Poop Talk

What can your poop tell you.

Created: Jan 16, 2021 / Updated: Mar 1, 2022

It is amazing the amount of information that your stool can provide about your health and about what is going on inside your digestive tract and your body. You will find lots about that within this article.

Many people don’t like to talk about poop. They feel embarrassed. However, there is a great tool that helps individuals (including children and teenagers) have easy conversations about the characteristics of their stool, especially when they need to talk to their health practitioners. This tool is called The Bristol Stool Chart, and was created in 1997 by Kenneth Willoughby Heaton, after doing many studies and tests of the bowel during his time at the Bristol University and at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in the UK. This tool is also known as Meyers Scale, Bristol Stool Form Scale, or simply BFS.

The Bristol Stool Chart is a great reference to evaluate if the form of the stool is normal or not, by comparing the shape, the consistency and the size with the types shown in the chart. If your stool is not within normal ranges, (you will figure that out once you keep reading), then something might be going on inside your digestive tract, and you might need to keep an eye on things.

Let’s dive in and see what information your stool can provide, based on different shapes and colors.

SHAPE

The Bristol Stool Chart shows the following seven categories of stool.

What is considered a normal stool might vary from one person to another, but in general terms, there are a few things that you might want to consider when figuring things out about your health:

The ideal stool should be a soft long mass, easy to pass.
It should not involve the conscious mind to empty the bowel.
It should not require any straining, and should not hurt when passing through the anal canal.
It should not take long time to pass. For some people 1 to 2 minutes is more than enough, for others, it might take a little longer.

When the stool is hard and difficult to pass, requires straining, or it is painful to pass, it is considered to be constipation. Having constipation for a day or two might not be a big deal, however, chronic constipation is extremely harmful, because it contributes to the build-up of toxins that could potentially start poisoning your body and lead to disease. Stool types 1 and 2 of the Bristol chart might be associated with constipation. In addition, not having at least one stool a day might be considered a sign of constipation as well, but again, this might be a bit different from person to person. Everybody’s body is different, and what seems to be normal for some, might not be for others. In general, studies suggest that a healthy person should have at least one to two stools a day. Not having a stool a day might suggest possible constipation, and constipation is really not a good thing, because of the toxicity that it brings into your body. But that is a different topic for another article. So stay tunned for that. And a fun fact is that most people poop around the same time every day. When your stool is too watery, it is considered diarrhea. Short term diarrhea is not to fear, because it is a natural cleansing reaction from the body, to remove unwanted toxins and flush them out of the body through the bowel. For example, when a person has food poisoning or a catches a bug in the tummy. However, chronic diarrhea could be a problem, because it might drain important nutrients from the body making the person malnourished and weak. While Stool type 5 of the Bristol chart might suggest diarrhea, types 6 and 7 are definitively associated with it.

COLOR

Just like the consistency and the size of the stool can provide information about your health, the color can also reveal some helpful information.

Brown. Different shades of brown are usually considered normal. This color is the result of the bilirubin, which is a yellowish substance that forms after red blood cells break down, and that gets removed from the body.

Black. Some medications and iron supplements could change the color of the stool to black. However, if you have not had any of those, then the black color could be a sign of bleeding in the upper part of the gastrointestinal tract. It is true that color of blood is bright red, not black, however, blood coming from upper levels of the gastrointestinal tract take some time to be excreted through the stool, and therefore by the time the blood is out, it looks darker.

Green. Having a little of a green color in the stool is considered normal. However, when the stool is full green there might be a reason for that. Maybe you have been having some dark green vegetables like spinach, or green powder supplements (they contain chlorophyll, which is green) in your diet, which might give the green color to your stool and might not be a problem. However, another important reason to consider when having green stools is that there might be very little bilirubin in your body. As mentioned above, the stool gets its brownish color from the bilirubin.

Red. There are some foods that might give your stool a reddish color, for example, eating foods like tomato juice, beets or cranberries. Otherwise, if the color looks bright red, it might be the result of some bleeding, either in the lower intestinal tract or, which happens often, due to hemorrhoids. The reason for the bright red color, when it is due to blood, is that the blood coming out is fresh.

