As the old saying goes, you can’t polish a turd, but you can – and arguably should – study them.
Doctors have long known that the contents of our toilet bowls offer real insights into our overall health. Now that wisdom extends to how often we fill those bowls.
Finding the Goldilocks of pooping
Last year, a team of researchers found a link between the frequency of bowel movements and long-term health.
They analysed 1,400 healthy adults, discounting people with certain conditions or using medications that might affect their stools.
Next, they devised four categories of unclogging the trumpet: constipation (one or two bowel movements per week), low-normal (between three and six bowel movements per week), high-normal (between one and three bowel movements per day), and diarrhoea.
Within this scale, the team found a kind of Goldilocks zone, not too much and not too little.
Perfect pooing is the high-normal range, says Prof Sean Gibbons, one of the paper’s authors from the Institute of Systems Biology.
“I’d extend that to every other day as well. Between that and twice a day, and I think you’re in a pretty safe window,” he says. “Some people take a lot of pride in it – they go at 10am on the dot.”
What our poop tells us about our gut health
Gibbons’s interest in our collective bowel movements comes from our growing understanding of the ecology of microbes that live in our gut.
“Transit time or bowel-movement frequency is one of the major axes of variation in that system,” he says.
When stool passes through the gut, microbes use up the available dietary fibre, fermenting it into beneficial fatty acids.
But if the stool hangs around too long, the fibre is exhausted and microbes switch to proteins instead. That can lead to toxins being released into the bloodstream.
“The build-up of these [toxins], like indoxyl sulphate or trimethylamine, have been associated with chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease,” Gibbons says.
A similar, but slightly different process happens if you poo too often.
“People who had diarrhoea had higher levels of systemic inflammation like C-reactive protein,” he explains. “We saw markers of stress in the liver, elevated in the blood.”
There is, of course, a natural variety in how often people poo. Most people notice if their pooing patterns change, but many clinicians don’t worry about it too much.
Gibbons says that the general consensus among clinicians is that as long as the variation isn’t extreme, then it’s unlikely to require treatment.
“What we’re arguing, however, is that maybe it is an issue worth looking into,” he says. “We want to maintain a fairly regular schedule, like once a day or every other day. When you go outside of that window, you start to see these potential risk factors for future chronic illness and ageing.”
The texture and consistency of your logs
Another way to ponder your poo is just to look at it. The Bristol Stool Scale is a truly fascinating, if slightly gross, visual guide to the health of human waste.
Developed in 1997, it’s used as a diagnostic tool, categorising our droppings into seven forms, from small hard pellets to watery diarrhoea.
As with bowel-movement frequency, you’re looking for some healthy middle ground in terms of shape and consistency: sausage-y stools that pass with the grace of an Atlantic seal are ideal.
That speaks to the effort involved in the bathroom, too. Pooing shouldn’t feel like a workout, but it shouldn’t feel like a sudden collapse either.
Read more:
- Here’s the best way to sit for better poops, according to science
- Is there really a noise that makes you poop yourself?
- What’s the longest time that somebody has been constipated?
It’s all about living a healthy lifestyle
If, when you park some bark, you find yourself regularly outside these Goldilocks zones, there are measures that researchers advise.
In his study, Gibbons and his colleagues found that the people in the beneficial high-normal category followed more healthy lifestyles.
“They tended to eat more fruits and vegetables. They tended to be more physically active and drank more water,” he says. “Those three things will go a long way.”
He also recommends newer health trends. “You can also do things like take dietary fibre supplements or introduce flaxseed and chia seeds to your diet. That does help quite a bit.”
There are also health and wellness trends to be wary of. Popular weight-loss drugs, like Wegovy and Ozempic seem to have multiple health benefits, but Gibbons cautions that they tend to slow transit time through the gut and colon, and that can affect how often you go to the toilet.
“High-protein diets can also be kind of dangerous because of the protein fermentation by-products I mentioned. There’s a lot of evidence, especially in younger people, that they can be problematic for things like type-2 diabetes.”
So, the next time you sit on the throne, try thinking of it as performing your own personal health check.
About our expert
Prof Sean Gibbons is an associate professor at the Institute for Systems Biology, where he leads the Gibbons Lab, researching microbes, ecology and medicine. Gibbons received his PhD in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015. He specialises in microbial ecology, evolution, complex adaptive systems, bioinformatics and the human microbiome.
