, easier to move through, doesn't have to do a lot of hard breaking down like fibrous foods.

If it's something soft like eggs, it'll move through the stomach even quicker.

But from the point from when it exits the stomach until you decide to release it into the world again, that process can take days.

Because for a lot of people, it moves through the small bowel over the next day or two, hangs out in the colon.

But

You know, we have control over that final step.

And there are some people, for any number of reasons, who are going to hold on to it a little bit longer than others.

So it can take a day, two days, sometimes even longer.

Wow.

But it's out of the stomach.

Within hours.

Within hours.

Yeah.

And sometimes even, again, within 30 minutes, depending on what you've eaten.

Huh.

That is absolutely fascinating.

The thing about this, though, is that if you think about the gut just this way, and this is the way that I think a lot of us have learned about the gut in school, you will think about the gut just as a digestive organ.