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"How often do you poop?" might sound like a very personal question, but your answer could reveal quite a lot about your overall health. A study published in 2024 investigated how often people had bowel movements and compared those stats to their demographic, genetic, and health data.
The healthiest people among the 1,425 participants reported pooping once or twice a day – a 'Goldilocks zone' of bowel movement frequency. Pooping too often or too rarely was associated with different underlying health issues, the team led by researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology found. "This study shows how bowel movement frequency can influence all body systems, and how aberrant bowel movement frequency may be an important risk factor in the development of chronic diseases,""These insights could inform strategies for managing bowel movement frequency, even in healthy populations, to optimize health and wellness."The study investigated the bathroom habits of people who were"generally healthy" – that is, with no history of kidney or gut issues likefor those reporting one or two bowel movements per week; low-normal for three to six movements per week; high-normal for one to three movements per day; andThe researchers also analyzed patients' blood metabolites and chemistry, their genetics, and the gut microbes present in their stool samples. The team looked for possible associations between bowel movement frequency and these health markers, as well as other factors like their age and sex.Bacteria usually found in the upper gastrointestinal tract were more common in stool samples from participants with diarrhea. Their blood samples, meanwhile, showed biomarkers associated with "If stool sticks around too long in the gut, microbes use up all of the available dietary fiber, which they ferment into "After that, the ecosystem switches to fermentation of proteins, which produces several toxins that can make their way into the bloodstream." Sure enough, some of these byproducts were found in these patients' blood samples. Particularly enriched was a metabolite called indoxyl-sulfate, a known product of protein fermentation that can damage the kidneys. The team suggests the finding is potential evidence of a causal link between bowel movement frequency and overall health.tracked inactive adults who began resistance training twice or three times a week. Those who gained the most strength showed changes in the makeup of their gut bacteria in just eight weeks. These kinds of changes might help some people move out of the constipation or diarrhea categories and into a healthier bowel-movement range.found that people with a lot of methane-producing microbes in their guts are especially efficient at turning dietary fiber into short-chain fatty acids.Of course, everybody has found themselves at one extreme or the other at some point in their lives, after catching a stomach bug or eatingBig breakthroughs. Bold ideas. Straight to your inbox.
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