When you gotta go, you gotta go. But how long the poop stays in you before you gotta go could have a surprisingly big influence on your long-term health. According to research, the amount of time food spends traveling through your digestive system may shape everything from your gut bacteria to your risk of chronic disease.
Scientists call it “gut transit time,” which is far too metropolitan for a bowel movement. It measures how long food takes to travel from your mouth to the toilet. Everyone has a different schedule, and there is no definitive “normal” number of times you should be pooping a day, but the medical world has generally landed on a frequency of anywhere between three times a day to three times a week being the norm.
How Bad for Your Health Is a Slow Poop Schedule?
In the 2023 study published in the appropriately named journal Gut, researchers found that gut transit time is one of the biggest factors influencing the trillions and trillions of microbes living in your intestines. When food moves too slowly, those microbes eventually run out of fiber to digest and start munching on protein instead, thus producing compounds that lead to the grand health enemy of our time, the dastardly villain known as inflammation. It also leads to DNA damage and could possibly lead to colon cancer.
An off-balance transit time has been linked to conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, and even nasty neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis. Don’t let that part freak you out too much, as scientists still don’t know whether digestive changes cause those illnesses or are a result of them.
Luckily, there’s a lot of stuff you can do to get your intestinal poop trains running on a good gut transit time once again. Fix your diet, start exercising more, and reduce your stress as best as you can, but then there are some factors that you don’t have as much agency over, like your age, genetics, and side effects of any medications you’re taking.
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