The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Fri, 10 Jan 2025
In this moment, the gastroenterologist and gut health expert Dr Will Bulsiewicz breaks down everything you need to know about how your poo is one of the biggest signs of your overall health.Will says that too often we see poo as disgusting rather than a major clue of our health, as he says poo for a gastroenterologist is what checking the pulse is for a cardiologist. He says that signs can range from the size, smell and shape of poo, all of which can indicate anything from a poor diet to colon cancer. This is because 60% of your poo is bacteria and a direct window into the state of your microbiome which impacts all areas of your mental and physical wellbeing. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify-https://g2ul0.app.link//D9d8Wb9r1Pb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link//vyoc8p5r1Pb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Will: https://theplantfedgut.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
I read in your book that 60% of poop is bacteria, which just blew my mind.
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.
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. Yeah. For anyone that can't see, 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'm going to pass you that so you can play around with it. Yeah. 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?
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, a 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 Stuhl Scale. Right here, I'll put it on the screen. Yeah, and we're gonna run through this. But before we do, I wanna mention a few things real quick.
As the US Medical Director of Zoe, 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.
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