[Music] Don't head to the bathroom
without watching this first. Okay if the eyes are the window to the world of
the soul then poop is the window to the gut. It's true. Something that we all do, hopefully every day,
but surprisingly we really don't discuss it much. Yes I'm talking about your poop. Poop is extremely
important for your health and it can actually indicate many health issues and also indicate how your
health is doing on the good side. In this episode I'm going to share every shape, size, color of poop
out there, and what it could mean to your health. Now, there are many factors that characterize
your poop that maybe you haven't thought about. Color, shape, size, consistency, length of time
you spend in the bathroom besides reading, and frequency of poops. Now, there are certain shapes
that you really don't want to see and let's start there first. First of all, marbles. If you're
passing marbles instead of big giant snakes, you have a problem. What do marbles look like?
Well if you've ever been out hiking or ever been where rabbits or goats or sheep congregate, you'll
know that their poop comes out like little marbles. And often those marbles are all stuck together
but sometimes they come out individually. This is oftenly associated with constipation, and
one of the first things to look for when you're passing marbles is dehydration. You've got to
have enough hydration to actually have liquid in your poop and many people with constipation and
marbles simply aren't, number one, getting enough liquids in their diet. Now the good news is, things
like tea or coffee do not constipate you and they do not dehydrate you. So they count as liquid.
Shockingly, wine counts as a liquid and there's actually, if we get time, benefits to your poop of
drinking red wine but we'll get to that later. So number one, if you're passing marbles first look
at the amount of water that you're drinking. The second thing, I said this over
and over and over again but normally the vast volume of your poop, believe it
or not, should be living and dead bacteria. The vast majority of it. You should be pooping
bacteria. Bacteria have to have fiber to grow and multiply. That's what they eat. And the more
fiber, particularly soluble fiber, that you give those bacteria to eat, then the bigger your poop
and the fuller your poop and the less marbles. On the other hand, if all you're seeing is
marbles, and you're well-hydrated, those marbles could be a sign that in fact your bacteria
are decimated, you don't have a lot of them which is quite possible following a round
of antibiotics or eating commercial chicken, pork, lamb, and beef that have been fed antibiotics
in the process of raising them. Even farm-raised seafood is fed antibiotics to prevent infections.
So even you seafood eaters, be wise that you may be destroying your gut microbiome. Also as I
mentioned before, if you're using artificial sweeteners, particularly sucralose which is Splenda,
which is still in a lot of preparations, a lot of Keto bars, a lot of low-cal soft drinks, this kills
gut bacteria. So if you're doing what you think is kind of everything right but you've got marbles,
always think that maybe this is a problem that you don't have a lot of gut bacteria to work
with. The second thing is, remember gut bacteria have to have something that they want to eat to
grow. And if you don't give them what they want to eat to grow, then your poops are still going to
be marbles regardless of what else you're eating. We often see this when people go on a high protein
diet like an Atkins diet, we don't see it quite as much when people go on a ketogenic diet because
there's a lot of fat that can, quite frankly, make things slippery in your poop. But if you're on one
of these diets and you're starting to see marbles, the odds are that your gut bacteria aren't getting
what they need to eat. Now why that's important, we know now more than ever and with every
advance in research in the microbiome that we, our functioning, our health, our
brain power, our emotions, are dependent on the gut microbiome getting what they need
to eat. And if you take care of them, nobody gets hurt and everybody gets benefit. So your poop size
may be very well telling you what's going on. Now, many people have a variation of that in that they
have kind of a caterpillar look, like lumpy and bumpy. It's all kind of - it's log shape but it's
lumpy and bumpy and this is just a variation on that theme. So again, if it is lumpy and bumpy but
altogether, either look at not enough hydration or not enough gut bacteria diversity or you're
not giving those guys what they want to eat. So look at all three of those factors and
it could be a combination of all three. Now I often get questions about floaters
that literally float to the top of the bowl. There can be two causes for this. Number
one, if you're eating a ketogenic diet particularly a high fat ketogenic diet,
then normally we have a number of enzymes that break down fat molecules for absorption.