Yellow, pale or “white-ish”. Stool that is yellow, pale or clay-colored might suggest the presence of fat. In addition, when the stool contains fat, it usually looks greasy and floats. Whitish stools usually indicate malabsorption of nutrients in your body, mainly fat. When fat is not properly digested and absorbed, you might end up with deficiency of the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E& K). Another reason for whitish stools might be the the lack of some digestive enzymes called lipase which help digest large fat molecules into smaller molecules that are easier for you body to absorb. In addition, whitish stools might also mean that you are lacking bile, which is a digestive fluid that comes from your liver and gallbladder. Pale poop could also be a side-effect of certain medications like anti-diarrhea medicine.

Orange. Foods rich in beta-carotene could make the stool turn this color. Some examples of these foods are: carrots, pumping and squash.

Other colors. Eating too many candies, drinks or processed food that contain food coloring, might turn the color of the stool to different colors. Even things like too many blueberries may turn the color of your stools to deep blue.

ODOR

It is normal that poop smells bad. At the end of the day, it is made up of things that your body needs to get rid of, including bacteria, toxins and the by-products of the metabolism of pathogens in your body. However, an extremely unusual strong smell (foul-smelling stools) might be a sign of something else going wrong inside the body, most probably associated with an imbalanced microbiome or a leaky gut. So when this happens, you might want to keep an eye on what is going on in your body.

POOP THAT FLOATS

In general, your stool should hit the water in the toilet and sink. But sometimes you might find stool floating in the water. Most times this in an indication that the stool has high fat content, which means that the body might not be absorbing fats properly (and possibly other nutrients as well) from the food you eat. This is not a reason to stop eating fats. Remember that our body is partially made of fat and needs fat to work properly. What you might consider here is why your body is not absorbing fats properly, because malabsorption might lead to malnourishment. Malabsorption of fat also might suggest that you are deficient in Vitamins A, D, E and K, since those are fat-soluble vitamins). I want to emphasize that having stools that float should not lead to decrease the good quality dietary fat.

FECAL COMPACTION WITH AN OVER-SPILL SYNDROME

When a person is not able to have adequate bowel movements for days or weeks, a large compacted mass of feces builds up in the large bowel, gets hard, cannot be passed, and stays in the bowel for a long time. Fecal compaction is referred to the condition where the bowel is full of those hard old masses ‘glued’ to the wall. When the person needs to have a bowel movement, the stool that passes through these hard masses gets squeezed so much that comes out in strange shapes. The compacted feces produce powerful toxins, which absorb into the blood stream, affecting many organs in our body. Many times the stool can turn as a combination of constipation and diarrhea, and even leak out in small amounts, soiling the person’s underwear during the day.

Typically, passing stool does not shift the compacted masses and the bowel does not get emptied. People with this problem, both children and adults, often spend a long time on the toilet because they feel that evacuation is not completed.

Fecal compaction is the basis for many chronic degenerative conditions, like autoimmune diseases, neurological illnesses, fibromyalgia, autism, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders

Enemas is an alternative that can be used to clean the bowels and remove the hard masses stocked in there. And while this option is very effective, it is a good practice to learn properly how to do an enema in a safe way before trying it.

In Summary: Many things can affect the shape, color, consistency and smell of the stool, as well as lead to diarrhea or constipation, for example, the food you eat, medications, antibiotics, stress, infections and many others. In general, if your poop looks off and it isn’t just a one-time thing, I would recommends to check in with a health practitioner that can help you figure things out.

Many people don’t like having poop-talks due to embarrassment. But based on what you just learned here, if you feel that your stool is not normal, or you tend to have constipation or diarrhea in regular basis, it might be time for you to start figuring things out, to make sure that you will not get malnourished if you have chronic diarrhea, you don’t increase toxic load in your body with chronic constipation, and your gut is well taken care of, to avoid your gut wall to get damaged and get a Leaky gut, which might lead to disease.