What your poop colour says about your health
What your poop colour says about your health. Photo | Photosearch
Turns out, readers were fascinated to hear about the message in their farts, so today’s article is a follow-up – and as patients of mine know, I love hearing about bowel movements.
Most people know that going too often or not often enough isn’t a good thing. While the former indicates irritation in the gastrointestinal tract, the latter indicates poor fibre and water intake. The ideal number of daily bowel movements is three – one for each meal that you have, so that food is digested, goodness absorbed, and then expelled. Despite this, I’m generally happy when a patient has two good bowel movements a day, but as I’ve come to realise of late, colour is important too.
Let’s start with what’s considered normal. Yes, you guessed it: the normal colour of the stool is brown, and this is because of what the stool is made up of. It’s a mixture of bacteria, water, bile, bilirubin, broken-down red blood celIs, and plant matter that you’ve not been able to digest, as well as small amounts of protein and fat.
The most worrying stool colour is red and, unless you’re always eating beetroot like my kids, it can be an indication of bleeding in the lower GI tract. Causes include hemorrhoids (piles) or diverticulosis, but it could be an indication of rectal cancer – so see a doctor.
Next up, we have green stools. These normally arise when food’s travelled through the intestine pretty quickly and the bile doesn’t get a chance to be turned into its final brown colour. Green stools can arise if you’re taking iron supplments or antibiotics, or eating lots of greens. However, it can also be a sign of Crohn's disease (a type of intestinal inflammation).
Yellow stools are the most commonly reported type of strange stool in my practice and can be caused by a gallbladder that’s not functioning well (the bile isn’t being handled as it should). Parasites like giardia can also produce a characteristic yellow stool, but this normally also presents as diarrhea. If your stool is clay-coloured, it may be your liver (low bile output), but the colour change can also be caused by antacids containing aluminum hydroxide.
If you have a white stool, it could be due to mucus in the stool, or inflammation often seen in conditions like IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). On the other hand, for black stools, you’d be looking for bleeding in the upper GI tract (oesophagus, stomach, small intestine). Don’t panic though: you can also get these with iron supplements, heavy meat consumption, and some antacids.