They're primarily produced in the bile and the pancreas. And those enzymes do a pretty good job of
breaking down fats into smaller molecules to get absorbed. When we overwhelm that enzyme system with
an extremely high fat diet, you can as a normal consequence, have some of your stool, or all of it
for that matter, float. And just remember fat people float much better in the water than
skinny people because fat floats in water. So that's what you're seeing. Now on the
other hand, if you're not following one of those diets and you still have stools that
are floating, that's a problem generally with insufficient enzymes, pancreatic enzymes,
and bile liver enzymes to break down fat. If that's the case, first of all try an enzyme
supplement. There are a number of them on the market there, they can be cheap and they actually
work, I'm not going to give you some names on this one but try supplementation of digestive enzymes
with your meals. And if that solves the problem, then that usually fixes the issue. On the
other hand, if that doesn't solve the problem, you want to look at other factors
that we'll get into in just a second. So in fact let's do that right now. Let's
suppose that you have floaters but you also notice that your stool color, which used
to be dark or brown or even shades of orange or green, suddenly begins looking lighter like
it's clay. Well bilirubin which most of us know as a bile from the liver, is what actually gives
most of our stool it's color, that brown color. If there's a blockage in your liver or in the
ducts draining the liver and the pancreas into the gut, one of the first signs that you could see
is that your stool has changed to a clay color. That may appear days even weeks before jaundice
appears and jaundice is that typical orange color that you see in your eyes or that you see
in your skin. And that tip off that a clay colored stool may be the difference of you getting to
your physicians and notifying them about this and getting the appropriate tests looking for
a blockage in the bile and pancreatic ducts. Now sometimes that's caused by a stone, sometimes
it's caused by something worse like a cancer. But a clay-colored stool is something that you
want to pay attention to. Okay how about soft serve. Everything's kind of mushy, it needs
a lot of wiping. Well frequently, this is caused by irritation of the lining of your gut. And I
can't tell you the number of people including myself back before I knew that their leaky gut and
their irritation of their gut wall by, in my case, lectin-containing foods was I always thought that
soft serve was normal because nobody told me any different. And imagine my shock when I got major
lectin containing foods out of my diet, including gluten, that my soft serve went away. Soft serve
is not normal. I do have a few people who eat copious amounts of vegetables. And I literally
mean copious amounts of vegetables that have up to three to six soft serve bowel movements
a day that they consider perfectly normal. On the other hand, we have to realize that almost
all plants have one or more lectins that can be problematic when we eat too many of them. And
so one of the things if everything else is fine but you're having a lot of soft serve bowel
movements and you're eating a lot of vegetables, try the experiment for a few days of cutting
back on those vegetables and see what happens to the characteristics of your bowel movement. You
might be surprised. On the other hand, if you're not eating a lot of vegetables and are still having
soft serve, please please please look at the no list of The Plant Paradox and do the
experiment of getting those vegetables out of your diet, getting those grains out of your diet,
and watch what happens to your soft serve. Okay how about watery diarrhea? Well there's not enough
time to tell you all the causes of watery diarrhea. Interestingly enough, invariably my patients with
watery diarrhea may have come back from a foreign trip, particularly to Mexico or South America. And
they have picked up one or more interesting bugs that are the cause of their watery diarrhea.
Now here's a trick and it works almost every time. And I travel with it. Take along
some Pepto-Bismol caplets or tablets and prophylactically take a few Pepto-Bismol
when you're traveling, particularly to Mexico. If you develop watery diarrhea here's a trick that
almost always works. You take 8 Pepto-Bismol tablets a day, two four times a day for a week.
Now your stool will most likely become black that does not mean that you are having blood
in your stool, which black stools can indicate. But it's the process of Pepto-Bismol changing
that color. But invariably it does seem to work. Now since I mentioned black, your
stools are not supposed to be black. And if you suddenly begin having black or greenish
black stools, this is frequently a sign of a slow bleeding ulcer or gastritis as the cause of this.
