Turns out, it’s not a sign of appetite.
Have you ever wondered why your stomach makes more noise than a mower before lunch?
The culprit is something called borborigmo, the medical name for the growling of your stomach.
And surprisingly, although they tend to occur when you are late in eating, they are not regularly a sign that you are hungry.
Instead, they are actually the cleaning service for your gastrointestinal system doing its job after your previous meals, says Dr. Sita Chokhavatia, a gastroenterologist at Mount Sinai Hospital .
A few hours after you eat, a 90-minute cycle of contractions – the inter-digestive phase – moves the remaining pieces of food left in your stomach and small intestine.
Then the? Migrant motor complex? Loudly transports gas and fluid mixture forward. This is what you hear.
“It is as if you were squeezing and shaking a balloon filled with water and air,” says Dr. Chokhavatia.
If you need to silence the sound in your stomach because you’re at a meeting or a date, eat some popcorn (because of the insoluble fiber) or a piece of chocolate, which will immediately switch your gastrointestinal system to the silent initial phase of digestion.