Absorption in the pouch??

JFish got me to thinking.  Thought I'd start a thread on this one.  Concerning RNY...If I wash down my meal with liquid, am I causing malabsorbtion in my body?  Since certain absorption goes on in the pouch and just below it, (in the start of the small intestines) am I hurting my body and could I be suffering from doing this?  Just wondering...Brian

I certainly hope not because I really don't enjoy eating without having at least a little something to drink. I've had blood work done three times now and it has always come back OK.

From the reading I've been doing this afternoon concerning meds and such, it doesn't appear that a whole lot of digestion goes on in the pouch anyway, due to the lack of hydrochloric acid. The part of our stomach that was stapled off (remnant stomach) contains most of the acid producers and these acids are deposited into the intestines down past the roux limb. I don't know the corrolation between digestion and absorption, but my uneducated guess would be that you're not missing out on much by washing the content downstream accept for maintaining the feeling of fullness for a longer period of time.

Here's a run-through.  Food in the "old stomach" would normally take 2-6 hours to leave and enter the small intestines....not much absorption happens in the stomach at all, it is mostly a storage sack that churns what you've swallowed into what's called "chyme" or "vomit" in larger circles ;-).  Anyway, the real absorption comes into play once the chyme enters the small intestine where it is sucked dry basically and what you have leftover is all products that couldn't be digested (hence why we have to do number 2).  And so here's where your question gets answered.  Since our new pouch of a stomach is SO insanely ridiculously small there's relatively little action going on in it (it's not really churning, but more like just shuffling food into the small intestine like a funnel) and so the only real issue you might have with drinking something when you eat is that it could cause the "dumping syndrome" because it forces the food into the small intestine prematurely.  Hopefully all that makes sense lol I'm a nursing major. Oh and just b/c it's the fundus region of the stomach that is our new pouch doesn't mean it doesn't produce any acid.....just not as much. And as for malabsorption, I would say yes if you are having the dumping syndrome, but if your bowel movements are normal then no, everything is being absorbed fine.

Very little of anything gets absorbed from an intact pre-op stomach or a post-op RNY pouch.  (offhand, the only substance I can think of is alcohol.)   The great majority of absorption occurs in the small intestine, which means from the start of your roux limb to the end of your small intestine.  Even that requires a certain bit of hand-waving, because many digestive enzymes (proteases, lipases) are produced by the pancreas, and these don't enter the small intestine until the distal anastomosis, so most proteins and fats don't begin to be digested until after that point. I don't think you'd be hurting anything; the prohibition against drinking too soon after eating stems from the fact that you're tending to wash out your food sooner than it would usually, reducing the time that you feel full and sated.  If anything, drinking moves the food out of the stomach into the roux limb, where it begins its journey of digestion. /Steve

Smart-ass ;-)