How fast DOES that wine go through you?

[Gautama2]

Assuming I just took a piss, and then drank a reasonably large glass of a liquid with smiliar viscosity to water, how long would it take before I would be able to piss it out?

Also assuming that I am simply sitting in a 70 F room doing no other activities.

 

[CycloWizard]

Alcohol doesn't just pass through you. Your body treats it as a toxin, consuming it in chemical reactions. Unfortunately, I've been conducting a similar experiment (using beer instead of wine) tonight, so I'm no longer qualified to discuss the matter. So far, my qualtiative results indicate that consuming 1.5 pitchers of Bud Light® over a 3 hour span, then not drinking for an hour, still put a 225 pound man over the legal limit (though 'over the legal limit' simply means I wouldn't feel comfortable driving right now - I had someone else bring me home). I can probably give more detailed information tomorrow.

 

[Gautama2]

I wasn't talking about the alcohol, i was asking how long til you could piss the consumed liquid out.

 

[BladeVenom]

It doesn't quite work that way, but your kidneys can process almost a quart an hour.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: Gautama2
I wasn't talking about the alcohol, i was asking how long til you could piss the consumed liquid out.

Ah. I'd say 15-30 minutes, depending on bladder size and kidney capacity. This is pretty easy to test. Just chug a quart of water and see how long until you need to hit the head.

If you want something a little more formal, this type of test is used to look at residence time distributions in chemical reactors using radioactive tracers all the time. 'Chugging' a known quantity of water infinitely fast approximates the Dirac delta function ('impulse') input, which is easily modeled. The first thing to do is measure the concentration of your input at the system outlet. You could do this by coloring the water that you're chugging such that the absorption at a certain wavelength is indicative of the concentration of the water that you chugged (as opposed to water already in your system), giving concentration:time data. One can then convert this to an 'F' curve by multiplying the concentration:time data by the volumetric flowrate divided by the mass of tracer. This F curve is the integral of the age distribution function/residence time distribution 'E', which tells you how long each bit of tracer lingered in your system. Estimating the capacity of your bladder at 2 cups (the average for an adult human), it is then trivial to back out the initial time at which the bladder began filling up with your tracer fluid.

I'd do this experiment myself, but I've already drank about 128 ounces of water/Gatorade today and I'm trying to stave off that nasty water intoxication that's going around.

 

[TraumaRN]

* Males: 97 to 137 ml/min.
* Females: 88 to 128 ml/min.

Those are the rough averages of Glomerular filtration rate for a healthy adult of average size. Your kidneys process a very large amount of blood in a very short amount of time...just look it up.

 

[gerwen]

Anyone knowledgeable care to explain what exactly happens to liquids we ingest, with a rough timeline? Does it go stomach-->intestines-->blood-->kidneys-->bladder-->toilet? At what form is it in each stage? (I'm especially curious about going through bloodstream, if it does) How does an alcoholic or anything other than water change things?

Thanks in advance.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: gerwen
Anyone knowledgeable care to explain what exactly happens to liquids we ingest, with a rough timeline? Does it go stomach-->intestines-->blood-->kidneys-->bladder-->toilet? At what form is it in each stage? (I'm especially curious about going through bloodstream, if it does) How does an alcoholic or anything other than water change things?

Thanks in advance.

Like I was trying to say, there isn't a specific timeline for the entire batch of fluid that you drink. It will be dispersed, as all of the treatment processes it undergoes take a finite amount of time. Thus, the 'time' it takes could be defined in several ways. Generally, you would use a mean residence time (the time it takes for half of the fluid to pass a certain point in your body), an onset time (the time it takes for the first particle of fluid to pass a certain point in your body), or some other metric.