What would happen if you ate something that was inedible but not poisonous?

[Marktheghost]

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if you had no food, and just ate anything, to stop feeling hungry. Would it work? And if it wasn't poisonous, would it do you any harm?

Maybe it would work as a suicide method; eat something just to stop the feelings of hunger (I'm not sure what, grass? paper maybe?), and die relatively painlessly from lack of nutrition.

 

[Famous Last Words]

When you stop eating, the feeling of hunger subsides after a couple of days. You get waves of hunger - the feeling you get when Ghrelin is released, the body's signal to go out and hunt for food - but these signals decrease in intensity the more you ignore them. Have you ever felt really hungry but you've been too busy doing other things and just ignored it? The hunger goes away and you feel absolutely fine after about twenty minutes. The body realised that it wasn't being fed so switched over to burning fat instead. If anything, you feel better and less lethargic than if you actually ate. There's no point in trying to combat this kind of initial hunger with eating paper.

When the hunger goes away, you're able to exist on your body's own stored fat without too much discomfort for quite a while (depending on how much stored fat you have).

Real physical hunger comes after the body realises that the stored fat isn't infinite. You can't eat paper or grass to combat this kind of hunger because the body knows there are no nutrients in there. It's still going to send hunger signal to your brain and you're not going to fool the body this way.

Basically, there's no point in the process where eating paper is a good idea to combat hunger. Even as a suicide method.

 

[Insomniac]

like plastic or pearls?

I think it'd get evacuated. If it's in large quantities Idk

but good question

 

[UpandDownPrincess]

If you're talking about an object, you will pass a small one in your stool. This happens to kids all the time - they swallow coins, toy accessories like Barbie shoes, just about anything you can imagine. If it's small enough, they get some mineral oil and it just works its way through.

If it's too big to be expected to pass, an endoscopy tube can retrieve it from the stomach.

Docs who work in a pediatric ER usually have a neat collection of retrieved items.