Revoltingly OT: Size of your colon

[AgentZero]

OK, this is a wee bit gross, so if you're of a queasy disposition you might just want to skip over this and go read the latest installment of Hell is for Heroes, before I add the next bit.






Still with me? OK, so I'm up at 3:20am at the moment mostly on account of jetlag, and there's this infomercial on the telly about some natural health product or another, where the promoter is claiming that a lot of the minor ill health effects we feel nowadays (ie: chronic tiredness, etc) is due to the fact that we're carrying around a bunch of undigested fecal matter in our colons. Told you this was gross. Now while I normally wouldn't argue the point, aside from the fact that undigested fecal matter is an oxymoron, given that it's not fecal matter until it's at least partially digested, before that it's just undigested food.

The 'Health Expert' (that's what the show calls him. Not even a doctor?) claims that people have 15-40 POUNDS of this gunk stuck on their colon walls. Now what is want to know is, is the colon actually that big? I'm a fairly big guy and even I feel uncomfortably full if I eat more that about a pound or two, and I always thought the colon was smaller than the stomach. So how can one have even 15lbs just coating the walls, let alone filling the whole colon? It just don't make no dang sense to me.

Too tired to think of another shameless Hell is for Heroes plug, so just go read the damn thing.

[Captain Kwok]

Perhaps this gunk is awfully dense, somewhere on the order of lead.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

...Personally, I still say that extra 40 pounds is fat. It's the better explanation.

[bearclaw]

Captain Kwok said:
Perhaps this gunk is awfully dense, somewhere on the order of lead.

ROTFLMAO!!! (oops, there goes 40 lbs...)

[Renegade 13]

If there was that much weight just sitting there, I think I'd feel it clunking around in my guts after a while

[Caduceus]

As a physician, I think this is incorrect. The fact is that if you go in for a colonoscopy (the large intestine), you take the preparation (horrible tasting liquid) that does make you use the bathroom quite a bit over about a 12 hour period, but folks don't lose 40 pounds. Their colons are cleared out to allow the scope to see the walls/polyps, etc.

Most of these informercials are not substantiated by scientific fact. Just buy the snake oil and be done with it

[Hunpecked]

For most people, it takes about 24 hours for food to transit the digestive system. So you'd have to eat at least 40 pounds of food a day to keep 40 pounds in various stages of digestion.

More actually, allowing for absorption of water and other nutrients.

[EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro]

Infomercials in Ireland? The terrorists have already won!

[AgentZero]

EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro said:
Infomercials in Ireland? The terrorists have already won!

Ah, don't worry. I'm in Canada visiting my folks. Hence the jetlag. I figured it probably wasn't physically possible for someone to have that much crap (pardon the pun) sitting inside them. But I tells ya, this infomercial was something else. It was set up like a panel show, where the two hosts grill the guest on various aspects of their platform, except unlike decent panel shows where the guest actually gets grilled, every single question the 'hosts' asked was obviously designed to make yet another statement as to the wonderousness of his new product, with absolutely no follow up.
Host: "But is it safe?"
Guest: "It's perfectly safe."
Host: "Amazing. And how does it work again?"

And the funniest thing? The guest used the 'fact' that his kids had bigger, thicker and longer faeces that his. In his own words, his 5 year old was expelling something the 'length and thickness' of the guests arm, and this was taken as evidence that there was something wrong with the guest's digestive tract. Now I don't know about you but if I had a five year old that was dumping logs the size and thickness of my arm, I'd be more concerned about the state of his digestive tract than my own.

And what's this sicko doing poking through his kids poo anyway?

[Renegade 13]

AgentZero said:
And the funniest thing? The guest used the 'fact' that his kids had bigger, thicker and longer faeces that his. In his own words, his 5 year old was expelling something the 'length and thickness' of the guests arm, and this was taken as evidence that there was something wrong with the guest's digestive tract. Now I don't know about you but if I had a five year old that was dumping logs the size and thickness of my arm, I'd be more concerned about the state of his digestive tract than my own.

And what's this sicko doing poking through his kids poo anyway?

I was thinking the exact same thing! There is something seriously wrong...with both the kid and the parent!