Does this apply to dogs too??? This is an article I found about humans...
Rumble in the jungle
What do all those stomach noises mean?
By S. Jhoanna Robledo
Special to MSN
It's noon and you're sitting in your office poring over paperwork when you hear it, that telltale low, quaking rumble in your belly. You glance at your watch and chalk it up to hunger. It's lunchtime, after all, so when the stomach makes noises it must be a signal that it's time to eat, right?
Not so fast, says Dr. Herbert Lim, a gastroenterologist at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu. "I don't think there's always a correlation between hunger and the rumbles in your stomach," he says. "It might be mostly in your head, or your belly, no pun intended." That's because the notion that the stomach is louder than it ordinarily is when you need to eat goes against the physiology of the gastrointestinal tract.
The ABCs of borborygmi
Stomach noises actually have an official — and some say funny-sounding — name: borborygmi (pronounced BOR-boh-RIG-mee). And although these noises may appear to come from the stomach, they're actually generated by the intestines, which undulate in a wave-like motion called peristalsis. This moving of food particles, acid and gas from one end of the intestines to the other produces a sometimes-discernible sound often likened to a gentle grumble. "Different things cause it to speed up or slow down," says Lim. "A lot of it is air and gas produced by carbonation or bacteria. It's normal functioning."
Doctors like to know that the GI tract is actually making noises, especially those bass-like rumblings. "You want to be sure that you can hear bowel sounds because that means everything's working," says Dr. David Robbins, an advanced fellow in endoscopic ultrasound at the Medical University of South Carolina. Contrary to popular belief, however, hunger alone doesn't necessarily trigger the stomach to move faster or be more raucous. "It doesn't make sense because it's when you eat that it's most active," he says.
Rather than being brought on by the actual need to eat, the gut may grow restless and active at the sight or thought of food. Experts describe this chain reaction as positively Pavlovian. "Your appetite is controlled by your appetite center in the brain's hypothalamus," says Robbins. "You think about eating that cheeseburger and it stimulates acid secretion in the bowels." That very act then encourages the GI tract to move more, hence the noises.
