How Much Poop Is Stored in Your Colon??

do you really have pounds of toxic poop or stool in your colon because there are claims out there that say you could have anywhere from 5 to 20 pounds some claiming as high as 40 pounds of stool in the body so in this video we're going to talk about if this is even true or even possible how our body processes and gets rid of that waste and what the overall implications would be with that much stool or poop in the body so let's go take a look at a colon so first let's start with where

does poop or feces come from well you may be thinking well it starts with eating and food but how does something like this truly contribute to the formation of your stool well it starts by taking this delicious item and putting it in your mouth or less geeky anatomists like to refer to as the oral cavity that you can see here with the probe now just for references that this is a sagittal head or a cut through the midline of the body so you can see the internal relevant structures here and it's in the oral cavity

where digestion begins we start with mechanical digestion by chewing the food and we also get a chemical digestion because salivary glands are going to secrete saliva into the oral cavity and those will contain enzymes and which will break down the food and also help soften the food so it can pass smoothly back to the next portion which is the pharynx which is a fancy pants name for the word throat then we'll move that food from the pharynx into the esophagus right here and you can see the esophagus is just right in front of the vertebral

column or the spine there so the esophagus is in the midline of the body and that esophagus is going to transport that food down from the throat or the pharynx and into the stomach that you can see here now let me just explain this conglomeration of guts here this is essentially the rest of the digestive tract from the stomach down to the rectum here and it's about how it would be oriented in the the body the stomach the small intestine and the large intestine kind of bordering around there and we'll go into a little bit

more detail of each segment as we go through this creation of poop or our story of poop we'll also make some references to how it truly sits in the body or an intact body here as we go as well so back to the stomach though the stomach is going to continue the process of digestion by secreting hydrochloric acid and some other digestive enzymes to continue to break down the food but one of my favorite things that the stomach does is creates this muscular blender action these contractions are going to move the food and if you've

seen previous videos you tend to know that i like to do this with the stomach to show these contractions but as that stomach contracts it'll mix the food with the digestive enzymes and the acids and we actually change the name to chyme chyme is essentially the mixed food with the secretions of the digestive tract then the stomach is going to regulate the passage of that food from itself into the small intestine here now let me reflect the colon here so you can see that there's a really cool sphincter here called the pyloric sphincter it's i

can feel it underneath my fingers it's a really muscular sphincter so the passage from the chyme into the small intestine can be highly regulated but this first portion of the small intestine is going to give a really important contribution to what we know as poop or feces but let me mention one other thing the first part of the small intestine is referred to as the duodenum or sometimes pronounced the duodenum it's about 12 finger breaths in length so 4 8 and then 12 so about to this region here and it's still going to be participating

in digestion because the pancreas is going to secrete pancreatic enzymes into this tube to further digestion and important the liver and the gallbladder are going to secrete bile into there and you can see the liver right there at least the bottom portion of it hanging out in that right side or right upper portion of the abdomen here now bile does help with digestion it's really important for breaking down fats but as far as contributing to poop or a stool bile is responsible for the color of the stool as it gets injected into the small intestine

here now to be fair bile when it's first secreted is actually a greenish yellowish color but as that bile gets mixed into the chyme and the chyme just passes through the length of the guts and this is the small intestine i'm passing through and as it continues to pass through the guts it enters the large intestine and in the large intestine there's a lot of bacteria maybe you've heard of flora or good bacteria a bacteria will further break down the bile which will change its pigment to that brown color that we all know and love

so speaking of passing through the guts understanding this process of moving through 20 feet of small intestine is going to truly help us understand or put the finishing touches on this story of poop or stool formation but let me ask a question first how many pounds of food do you think the average adult eats per day because the answer to this question is quite relevant when we think about this bolus of chyme moving through here or food moving through here what's going to happen is the small intestine or at least the majority of it's going

to suck in those nutrients and absorb them into the bloodstream let me show you on this other cadaver here you can see this is kind of the conglomeration of the small intestine but if i open it up you can see this yellowish yellowish tissue that you can't see on the tray and this yellowish tissue is called the mesentery it does help hold the small intestine to the back wall of the body but it also is full of tons of blood vessels that are going to help suck those nutrients in from the tubing that you can

