This is human ‘poo’, or ‘poop’, or ‘number twos’, or various other words. Doctors call them ‘stools’. Don’t turn the page in disgust – give it a good look. See how it is a long pile? The width of it tells you have wide lower guts (known as the colon, or lower intestine) big enough to send out what you see here. Also notice how long it is. That tells you something about how long your colon is. Once it is full up, the colon sends a message to the brain telling you it is time to go to the bathroom to make room for more.

You store quite a lot of poop. Try weighing yourself just before and after going to the bathroom. So what we can see is a long, quite compact coil of dryish material. It also has bits in it – you can see them – and none of it looks anything like what went in as food – or at least we hope not. The change from what goes out from what went in tells us that the food has been processed quite thoroughly, but the fact that it has visible bits tells us that not everything has been processed. Some has gone right through almost unchanged. And, as we shall find out later, it has also picked up things: about 60% of the volume of this poop (and yours) is made of bacteria that grew in your colon, not food at all.

Am I a normal pooper?

The average person poops about once a day—about 1oz (30g) of stool for each 12lb (5.4kg) of their body weight. So if you weigh 84lb, you are likely to produce 0.7lb (0.3 kg) of poop a day.

When you do go to the bathroom, it’s ideal to have a poop that is all connected in one long, smooth “S” shape. Poops like this develop when you’re eating sufficient fibre and drinking plenty of water. However a smooth poop that is thin or broken up into a few smaller poops is not something to be concerned about according to digestive experts, as long as this is “normal” for you and does not cause you any discomfort. The colour of a normal poop should be a medium to dark brown.

(more in the book below)