• Question: Why do we go toilet?

    Asked by asiansupreme to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 27 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by edward321.
    • Photo: Emma Trantham

      Emma Trantham answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      There are a few reasons that we go to the toilet.

      The first is that we can’t digest everything we eat. Some stuff, particularly bits of plant, remains undigested as it passes through our gut and if we didn’t get rid of it then more and more of it would build up. Not sure what would happen then but I imagine it wouldn’t be pretty!

      Part of why we urinate is to make sure that the amount of water in our bodies is kept pretty constant. You might have noticed that if you haven’t drunk much your urine is dark yellow whereas if you have drunk a lot it is a pale colour. This is because if you haven’t drunk much your kidneys (which produce the urine) pull some water out of the urine as it forms because the body can’t afford to waste water. When you’ve had lots to drink the body has a lot of water and so the kidneys pull back less water out of your urine.

      And another reason we urinate is to get rid of toxic substances from our body.

    • Photo: Blanka Sengerova

      Blanka Sengerova answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      There are two aspects of going to the toilet: urinating and defecating. When you eat something it is digested by the stomach and then in the small intestine the good things(nutrients) in it are absorbed if they are small enough to go through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. The large intestine is then used to reabsorb as much water as possible. What is left becomes poo, and this is for example fibre and cellulose that we can’t digest. Interestingly, some animals such as cows and sheep can – they get nutrients out of grass, whereas we wouldn’t, for us eating greens makes it easier for us to pass the poo out.

      Urine is made by the kidneys in a special organ called the nephron. As Emma says, part of this is the regulation of water and if you have drunk lots, lots of water gets excreted. But as the urine passes through the kidneys, it goes very close to the blood and there is a pressure on the wall separating the two and any small waste products from the blood that the body needs to get rid of are pushed through this barrier to be washed out of the body by peeing.

      So in summary, we go to the toilet to remove waste products from our body.

Comments