A rumbling stomach is a normal part of digestion.
When you haven't eaten in a while, your body has ways of reminding you that it needs fuel. Often, the stomach nudges you toward your next meal by making loud gurgling noises. But why, exactly, do our stomachs growl?
Peristalsis is a series of wavelike muscular contractions that propel gas, food and liquids along the hollow tube of the digestive tract. The human digestive tract, which includes the mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines and rectum, is essentially a long, muscular pipe. To get food from one end to the other, the muscles built into the lining of this tube contract in a sequence, one set of muscles after another, which pushes digestive contents along.
"Your stomach can growl when it's hungry or when it's full because we have hormones that regulate our appetite and trigger peristalsis," Weir said. Immediately after a meal, there is a lot of peristalsis going on. There are an average of three waves per minute in the stomach and 12 along the small intestine. As food is pushed through the digestive tract, it is mixed and churned for easier digestion, and the mixing of solids and liquids during digestion is not a silent process.
The reason the stomach and intestines might contract in the absence of food may be to clear out any excess liquid, solid or microbial debris that may be lingering in the stomach or intestines, Mark A. W. Andrews, a professor of physiology and associate director of the Independent Study program at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Pennsylvania, said in an article for Scientific American.
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