The stomach: everything you need to know about the vital organ you can live without
- The human stomach is the size of a palm and can distend to many times its original size
- Find out about how it works, potential problems and how to keep your gut healthy and happy
The human stomach is surprisingly small when it’s empty, “about the size of a person’s palm”, says Dr Paul Ng, a Hong Kong-based specialist in gastroenterology and hepatology.
Yet as everyone with a good appetite knows, the stomach is elastic and can expand to many times that size. “There are two openings in the stomach” Ng explains. “Sometimes when there is a blockage at the lower opening (pylorus), gastric outlet obstruction (GOO) can occur, in which the stomach becomes extremely distended. Even when that happens, people would vomit instead of having their stomach torn apart by the accumulation, so the stomach doesn’t explode”.
People who say they have a large appetite or they are overweight because they have a large stomach are deluding themselves. Once a person is an adult, the stomach doesn’t change in size. “The intrinsic structure of the stomach is the same for both sexes,” says Ng. “But because males tend to have stronger abdominal wall muscles (the effect of testosterone), the male stomach is more securely placed in the belly. The motility (movement) of the stomach tends to be slower in females due to hormonal effects.” Slow gastric motility can give rise to discomfort or nausea.
Stomach size doesn’t govern what we eat – appetite and cravings do; some people feel full sooner, so they eat less. Stomach rumbling – or to identify it properly ‘borborygmus’ – is normal, it is produced by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines.