Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

I read in your book that 60% of poop is bacteria.

Will Bulsiewicz (0:07)

Yeah.

Steven Bartlett (0:07)

Which just blew my mind.

Will Bulsiewicz (0:09)

Yeah, and I think that this is an important conversation to have because we have stigmatized poop. We're not allowed to look in the bowl. We should be looking in the bowl. And the reason why is because if I were a cardiologist, I would come over and I would check your pulse, I would listen to your heart, and those vital signs would allow me to have an idea of how you're doing in terms of like just on a basic level, your cardiovascular health, all right? I'm a gastroenterologist. If I want to know the basics of what's going on with you and your body, I need to know how you're pooping.

Steven Bartlett (0:42)

So let's close off on this subject of poop. My team actually prepared some poop samples earlier on because I was wondering as a gastroenterologist, I wondered that if you could look at someone's poop and determine whether they have good gut health, and if you can understand what's going on in their body just by how their poop looks because poop comes in many shapes and sizes. So what I have here is a variety of different shapes and sizes of poop. For anyone that can't see, well, look at the screen if you're listening to this podcast on Spotify or YouTube. Different shapes and sizes of poop here. This is real human poop. So I'll pass you that so you can play around with it.

And why does the shape and size of our poop tell us anything? Why does it matter? And how is it indicating something that's pertinent to our overall health?

Will Bulsiewicz (1:32)

Well, because it goes back to what you mentioned earlier, which is that 60% of the weight of our stool is actually microbial in origin. So if you want a window into your microbiome, look at your poop. You don't necessarily need to go and do an expensive test. Quite simply, looking at your poop is one of the ways that you can tell what's going on. So there was a study that was done in the 90s, so long time ago, and it was less than 2,000 people, exclusively in the city of Bristol. And it led to the creation of a chart called the Bristol Stool Scale.

Steven Bartlett (2:06)

I'll put it on the screen.

Will Bulsiewicz (2:07)

Yeah. And we're going to run through this. But before we do, I want to mention a few things real quick. As the US Medical Director of Zoey, I'm proud of my contribution as a gastroenterologist, as a physician, to the work that we're doing there. And we not only did the Blue Poo Study, which we've talked about already, which is that you can eat your muffins and figure out your gut transit time. But we also did a couple of other things. One is called the Blue Poo Challenge, where we had over 20,000 people across the planet who were basically eating blue muffins and then reporting back to us on what was going on with them. And then more recently, so again, the Bristol Study was 2000 people exclusively in the city of Bristol. We recently did the largest study across the entire UK on poop and what people were doing in terms of their bowel movements. So it was called the Big Poo Review and we had 142,000 people from across the UK basically fill out a 17 question survey. And part of what we were looking at was their Bristol stool form. We were also looking at how often they poop. By the way, the average person poops 1.7 times per day.

And we were also looking at how it associates with different conditions. So as an example, 1 in 5 people in the UK are constipated. 1 in 6 people in the UK have diarrhea. So it's interesting to take a look at all these things. So now getting into the Bristol stool chart, the dream.

Steven Bartlett (3:34)

That is real poop.

Will Bulsiewicz (3:37)

It's lovely.

This is the dream. This is where we all want to be. And this is a Bristol 4 The Bristol 4 is the classic where I come walking out of the bathroom in slow motion and rock music is jamming and doves are flying in slow motion. And I just am such a stud. So and that's after a Bristol 4 My wife knows what happens when I come out looking like that. It's soft and formed. OK. And it's like a sausage or a torpedo. So pretty smooth. Now, when we move from a 4 to a 3, a 3 is not that big of a deal, but it is getting some cracks and crevices in it. All right. So and we're moving towards constipation. Now, a 3, a little more fiber, a little more hydration, some exercise. These are simple things that can help to get you back to a 4 if you're having one of these, a 3 But that moves us to a Bristol 2 where we are truly getting into constipation territory here. And basically, this is like if you took a whole bunch of marbles of poop and jammed them together, so it still forms into something, but it looks like a pack of marbles of poop that are stuck together. So that's a Bristol 2 stool, that's constipation. And then finally, a Bristol 1 is when you're having the rabbit pellets and they're hard. They're not easy to get out. And sometimes they're a lot bigger than this. These are small. So you would form this up into what would be like a golf ball. And that golf ball would be like a Bristol 1