Yes, it’s completely normal for your stomach to make noises. Your digestive system produces clicks, gurgles, and rumbles throughout the day, whether you’ve just eaten or haven’t had food in hours. Doctors call these sounds borborygmi, and a healthy gut typically produces between 5 and 30 of them per minute. Most of the time, you only notice them when a room goes quiet or when they’re louder than usual.
What Causes the Sounds
Your stomach and intestines are muscular tubes that constantly contract and relax to push food, liquid, and gas forward. This wave-like motion is called peristalsis, and it’s the engine behind nearly every gurgle you hear. As the walls of your digestive tract squeeze together, they compress pockets of air and fluid, producing sound the same way squeezing a half-full water bottle does.
These contractions don’t stop when your stomach is empty. In fact, some of the loudest noises happen between meals. A hormone called motilin triggers a cleanup cycle known as the migrating motor complex, which sweeps leftover food particles and bacteria from your small intestine into your large intestine. This housekeeping cycle works alongside ghrelin (your hunger hormone) to produce that unmistakable growling when you haven’t eaten in a while. Because there’s no food to muffle the contractions, the sound carries more easily.
Why Some Days Are Louder Than Others
The volume and frequency of stomach noises depend heavily on what you’ve eaten, how you’ve eaten, and how much air you’ve swallowed. Swallowing excess air, sometimes called aerophagia, is one of the most common reasons your gut sounds amplified. Everyday habits that increase air swallowing include:
- Eating too fast or talking while you eat
- Chewing gum or sucking on hard candy
- Drinking through a straw
- Carbonated beverages like soda or sparkling water
- Smoking
All of that extra air has to go somewhere. Some comes back up as a burp, but the rest travels through your intestines and adds to the symphony.
Foods That Make It Worse
Certain foods produce more gas during digestion, which means more noise. The usual culprits fall into a few categories.
Dairy is a big one. Roughly 65% of people have some degree of lactose intolerance, meaning they can’t fully break down the sugar in milk, cheese, and yogurt. The undigested lactose ferments in the gut, generating gas and often louder sounds. Legumes like beans, lentils, and peanuts contain carbohydrates that are similarly tough to digest. Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale) are nutrient-dense but notorious for the same reason.
Artificial sweeteners deserve a special mention. Sorbitol and fructose, found in sugar-free gum, diet sodas, and many “sugarless” candies, can be difficult for the gut to absorb. They ferment in the colon and produce excess hydrogen and methane gas, which translates directly into more rumbling.
Simple Ways to Quiet Things Down
You can’t eliminate stomach noises entirely, and you wouldn’t want to. They’re a sign your digestive system is working. But if the volume is bothering you, a few changes help.
Slow down when you eat. Chew thoroughly and swallow one bite before taking the next. Sip from a glass instead of a straw, and save conversations for after the meal rather than during it. Cutting back on carbonated drinks and chewing gum removes two of the biggest sources of swallowed air.
If hunger growling is the issue, eating smaller, more frequent meals keeps your stomach from running that loud cleanup cycle for extended periods. A piece of fruit, some vegetables, or a handful of nuts between meals gives your stomach something to work with quietly. When you’re on a restrictive diet that limits fiber, adding a source of bulk like oatmeal or bran helps keep things moving through the large intestine so gas doesn’t build up.
When Stomach Noises Signal a Problem
Normal borborygmi are irregular, vary in pitch, and come and go without pain. A few patterns, though, point to something worth investigating.
Very high-pitched, tinkling sounds can be an early sign of a bowel obstruction, where something is partially blocking the intestine and contents are being forced through a narrow opening. If those high-pitched sounds come with worsening cramps, bloating, vomiting, or an inability to pass gas or stool, that combination needs urgent medical attention.
A completely silent abdomen is also significant. Total absence of bowel sounds, especially following a period of unusually loud or hyperactive ones, can indicate that part of the intestine has stopped functioning. This may reflect a serious situation like intestinal tissue death or a ruptured bowel.
Persistently loud stomach noises paired with chronic diarrhea, unexplained weight loss, or abnormal stools can point to a malabsorption condition. Celiac disease and lactose intolerance are among the more common causes, where the gut can’t properly absorb certain nutrients and the leftover material ferments, producing excess gas. If your stomach sounds are consistently accompanied by these symptoms over weeks rather than days, that pattern is worth bringing up with a doctor.
For the vast majority of people, though, a noisy stomach is simply a working stomach. The gurgles you hear in a quiet meeting or lying in bed at night are your digestive tract doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.