Question: What happens to the body to cause us to get food poisoning symptoms?

Emma Trantham answered on 26 Jun 2012:

Hi

There are several different ways our bodies can get food poisoning.

Sometimes harmful organisms like bacteria can live on or in our food and produce toxins. These toxins can make us ill. In fact they can make us ill even when the bacteria that produce them have been killed by cooking. Some of the toxins make us vomit but some can be much more serious.

Sometimes the harmful organisms (bacteria, viruses) survive in our food, either because we don’t cook it or because we don’t cook it well enough. These organisms can then go on to give us food poisoning in several ways:

1) By producing a toxin. This time the toxin is produced inside our gut, rather than on our food. The toxin interacts with the cells of our intestine and makes us ill.

2) By multiplying lots (this is an infection) inside our guts. This upsets our guts (causing them to become inflamed) and so we get ill.

3) By multiplying lots and moving out of our guts into other parts of our body like our blood. This is the most dangerous situation as a lot more of our body gets exposed to the harmful organism and so we can get things like liver damage.

Does this answer your question?