We also see it, interestingly enough, in people who are taking high dose NSAIDs, non-steroidal
anti-inflammatory agents, like Aleve or Advil. And these subtly cause holes in the
walls of your intestines that bleed. And that, if you have black or blackish
green stools, be on the lookout for this. What about green stools? Well I've done fun
experiments in the past taking large amounts of Chlorella and Spirulina to the point where my
stools turned green. And according to one health expert that I was following at the time, this was
many years ago, that's when you know you're taking enough Chlorella and Spirulina. Now, I don't
have green stools anymore because I backed off on the amount of Chlorella and Spirulina.
But if you're into Chlorella and Spirulina or other algaes for that matter, or exceedingly dark
green vegetables, particularly spinach and kale, you may notice a greenish tint to your
stool and there's nothing wrong with that. Now what about bright red blood either on
the outside of your stool or when you wipe? Almost always, that's from a internal or
external hemorrhoid. Now in general these are self-limiting. If it happens for a couple of
days and you notice that the blood is bright red and it's when you wipe or that it's on the
outside of the stool or it's dripping into the toilet bright red, the odds are that's a hemorrhoid.
Now should you have that looked at? Absolutely. But if the blood is mixed in with the stool or the
blood doesn't look like blood but there's maroon color to the stool, that's coming from farther
up than just your rear end and that's the time to talk to your gastroenterologist about getting
a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy looking for other mischief. Now, what about yellow stools? Well yellow
stools often can occur in accompanying loose stools and diarrhea. And sometimes it's just
the fact that things are going through your intestines so much faster than normal that the
normal bile color and pancreatic enzymes which are kind of yellowish are not being absorbed
fast enough and they appear in this in the stool. Okay. Diarrhea again can happen for multiple
reasons. Certainly if you're traveling you got to look for a traveler's diarrhea cause, Montezuma's
Revenge, and interestingly Pepto-Bismol is one of the most effective treatments. I found with chronic
diarrhea that almost invariably we never pick up a pathogen on a typical stool culture or stool test.
It's in my opinion, pretty much of a waste of time. The diarrheas that we see frequently can be from
a bile overgrowth problem, certain bacteria love to eat bile. There are some effective bile binding
agents, they are prescription based. But we found them very useful as a temporary fix to break a
cycle of diarrhea. On the other hand, constipation is what we started this program with. In general,
you're supposed to have a bowel movement every day. You want to have two every day, that's fine
with me. Some people are on an every other day cycle and that's still quite normal. But if
you're going more than two days without a bowel movement, then something is amiss. And it can be
hydration problems, it can be lack of magnesium. One of the first fixes for chronic
constipation besides looking at your hydration status is magnesium. Most
adults are profoundly deficient in magnesium. Now milk of magnesia is concentrated magnesium
and magnesium actually allows for more motility in your gut wall and that pushes bowel movements
forward. Most people should be taking anywhere from 300 to 600 milligrams of magnesium a day. I like
it at night, it helps you sleep, it helps your mood, it's a cure-all for many things. If this is a real
problem then they're certainly over-the-counter aids like milk of magnesia. I particularly like an
agent called Swiss Chris, I've written about it in my books. But if you're chronically having to take
an aid to move your bowels, there's something amiss. Also remember that many of the plant-based
laxatives use a compound called Senna or Cascara. And I've seen what we call toxic megacolons
in chronic Cascara and Senna users the bowel literally gets paralyzed and gets huge and can
become a huge factor. And it's something very very difficult to be weaned from. So just
because it says all natural laxative or plant-based laxative, buyer beware. Sure, you
can use it for occasional constipation but this is not a remedy that you want to work with.
Okay so what should your poop look like? Quite frankly when you look into the toilet bowl you
should see a giant snake coiled looking at you. And the way to get that is the more I can get you
eating large amounts of leafy greens, vegetables, other Prebiotic fiber, and getting probiotics,
friendly bacteria that's going to eat that, you're going to have the most pleasant
bathroom experience and tell me all about it when you write it back. Make sure to check
out the next one here. Fun fact, the amount of lithium in your local water may have a positive
benefit on your brain health through the years.
