Amazon icon Audible icon Autographed icon Book Bub icon Booksprout icon Buy Me a Coffee icon Email icon Facebook icon Goodreads icon Instagram icon Mastodon icon Patreon icon Periscope icon Pinterest icon RSS icon Search icon Snapchat icon TikTok icon Tumblr icon Twitter icon Vine icon Youtube icon LinkedIn icon

Tag: Bristol stool chart

What you can learn from the color of your poop.

Besides watching the consistency of your poop with the Bristol Stool Chart to assess your state of health, the color of your stool can tell you a lot as well. Assessing your stool over a few days time can help you to get a better sense of if the color is related to what you ate or to biological function. Here’s a quick overview:

Brown = normal.

dr oz stool color chart
Here is Dr. Oz's Stool Color Chart to guide us in assessing our health through our poop.

Light clay colored = too many antacids or perhaps liver dysfunction.

Green = possibly you ate a huge mass of leafy greens, but more likely it indicates the stool is moving too quickly through the digestive tract. Green can mean Crohn’s disease or that you’ve been on a round of antibiotics.

Yellow = gallbladder dysfunction, possibly from a viral, bacterial, or parasitic infection.

Red = either you ate beets or you have bleeding in your lower GI tract.

White = perhaps indicating malabsorption of nutrients or an excess of mucus. The barium used in x-rays can also turn stool white.

Black = heavy meat consumption or bleeding in the upper GI tract.

What Healthy Poop Looks Like

My practice as a naturopath focuses on balancing nutrition and identifying and eliminating inflammatory foods to restore health, and I always inquire about my patients’ elimination habits. bristol stool scale for determinng healthy poopThe state of someone’s stool says a lot about their internal processes, i.e.,  if they are absorbing their foods, suffering from inflammation, and/or infected by parasites. I ask about color, odor, buoyancy, frequency, ease, and consistency. One of the tools I use to assess the responses is the Bristol Stool Chart.

Developed at the University of Bristol in England, and published in the Scandanavian Journal of Gastroenterology in 1997, the Bristol Stool Chart describes the consistency and form of human poop ranging from diarrhea to constipation. It’s a clinical tool you can use to assess your own health on a daily basis.

The optimum state for stool is Type 4. I think of it as when your poop looks like an old banana: smooth and tubular with a slight curve and gentle to pass.

One of my mentors, Dr. Tom Anstett, jokes that he is the president of SWA, or Stool Watchers of America. He knows that your stool is a good indicator of how the rest of your body is doing: healthy stool means all systems are fired and functioning.

Are you noticing that you do not eliminate Type 4 poop 1-3 times per day? Sophisticated testing and dietary therapies can help get you back on track and feeling good. Contact me if you’d like a free consultation.