system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why does diarrhea come so quickly when food takes hours for the stomach to digest and days to pass through the intestines?

I had Mexican tonight and had to rush to the toilet after a hour. Did I expell the burrito? What about the pasta I had for lunch, or the omelette I had for breakfast? Did they all came out without my body absorbing their nutrients?


Edit: Front page? Whoa. I guess diarrhea is more than meets the (butt) eye.

There seems to be two school of thoughts here: (1) the diarrhea is caused by the burrito, and (2) it is caused by something I ate the day before.
gpt
So your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.

When you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn't so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).

Now, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it's located on the track, it'll choose the best route.

Let's use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.

The Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.

I hope this answers your question.

TL;DR when you get diarrhea, everything gets pushed out, one way or another. There are no passing lanes.

Source: medical student

Edit: Wow, thanks for the gold!!