How big is the capacity of a person’s stomach? Why does eating too much cause the stomach lining to rupture? How can gastric juice corrode the internal organs and how can it be harmful?
With 3 bottles of mineral water, the stomach is full
How big is the stomach of an adult? To make it easier to understand, an analogy is made with a 500 ml bottle of mineral water. Normally for a CT exam, a patient of normal height and weight would be advised to drink 1 bottle of mineral water, because 500 ml of liquid already allows the stomach to expand relatively well.
If full dilatation is needed, the doctor will have the patient drink 2 to 3 bottles of mineral water, “and by this time the patient will feel full.” If the patient continues to drink more water, he or she will feel “full”.
What if you continue to drink more? “From the 5th bottle of mineral water, the person’s stomach has expanded to the limit, clinically known as acute gastric dilatation. At this time, people will feel very uncomfortable.”
Stomach like a balloon, can be stretched into a “paper”
If you want to give an analogy to the “stomach”, Director Pan said that this organ is a bit like a balloon.
When there is nothing in the stomach, it is like a balloon without air, shrunken into a ball, the thickness is about 1 cm.
Once a person starts eating, the stomach is like a balloon being inflated, slowly growing in size and the stomach wall gradually becoming thinner.
”If loaded with enough food, the stomach will bulge like a balloon full of air, through the stomach wall can see through the light.” In this case, the thickness of the stomach wall is not much thicker than paper.
”The good thing is that the stomach wall itself has a certain elasticity, and when the food is digested, it will also shrink back. Fear is afraid of loading too much stuff, the stomach wall is stretched past the limit, even the elasticity is gone.” Director Pan said that by this time, our stomach is very dangerous.
”Like the balloon, the thickness of the stomach wall is also uneven, the part near the intestine is thicker, the other parts are slightly thinner.” If there is no limit to keep loading food, the stomach will be like a balloon, with the thinnest part being burst first and gastric juice flowing out from the ruptured part, corroding the organs in the abdominal cavity.
The pH value of gastric juice is 1.5 – 2.0, comparable to hydrochloric acid
How corrosive is gastric juice? Two examples: if a fish bone is soaked in gastric juice, it will become flimsy in a short time; if an iron is soaked in gastric juice, it will rust quickly, and the corrosion is comparable to hydrochloric acid.
The PH value of gastric juice is between 1.5 – 2.0, and the PH threshold for determining acidity is generally 7. The smaller the number, the stronger the acidity, the more acidic the gastric juice is so strong that it flows out from the rupture of the stomach, enough to strongly corrode the organs in the abdominal cavity. Once this happens, the stomach acid and gastric juice in the abdominal cavity must be flushed out immediately. “Otherwise, it is very easy to cause diffuse peritonitis, leading to the patient in shock.”
But even if this approach is used to save the patient’s life, the damaged abdominal cavity can easily lead to abdominal adhesions, and the patient’s quality of life can be greatly reduced as a result.
It takes 4 hours to empty solid food
If physical problems are not taken into account, in general, food digestion time has a lot to do with the food material.
”Liquid food will be completely emptied by the stomach after 2 hours; with solid food, it takes about 4 hours to empty completely.” If you eat hard-to-digest food at noon, then it’s best to eat snacks again 2 to 3 hours apart, and the speed of eating should also be a concern.
”We’ve seen a lot of these cases clinically, and in this case, we would advise the patient to seek prompt medical attention and insert a gastric tube to remove the food.” When more serious cases such as gastric perforation occur, the contents of the stomach should be removed promptly, the rupture sutured, and the abdominal cavity flushed of gastric fluid.