see here now not everything is going to be absorbed there's things that are indigestible or therefore unabsorbable things like fiber so kind of think about this for a second as that bolus of chyme or food's moving through here it's going to be at least some of the things are going to be sucked into the bloodstream so as it's passing through the tubing here it's going to get smaller and smaller and smaller until everything's been absorbed and those that things that can't be absorbed will pass as you can see from the small intestine to a much

larger diameter tube called the large intestine which most people will refer to as the colon and by the way the answer to that question of how many pounds of food the average adult eats per day is about three to five pounds per day now some of you might be like okay well three to five pounds that five pounds is getting closer to that claim of having five to twenty pounds of toxic poop in the colon but remember when we are passing through here whether you ate three pounds whether you ate four or five pounds during

that day not all of that is going to make it all the way to the colon because a significant portion is going to be absorbed into the bloodstream so even that fibrous portion or whatever we can't digest not gonna be over five pounds if you're eating the average of what people might eat per day that's definitely a far cry from the 20 pound claim or the even the 40 pound claim but some still may push back even more and say well let's say even two or three pounds make it in there because you know you

were eating a lot of food that day then couldn't it build up over time and i would say to them do not insult my colon let alone your colon because it's not like when that indigestible material passes from the small intestine to the large intestine it's just gonna sit there and stagnate no your colon is much cooler than that and let me give you some points here first the first part of this large intestine is referred to as the cecum then it passes up to the ascending colon then into the transverse colon the descending colon

and then the curve portion the sigmoid colon into the straight part which is the rectum here now i just wanted to mention those so we could have some context for our discussion but one of the things that happens is the large intestine and you've probably seen it on pictures is segmented into little pouches and those pouches are called hostra or singular hostrum now what happens when each individual hostrum gets filled with feces it has a reflexive or at least a peristalic or a contractive motion that contracts and pushes the poop into the next hostrum and

then that one gets filled and pushes into the neck so every time a hostrom gets filled or is a little stretch to it it contracts and forces it further downstream so that's one cool thing that helps to propel the feces downstream another is just general peristalsis if you haven't heard of peristalsis before the idea is that all of the tubing the large intestine and even the small intestine here has built-in smooth muscle into the wall and peristalsis is essentially when the smooth muscle layers coordinate their contraction and to propel food throughout the digestive tract and

in this case we're dealing in the colon here feces now the colon will contract essentially about three to 12 times per minute just naturally anyway so that's a second way to propel the feces further downstream my favorite is something called mass peristalsis mass peristalsis is essentially really takes place in the transverse colon downstream what really happens is it's this wave of strong contractions that propels feces or the poop from the transverse colon all the way down into the rectum to stretch out the rectum now that happens about three to four times a day and it's

usually around when you're eating meals or right after and i'm sure you guys have all probably experienced this at one point or frequently or every day where you're like okay you get up maybe it's your morning routine where you have some coffee or you have your breakfast or maybe you're at work and you have a big lunch and right after the lunch you're like oh my rectum's trying to tell me something and the rectum is essentially because of that mass peristalsis moving all those feces down into the rectum it's essentially saying stretch okay you need

to release and hopefully you're gonna satisfy the need of the rectum and give it a bowel movement so let's say you don't listen to the demands of the rectum or in other words pay attention or at least just kind of ignore that sensation of stretch in the rectum that's saying hey we need to evacuate and have a bowel movement what happens in that scenario and how many bowel movements does the average adult have well first if the if you ignore the actual sensation here and you just hold it for lack of a better word or

description we essentially know this about the cone one of the functions i didn't mention is as the stool passes through the large intestine and as you can see the majority of it is referred to as the colon it also sucks the last part of water or absorbs the last part of water and salt out of the stool and if the stool is in there longer again saying like you decided to hold that sensation of having a bowel movement rather than going it's going to continue to take that water out of the stool and therefore make

it a little bit harder and even make it a little more difficult to possibly have a bowel movement in the future now as far as how many bowel movements the average adult has there's a wide range of data out there it essentially ranges from three times a week all the way up to three times a day now as far as three times a week i think that's pushing it a little bit or i guess not really pushing it if that makes sense and so in these conversations with my patients in the clinic when we're talking

