Why does your body produce acid when you eat meat?

Your body always produces acid, but with meat it produces twice as much acid.

Meat is the slowest to make its way through your body—taking four to seven days to make it to your body's off-ramp and into your bathroom's rest stop.

The stomach lining secretes hydrocloric acid no matter what food you eat.

Your body produces acid no matter what you eat. It is part of the digestive process.

More specifically, your body produces more acid when you eat meat because acid is used in the stomach to denature protein, and meat is a protein-rich food. Proteins are long chains of amino acids, bundled up into the specific shapes that allow them to function.

These proteins are far too big to enter the bloodstream from the digestive system on their own- they must be broken down into individual amino acids, which your body can use to build its own proteins.

The first step to breaking these proteins down is denaturation. Denaturation is the "unravelling" of a protein. Once a protein is completely denatured, what you have is a long string of amino acids, which can then be broken up by enzymes in the small intestine.

The hydrochloric acid in the stomach is responsible for denaturing protein before it reaches the small intestine, which is why eating meat will increase the amount of hydrochloric acid your stomach produces.

It breaks food down into Poop