Here’s What Your Poop Says About Your Health

Let me ask you a question: Do you have a healthy gut? If your answer is, “Well, I’m not sure?” — you’re not alone. It’s hard to know if what’s normal for us is normal for everyone, or if there’s actually an issue that needs attention. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s something that can give you a lot of information about your gut health (and overall wellness). And yes, it’s your poop!

It may come as a surprise, but your next trip to the bathroom can tell you a lot about how healthy your gut actually is. Everything from the shape, the consistency, and frequency of your bowel movements can provide helpful hints as to what’s going on in your gastrointestinal tract and beyond. 

As a functional medicine practitioner, I had to learn early on that if I was going to be a good practitioner, I had to get super comfortable talking about #2s. So today, let’s not shy away from this subject. After all, everyone poops!

What Your Poop Says About Your Health 

There are several different kinds of clues about your digestive health (and overall health) that you can gather just by paying attention to your bowel habits. Here are some of the most important areas to focus on. 

Frequency 

First, let’s talk about frequency. How often you “go” depends on your diet (including not just what you eat but how often and how much). Ideally, you should be pooping 2 or 3 times per day for optimal elimination of hormones, toxins, and chemicals that inevitably find their way into your food and water. 

Consistency & The Bristol Stool Chart

When it comes to consistency, healthy stool should be soft and long enough to form a curled up “snake”-like shape in the toilet. If you’re not sure exactly where yours falls, don’t worry. The Bristol Stool Scale was developed for exactly this purpose! It breaks your bowel movements down into seven types and makes poop health easier for everyone to understand.

• Type 1: Little hard lumps or rabbit-like pellets indicate severe constipation and shouldn’t ever happen.
• Type 2: A super hard, lumpy log shape is another sign of constipation but a more mild case.
• Type 3: A sausage-shaped log with just a few cracks that is quick and easy to push out is considered a normal poop.
• Type 4: This is where the snake shape comes in and is the gold-standard for a healthy poop.
• Type 5: You start to tread into diarrhea territory if you are easily passing separate, small, soft blobs of poop.
• Type 6: One type of diarrhea is when your poop looks super soft and mushy but still intact, usually with ragged edges, almost like pudding or yogurt in consistency. 
• Type 7: This is full-blown diarrhea when you have no solid pieces and comes out watery and extremely quick. Ever heard of the term “explosive diarrhea”? Yeah, that’s referring to this type.

Color

Ideally, your poop should be a standard brown color (light to dark brown is considered normal), which is thanks to a compound called bilirubin, formed during the breakdown of red blood cells in the body. Here are some other colors and what they likely mean: 

• Black: Black poop can happen if you’re taking certain supplements or medications, including iron supplements or bismuth (Pepto-Bismol), so don’t be alarmed if this happens if you start taking something new. But it’s still important to check with your doctor, as black stool could be a sign of upper intestinal tract bleeding.
• Green: Most of the time green poop occurs if you ate something that was in that color family. 
• White/Cream: This could mean a few different things including the presence of too much fat in your diet, malabsorption of nutrients, or in more serious cases a bile duct blockage or another problem with your gallbladder, pancreas, or liver. (1) 
• Red: If you ever experience bright red blood in your stool you should speak with your doctor right away as it can be a sign of hemorrhoids or intestinal bleeding. It’s also possible to have red stool if you’ve just eaten a lot of beets, cherries, or other red foods. 

Other Clues

If you have a healthy gut, you should be able to go to the bathroom in a few minutes. It shouldn’t be a major event! Anything longer than that, or any straining or long waits, is probably a sign of underlying gut dysfunction. If your poop is very foul-smelling, this may also indicate issues with nutrient absorption, bacterial balance, or other issues in the digestive tract.

In general, you can also use your intuition around your body here. How does it feel when you’re going to the bathroom? In many cases, you’ll be able to tell that something is off even if you don’t know exactly what it is. 

Of course, paying attention to digestive or other symptoms in combination with observing what’s going on with your poop itself will also help to identify any underlying problems. 