about pooping in their stool and their bowel health i essentially say let's shoot for one healthy bowel movement per day and we kind of define healthy as a well-formed stool that's not too hard that you don't have to strain to get out of the body and any extra bowel movements on top of that that aren't considered diarrhea that we just kind of consider those an added bonus so bringing this all together in this whole idea of potentially having five to twenty pounds of toxic poop in the colon if you're one of those people that eats

the average of three to five pounds per day maybe you even need a little bit more than the five pounds but if you're having a regular bowel movement on a day to day basis you're going to find it pretty challenging to even hit that five pound mark because stool is constantly going to be moving out with your consistent bowel movements and that's keeping up essentially with what you're ingesting now even when i'm in the urgent care clinic working with patients i've seen a lot of abdominal x-rays and one of the things that i'll evaluate for

and even the radiologists looking at those x-rays is we'll look at things like possibilities for dilated loops of bowel that's like stretching out the tubing that could indicate possibly a bowel obstruction we'll obviously take a look at the bony anatomy like the spine and the pelvic bones but one of the things we like to evaluate for is the stool burden in other words how much stool is in the colon and the majority of these patients do not have this increase or this excessive amount of stool or a high stool burden just sitting in their colon

the majority of them just have a regular amount of stool in there and not just packing in pounds and pounds and pounds of stool in there now granted there are some patients that get constipated and i've had patients come in that's like i haven't had a bowel movement in seven days or in a week and in those cases you're like okay could we get up to maybe that five to even that 10 pound range and i think that's possible through the if you really distribute it throughout the whole colon but let me just give you

some context on 10 pounds here that is a 10 pound weight just hanging out next to the descending in the sigmoid colon going down to the rectum here now granted this isn't a perfect comparison because stool will is will form a little bit differently and it is not nearly as dense as this but think about just this 10 pound weight how challenging is it to get it in and we'd have to distribute it throughout the whole colon you know it's possible in in some kind of extreme forms of constipation i would say but let's go

even further that is a 20 pound weight wow that would be extremely challenging and in most cases would be very hard to get that amount of weight just stuffed into the colon again i understand there are some limitations to this but this is more dense you're going to have a harder time packing feces to this level of density and so again pretty challenging to fit it in the whole colon that we have here and another thing i want to mention about that in those cases with the patients that are constipated in some cases i'm like

is it mild and we can just up the fiber is it something where we need to try a laxative or is it even kind of on the higher end of constipation where i give them the bowel prep for those of you who have ever had a colonoscopy you know about the glorious bowel prep that clears your whole colon free of stool so that the doctor can stick the camera up through the anus and take it up there so they can view the colon looking for things like polyps or colon cancer and i can tell you

this when i give people the bowel prep they're not losing 20 pounds of weight it's just not happening they'd be hard pressed to even lose 10 pounds of weight and some of that might be a little bit of water weight depending on the type of laxative that you might use and the last thing we need to talk about is this word toxic what do they even mean by that you'll often hear people making claims that even if you are having regular bowel movements that you can still get this buildup of toxic sludge on the inside

of the colon and the only way to get rid of it is from some bowel cleanse or some special supplement to help clear out that sludge well if you talk to the doctors who actually do colonoscopies and stick a camera up to actually visualize that you're not seeing any toxic sludge buildup when you actually see the pictures of those colonoscopies they're typically squeaky clean so they can actually visualize potential problems like polyps and and possible cancer they're not visualizing this random sludge just building up over time and let me just finish with this i don't

have any particular problems with say you know bowel cleanses or supplements that help kind of clear the bowel out the reality is a lot of those products just use laxatives that work somewhat similar to other laxatives that are actually fda approved but again i don't really have that big of a problem with them but we're talking about health and wellness whether it's the cardiovascular system the pulmonary system or any other system in the human body and obviously the digestive system that we're talking about today it's more about the everyday consistency that you're willing to do

it's about having a well-balanced diet that has enough fiber so you're constantly having motility through your digestive tract and pushing things along and that is the best way for you to have consistent healthy poop thanks for watching the video everyone and jeffrey wants me to let you know i'm really bad at promoting the merch so he wanted it to be front and center this is one of our pieces of anatomical artwork we've actually taken this picture and even put it on t-shirts and hoodies so if you feel like supporting the channel we'll put the link

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