Can you absorb calories rectally?

No this isn't a joke.  I seriously want to know.  I have a buddy who swears that you can't absorb calories rectally...but you can absorb alcohol.  So instead of drinking a sixpack, he'll just casually sip on a single beer all night.  But he'll also slip off to the bathroom to take some liquor shots up the bum to suppliment his buzz. (I have no idea how he actually does it) He claims he gets all the fun feelings of drunkeness, without any of the calories.  Is there any truth to this?

Original Post by bwdavi:

Original Post by simwaves1:

Calories do indeed get absorbed from the rectum. The alcohol itself has calories associated with it and, if I remember correctly, the whole GI tract has the ability to absorb carbohydrates even though all of it is usually absorbed before it gets to the colon.

 

So this seems to be the best answer so far on the 'calorie' side of things.  Isn't there a doctor or nurse on the site that can confirm absorbtion along the entire GI tract?  

As for an entertaining thread, you guys are welcome  

But please don't hold my future topics to such a high standard, because I assure you that I am not normally capable of producing posts that are this funny or creative.

 

Okay, so I wanted to see if I could find something to confirm that carbohydrates can be absorbed throughout the GI tract. First of all, it doesn't seem that calorie absorption through the rectum is that hot of a research topic, so it wasn't very easy to find information about it, but here's what I came up with:

Without the aid of the normal enzymes that digest macromolecules (saliva, gastric, pancreatic, etc.) there will be no digestion that takes place in the rectum, so that eliminates almost all absorption. Proteins won't be digested, and can't be absorbed intact. Lipids aren't absorbed in any significant amount without pancreatic secretions and bile. This leaves carbohydrates, which are only absorbed after being digested into basic sugars. I decided to look and see what the distribution of SGLT1 was in the GI tract. I found a paper that showed no SGLT1 transporters exist past the small intestines.

In the end, it seems that your friend is right. I think that the only calories that he's getting from the alcohol, is the alcohol itself. 

This is hysterically funny and quite disturbing all at the same time.  Thanks for the chuckles.  I was literally LOL.

My 3 year old asked, "What's so funny?" 

"NOTHING, son!"

Okay so I know this is an older post, but I came across the issue on a TV show so I thought I'd reply. Interestingly enough, the show was called 1,000 ways to die. This man was an alcoholc but he'd had a throat operation so he couldn't drink, so he asked his wife to administer a bottle of sherry rectally. The show went on to explain that the rectum is very venous, so most of the alcohol enters the bloodstream without passing through the liver first, as it would if you drank it. This makes it very easy to get alcohol poisoning. This man wouldn't normally have even felt drunk after that amount of alcohol, but because he took it in rectally, his blood alcohol level spiked to 5.7 (4.0 and above usually results in coma/death) and he died. So yeah, i'd say it's pretty dangerous!

i don't know about the calories, but i do know you can die doing that.  i saw it the other night on a show called 1000 odd ways to die. can cause alcohol posoning