Black, red, green? What should a “healthy” poop look like? [EXPLAINED]

Hemorrhoids, liver and gallbladder problems — these are just a few of the diseases that can be diagnosed by watching your own feces. Therefore, we explain what a “healthy” stool should look like and what changes in its characteristics are a warning signal for health and the body.

  1. A healthy adult person has a bowel movement up to three times a day. The stool may weigh up to 1,5 kg at a time. Throughout the year, this gives about 100 kg of metabolic by-products
  2. When checking that the excreted faeces are properly structured, one should evaluate, inter alia, its shape, color, smell and possible difficulties with defecation
  3. Adult human feces are made up of three main components — water (75%), bacteria (15%) and undigested organic residues (10%)
  4. You can find more similar news on the TvoiLokony home page

Each of us started our lives with it and most likely it will end our lives there. This is the poop a newborn squeezes out of the mother’s rectum as it passes the birth canal. Uncontrolled leakage of feces after muscle relaxation is also one of the symptoms of death. According to the research, a healthy adult man produces about 100 kg of stool per year, which is the result of metabolism. Basically, it weighs from 20 g to even 1,5 kg.

You can find the rest of the article under the video.

Feces – how it is formed in the human body

The breakdown of food and metabolism in the human body is an extremely complex and complicated process. The chewed food first goes to the stomach, where it is gradually digested, and then goes to the duodenum. This is where the most important nutrients are absorbed. Undigested debris is transported to the large intestine. Initially, the feces are in a semi-liquid form. As it moves towards the anus, the digestive tract gradually loses water that is absorbed along with the electrolytes through the intestinal walls. A ready-to-pass stool basically consists of three kinds of components. Up to three-quarters of our waste is water. About 25 percent. feces is a solid, mostly organic material. From 25 percent up to 54 percent in this group are microbes, bacteria and viruses.

Feces. Here’s what it should look like

To determine whether a patient’s stool is “healthy” or if a doctor should seek help, medics have introduced a special parameter for assessing this excretion product. This is called Bristol Stool Formation Scale. According to this measure, the following forms of feces are distinguished:

  1. Separate, compact, nut-like lumps difficult to pass;
  2. Stool of elongated shape, lumpy;
  3. Stool elongated, with cracks on the surface;
  4. Slender, serpentine pieces of stool, smooth and soft;
  5. Soft particles with clear edges (easily excreted);
  6. Mushy stool, fluffy pieces with jagged edges;
  7.  Watery, no solids (liquid);

The Bristol Scale is used to assess digestion and the distribution of matter in the intestines. Therefore, types 1 and 2 are constipated, types 3 and 4 are considered healthy stools, and types 5, 6 and 7 are caused by diarrhea.

Sometimes the poop can vary in color, texture, amount or smell. Differences in the shape and form of stools can be disturbing, but usually these changes are not significant and disappear after a few days. A “healthy” poop usually has the following characteristics:

  1. Colour — if your body is okay then the natural color of the stool is brown (in different shades). This is because when you defecate, remnants of dead red blood cells are removed. And among them a specific pigment — bilirubin.
  2. Strong smell — the bacteria in the faeces secrete gases that contain the bad smell associated with the poop.
  3. Ease of defecation — bowel movements and bowel movements should come without much effort. If this activity is painful, difficult or lasts more than 15 minutes, it is worth considering visiting a doctor.
  4. Shape — feces should have an oblong, cylindrical shape (it is due to the shape of the intestines themselves) and should be excreted in one or more pieces.

Red, white and green. Avoid these stool colors

Virtually any longer-lasting stool color, apart from the aforementioned shades of brown, indicates some problems with the digestive or excretory system. For example, red color indicates gastrointestinal bleeding or hemorrhoids.

— Blood in your stool is a sign of many things, it can also be a symptom of cancer or a fistula. Blood is a sign of all inflammatory diseases, but bleeding is often completely harmless — explains in an interview with Die Welt Skander Bouassida, chief physician and head of the coloproctology clinic at the Vivantes Humboldt-Klinikum in Berlin.

White stools herald problems with the liver or gallbladder. Although sometimes this color is caused by some anti-diarrheal drugs. Green stool means that your body has recently been digesting spinach or kale. However, green stool can also be a signal that there is too much bile in your stool and not enough bilirubin. We write more about stool colors here.

We encourage you to listen to the latest episode of the RESET podcast. This time we devote it to ecology. How to be eco and not go crazy? How can we care for our planet on a daily basis? What and how to eat? You will hear about this and many other topics related to ecology in the new episode of our podcast.

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