Saturday, 9 April 2016

How does the human stomach handle a mix of digested and undigested food?


As I understand it, the stomach digests the bolus into chyme and then passes the latter on to the small intestine. This process takes between 40 minutes and a few hours.


However, what happens when the processing of the bolus is not completely finished and new food arrives in the stomach?


Will the stomach pass on all the food, including the only partially digested "new food" to the small intestine when the time for digesting the first load is up? Or will it keep all of the food until all of it is completely processed? Or does it have some way of allowing only the processed parts to pass on and keeping the unfinished parts behind, like a gate control?




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