Relatively large amounts of water are needed for digestion, to keep your food in solution as you break it down so that it will be easy to absorb into the circulation when digestion is done. As noted, a job of the large intestine is to get that water back, and that’s why your bowels have to be so long—the leftovers slowly inch their way through the large intestine, starting as a soupy gruel and ending up, ideally, as reasonably dry stool. Disaster strikes, run for your life, increase that large intestinal motility, and everything gets pushed through too fast for the water to be absorbed
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