What your poo is trying to tell you

What the hell is that? Seriously, did that just come from you or did it crawl up the pipe? If you’ve just exorcised feces that don’t look like what you recently ate, it could be a sign of serious illness. It could also just be last Wednesday’s curry so it’s good to know what to look for.

What’s going on in your dookie

Human feces have many names but are a universal by-product of the human digestive tract. Yes, even your girlfriend poos, even if you’ve never seen her before. Stool is the body’s semi-solid waste product and consists of everything that the body was unable to absorb or had to expel in some other way, ie “dung”.

This includes not just food waste, but hideous-sounding things like dead blood cells, bile, and gastrointestinal bacteria, all of which are covered in a sheath of mucus that makes it easier to slip out. Whenever you have tried hard to happen that not only feels uncomfortable but actually feels impossibleYou have experienced your body’s discomfort not making enough mucus. It generally means that you are dehydrated, so make sure you have some water.

Fortune telling your digestive system

When it comes to throwing up, everyone is different. “There is no normality in terms of the frequency of bowel movements, just averages,” said Dr. Bernard Aserkoff, a physician in the GI department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told WebMD. For some it is normal to walk once or twice a day, for others only once or twice a week. This does not automatically mean that something is wrong with your gut. The same goes for the color, size, and shape of your poo.

For example, your chair can span a rainbow of brown, maroon, and green hues and still be viewed within healthy boundaries. Much of its coloration depends on the concentration of bile in your system. Produced by the liver and excreted in the small intestine, bile contains cholesterol, bile salts to help digest fats, and waste products like bilirubin. Since the bile pigments are broken down by stomach enzymes, they tend to change from yellow-green to brown. However, certain colors can also indicate serious bowel diseases – and possibly even some forms of cancer:

• Green: Green stools can be caused by a number of factors. This can indicate that food is getting through your system too quickly (read: diarrhea caused by fast food), preventing the bile pigments from being broken down sufficiently. It could also be caused by consuming large amounts of leafy green vegetables, excessive amounts of artificial food coloring, or even licorice candy made with anise oil instead of actual licorice herb. Some people have sensitivity to anise oil and may develop loose green stools after consuming it. If you’re taking an iron supplement (often used to treat Crohn’s disease and as a complement to ADHD treatments), light green poos are a possible side effect, as are constipation and diarrhea. Let your doctor know if this happens.
• White: Stool that is clay or white is caused by a lack of bile in your stool, possibly caused by a blockage in the bile duct. When your biliary system is blocked – for example by a gallstone, enlarged lymph nodes in the porta hepatis or inflammation and scars in the bile ducts – the bile is returned to the liver and causes not only white stools but also abdominal pain, dark urine. and jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes).
• yellow: Yellow stool, which is also consistently greasy and smells like acid eggs (due to the presence of hydrogen sulfide), may be caused by high levels of fat in stool that have not been broken down by the bile. This is a symptom of celiac disease. If you see this floating in the toilet, be sure to speak to your doctor.
• Schwarz: Black stool is a surprisingly common side effect and can be caused from a night on black liquorice and Guinness, to your iron supplement, to ingesting large amounts of bismuth subsalicylate, also known as pepto-bismol. This happens when the bismuth subsalicylate combines with traces of sulfur in your saliva to form bismuth sulfide, a highly insoluble black salt that can stain the tongue and stool jet black. Fortunately, it’s a temporary condition. However, black stools can also be an indicator of upper gastrointestinal bleeding, which may be caused by an ulcer or tumor. This bloody stool often takes on a tarry appearance and smells terrible. So if all of a sudden you throw up poop that’s black and sticky and smells like something that crawled up there to die, but have not Spent the last 16 hours in the pub, see your doctor.
• Bright red: Another symptom that could be fatal or could not be anything is bright red stool. Red stool is quite common and is often triggered by natural and man-made food colors in beets, cranberries, tomato juice, red gelatin, and beverage mixes. However, stool with bright red spots or floating bands of fresh blood are a sign of lower intestinal bleeding caused by hemorrhoids.
• blue: If your poop is blue, you probably already know why. This is an extremely rare side effect of consuming ferric ferrocyanide – more commonly known as Prussian blue, an insoluble light blue pigment used in the treatment of heavy metal poisoning (radiation, cesium, and thallium). Blue poo can also be caused by consuming large amounts of blue curacao and grape soda.
• Silver: Silver Poo is both very possible and a very poor indicator of your gut health. If your stool is the same color as a tarnished candle holder, it could indicate that you have both biliary blockage and upper intestinal bleeding. Basically white stool caused by a lack of bile mixes with gastrointestinal blood, giving it the same color as aluminum spray paint. So if your poop looks like something the Tinman would pass by, rush down the yellow brick road to the wizard in the emergency room.
• Lila: Congratulations, you have porphyria.
• Gold: You are rich!

The texture of your poo could tell you a lot

It’s not just about the color. Texture can say a lot too. And you don’t have to come in and feel it to understand the gist of it.

In the late 1990s, a research team led by Dr. Ken Heaton of Bristol University to study stool as a means of measuring bowel health. Excess water is reabsorbed from the stool as it flows through the large intestine (better known as the large intestine) before it is compressed at the rectum to facilitate passage. It usually takes an average of 16 hours for digested material to pass the length of the colon and be drained. However, should the material pass too quickly or too slowly, the texture of the resulting fecal matter can range from soupy to hyper-compacted rabbit pellets.

The Bristol chair scale as it is known was first published in the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology in 1997. While some in gastrointestinal research have questioned the overall accuracy of the scale, the system continues to be used as a means of parking balls for effectiveness of various treatments for bowel disease.

According to the table, your seven types of stools are:

Type 1: Separate hard lumps that look like deer or rabbit droppings. These are usually the most difficult to pass and are generally considered a sign of constipation.

Type 2: A uniform, sausage-shaped tree trunk made up of a mass of Type 1 poos, all of which are compressed together. This isn’t as difficult to pass as a Type 1, but it still takes a lot of effort. This may also indicate a slightly less severe bout of constipation

Type 3: This is actually what you want Their poop looks, if a little dry. As long as you don’t blow seals to push this out, this is perfectly healthy poop.

Type 4: The Venus de Milo from Craps, that is the “ideal” texture of Poo. It should be sausage-shaped, have a smooth, velvety surface, and be surrounded by slime. Nice.

Type 5: This is a bit soft, not quite diarrhea, but definitely not an ideal normal bowel movement. These soft blobs with clear edges are easy to pass through.

Type 6: Also known as mudbutt, type 6 stools indicate moderate diarrhea. These fluffy pieces with ragged edges ripple like a squishy pile of stools with no resemblance to the sausage-shaped stools we’re hoping for.

Type 7: When the poosuvius is ready to blow and you suddenly sprint into the bathroom, get ready for a Type 7 stool – if you can even call that oily brown splatter in your shorts a “stool”.

So while you shouldn’t try to diagnose a disease based solely on the divinations of your poop and a guide you found on the internet, keeping an eye on the color, quantity, consistency, and quality of your manure can be helpful subtle changes in your health while acting as a barometer of your overall butt health. [Web MD, Mayo Clinic, Wikipedia 1, 2]

This article was first published in 2014 and has been updated since its original publication.