If you are a happy parent of a peanut, 4-7 years old, then the questions from the series “why the grass is green”, “why the sky is blue” and “why the poop is brown” - this is not news for you. But if everything is more or less clear with grass and sky from the school curriculum in physics, then poop confuses even a rather educated and erudite parent.
Why are poop brown?
Let's recall from the biology class what feces are. Food, pre-ground and moistened with saliva in the oral cavity, passes through the throat into the stomach, where it is emulsified and digested with the help of the enzymes pepsin and renin (in babies before they reach 1 year old) and hydrochloric acid. Then partially digested food is evacuated from the stomach to the small intestine. In its initial section - the duodenum - comes bile. Bile is a secretion of the liver that accumulates in the gall bladder, yellow, brown or greenish in color, with a sharp bitter taste. This explains why the poop is brown. Bile interacts with food debris and substances released by bacteria living in the intestines, forming the substance stercobilin, which gives the corresponding shade.
By the way, in the absence of stercobilin, feces will have a white or grayish color. The color of feces can serve as a diagnostic sign, which helps to identify problems with the gall bladder, liver or pancreas.
With a question about why the turd is brown, we figured it out. But what if she is a different color?
- If your feces turn red - this may be a signal that you have internal bleeding. Seek medical attention immediately! By the way, if the source of bleeding is the esophagus or stomach, the stool will be black and with a sharp unpleasant odor. But do not immediately panic. Maybe you just ate beets for lunch?
- A yellowish shade of feces suggests that you eat too fatty foods. And they will also have an unpleasant odor.
- The green color of feces indicates the presence of a bacterial infection in your digestive tract. Or you are an avid vegetarian and eat a lot of herbs and green vegetables.
Interesting Facts
- If you swallow a bone, you will certainly find it in your feces, because the cellulose that it consists of is not digested in our body. Interestingly, only the shell will be undigested - the inside of the bone is perfectly digested and absorbed into the blood.
- Sometimes children may ask a question not only about why the poop is brown, but also about why they “smell” like that. The smell is given to them by sulfur-rich compounds that are secreted by bacteria living in our intestines (indole, skatol, mercaptans), as well as hydrogen sulfide.
- The feces of meat-eaters 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, excreted by the kidneys, has a white color and a pasty consistency.
- Scientists can get a lot of information about a person by studying his feces - up to age, state of health, culinary preferences, etc.
- In Islam, the toilet is called the house of Satan and is considered an unclean place. They always enter the toilet from 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 hygiene use water and their own left hand.
- And in ancient Rome, instead of paper, they used a wet sponge worn on a wooden stick. It sounds good, but after use, the sponge was placed in a special bath with salt water, where she waited for the next visitor to the toilet.
- Three quarters of feces are water. And the remaining quarter is dead bacteria from our intestines, cellulose, dead cells and mucus.