Assume the smoothies have the same nutrient profile as a regular diet. Like if you drank runny mashed potatoes and protein powder to simulate a normal food intake.
If you do poop because of the nutrients, is there a healthy diet at which waste products are no longer left in the intestine to turn into poop?
Drag has no intention of doing this, drag is just curious about the science.
Smoothies with a proper dietary balance still have fiber. So yeah.
But even beyond that, waste products from the gut microbiome, and left over bits that the body doesn’t use. Best case scenario, you would have small, liquid poops.
Your best bet? Intravenous feeding. Not that Drag has any intention of doing this.
If the fiber is required for a proper diet, why isn’t it absorbed by the intestines?
Because its role is to aid in the voiding process. Much as part of the role of water is to serve as a carrier of urea out of the body, fiber’s job is to provide, bulk of a sort that’s easy on your intestines for the removal of waste. We could have evolved different dietary needs, but as fiber is plentiful in what we ate in the wild we adapted around it. Similar to how cats need external sources of taurine but we don’t.
Fiber mostly feeds the bacteria in your digestive system and they play an important role in digestion, and general well being.
Fiber doesn’t actually have any nutritional value. It functionally just scrubs your intestines when you eat it. If you don’t have enough fiber it can cause very weird digestive issues as strange things build up in your guts.
Well, physical scrubbing, sure. But also, specific fibers are required for a healthy gut microbiome to function and maintain a proper balance of microbes that produce other micronutrients that your body cannot make on its own as well as fending off the types of microbes that subsist of sugars and fats alone.
And constipation!
Thank you!
Adding to what they said, without fibers your shit will be liquid and runny, because it’s fibers that give rigidity to it.
The task for dietary fibers is to give volume in the colon and give the peristaltic muscles something to do.
They have limited nutritional value.
And they are an energy source for the good microbes there too.
Gotta get those microbial micronutrients.
Why are volume and muscle movement needed?
It’s the optimal for our digestive system, of course in some cases like in the hospital or nursing home people have trouble with getting the correct diet they then get laxatives to help.
That’s not actually an answer. “It’s needed because it’s optimal”, that doesn’t explain any science. Drag wants to know the science.
If you want science then start with Wikipedias articles:
And then read all the references when you want to dig deeper.