How To Have Healthier Bowel Movements 

If, after reading the information above, you decide that your digestion could use a little TLC, here are some tips:

1. Identify Any Hidden Food Sensitivities

If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that no diet is right for everyone. And while there are some foods that can be irritating to a majority of people, many other foods have to be approached on a person-to-person basis.

The good news is that an elimination diet can help you identify any underlying food sensitivities, which can help you have healthier bowel movements. Here’s what you need to know about elimination diets before you try one out. I also go over tailored elimination diet protocols in my book, The Inflammation Spectrum.

2. Eat More Fiber

More specifically, prioritize insoluble fiber, which doesn’t dissolve in water. This kind of fiber is especially important for healthy excretion because it encourages the movement of material through your digestive system. It also keeps it at a softer consistency, making it easier to pass, which helps with constipation. 

Here’s something that might surprise you: insoluble fiber is important even if you struggle with diarrhea or loose stools, because it adds bulk and weight to your feces so that it’s not so watery. Some of my favorite clean, whole-food sources of fiber include artichokes, avocados, almonds, and chia seeds.

3. Get a Comprehensive Stool Test

If you really want to know what’s going on with your #2s, you can ask your doctor about a comprehensive stool test or gut microbiome testing. These kinds of tests help to reveal fungal, bacterial, or parasitic overgrowths as well as beneficial bacteria levels, giving you a more complete look at the microbiome. I do one of these tests for almost every person that comes through my telehealth functional medicine center.

READ MORE: Types Of Gut Microbiome Testing + How It Works | Dr. Will Cole 

4. Try Magnesium

If you are struggling with constipation, a magnesium supplement has been shown to help. (2) Certain forms of magnesium, like magnesium oxide and citrate, can help pull water into the intestines so you can empty your bowels more often and with more ease. Magnesium citrate is a key ingredient in GI Move, my supplement blend designed to help with regularity. 

5. Eat More Resistant Starch

Consider adding more resistant starch, which provides the benefits of both soluble and insoluble fiber, to your diet. Resistant starch, also known as prebiotic fiber, resists digestion and ends up in your intestines where it provides food for your beneficial gut bacteria. (3) Some food sources of resistant starch include green bananas and plantains, cooked and cooled potatoes, and potato starch.  

5. Investigate Further

In addition to comprehensive stool testing, if you’re experiencing chronic digestive concerns, it’s important to get to the bottom of what’s going on. There are some very simple, common causes of constipation and other digestive symptoms, including dehydration and lack of fiber in the diet. (4) 

If you’re drinking plenty of water and electrolytes, you’re on top of your fiber intake, and you eat a whole foods based diet, there may be an underlying issue such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), SIBO, or celiac disease. Your primary care provider may refer you to a gastroenterologist to help investigate. You can also work with a functional medicine specialist to dig deeper into underlying causes of dysfunction. 

READ MORE: How to Achieve the Perfect Poop: Gut Health Secrets For Better Digestion 

Learning From Your Body’s Signals

Talking about poop is uncomfortable at first but trust me when I say that you can learn a lot from it! Pay attention to color, shape, and frequency and allow it to guide your healthy lifestyle choices. Your gut health will thank you! 

As one of the first functional medicine telehealth clinics in the world, we provide webcam health consultations for people around the globe. 

Photo: unsplash.com

Sources

• Coucke, E. M., Akbar, H., Kahloon, A., & Lopez, P. P. (2019). Biliary obstruction.
• Mori, S., Tomita, T., Fujimura, K., Asano, H., Ogawa, T., Yamasaki, T., … & Miwa, H. (2019). A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial on the effect of magnesium oxide in patients with chronic constipation. Journal of neurogastroenterology and motility, 25(4), 563.
• Chen, Z., Liang, N., Zhang, H., Li, H., Guo, J., Zhang, Y., … & Shi, N. (2024). Resistant starch and the gut microbiome: Exploring beneficial interactions and dietary impacts. Food Chemistry: X, 21, 101118.
• Arnaud, M. J. (2003). Mild dehydration: a risk factor of constipation?. European journal of clinical nutrition, 57(2), S88-S95.