Questions why poos are brown

2024 Author: Priscilla Miln | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 00:21

If you are a happy parent of a 4-7 year old toddler, then questions from the series "why is the grass green", "why is the sky blue" and "why is poop brown" are not new to you. But if everything is more or less clear with grass and the sky from the school curriculum in physics, then poop confuses even a fairly educated and erudite parent.

Why is poop brown?

Let's remember from biology lessons what is feces. Food, previously crushed and moistened with saliva in the oral cavity, enters the stomach through the pharynx, where it is emulsified and digested with the help of pepsin and renin enzymes (in babies before they reach 1 year old) and hydrochloric acid. The partially digested food is then evacuated from the stomach into the small intestine. Bile enters its initial section - the duodenum. Bile is a secretion of the liver, accumulated in the gallbladder, yellow, brown or greenish in color, with a sharp bitter taste. This is what explainswhy are poop brown. Bile interacts with food debris and substances secreted by bacteria living in the intestines, forming the substance stercobilin, which gives the appropriate shade.

By the way, in the absence of stercobilin, the feces will have a white or grayish color. The color of the stool can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify problems with the gallbladder, liver, or pancreas.

With the question of why the poop is brown, we figured it out. But what if it's a different color?

• If your feces have turned red, this may be a signal that you have internal bleeding. You should immediately consult a doctor! By the way, if the source of bleeding is the esophagus or stomach, the feces will be black and with a sharp unpleasant odor. But don't panic right away. Maybe you just ate beets for lunch?
• Yellowish color of feces indicates that you are eating too fatty foods. And they will also have an unpleasant smell.
• Green color of feces indicates the presence of a bacterial infection in your digestive tract. Or maybe you are an avid vegetarian and eat a lot of grass and green vegetables.

Interesting facts

• If you swallow a bone, you will certainly find it in your feces, since the cellulose of which it consists is not digested in our body. Interestingly, only the shell will be undigested - the insides of the bone are excellentdigested and absorbed into the blood.
• Sometimes children may ask not only why poop is brown, but also why it "smells" like that. They are smelled by sulfur-rich compounds that are secreted by bacteria that live in our intestines (indole, skatole, mercaptans), as well as hydrogen sulfide.
• Meat eaters' feces smell worse than vegetarians.
• Bird feces are white, because their kidney ducts open into the intestines and do not have a separate opening, like in humans. And uric acid, which is excreted by the kidneys, is white and pasty.
• Scientists can get a lot of information about a person by studying their feces - down to age, he alth status, culinary preferences, etc.
• In Islam, the toilet is called the house of Satan and is considered an unclean place. They always enter the toilet with the left foot, all hygiene procedures are carried out with the help of the left hand, and they leave the toilet with the right foot. Traditions…
• There is no toilet paper in India. For the purpose of hygiene, they use water and their own left hand.
• And in ancient Rome, instead of paper, they used a wet sponge, put on a wooden stick. Sounds good, but after use, the sponge was placed in a special bath of s alt water, where it waited for the next visitor to the toilet.
• Feces are three-quarters water. And the remaining quarter is dead bacteria from our intestines, cellulose, dead cells and mucus.