What Your Poop Schedule Says About Your Health

Data from over 1,400 healthy adults can’t be wrong: pooping once or twice a day means you’re doing pretty well, healthwise.

Researchers from the Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle-based nonprofit that studies the “relationships and interaction between various parts of biological systems,” found that people who poop once or twice a day tend to have better long-term health outcomes. They found this out by collecting all sorts of data on the aforementioned 1,400 healthy adult volunteers, including lifestyle information, biological data, and medical info.

All sorts of factors are taken into account, like their gut microbiome and their blood chemistry.

You Might Be Healthy, But Are You 1 or 2 Poops A Day Healthy?

Participants then self-reported their bowel movement frequencies. If they only had one or two bowel movements a week, that meant they had to self-report as “constipated.” 3 to 6 per week was considered “low-normal.”

“High-normal” was 1 to 3 per day. And then diarrhea was its own category that I guess did not need to have its frequency explicitly spelled out or described. Everyone gets it.

They found that when your poop lingers for too long, it starts to build up a level of toxicity in your bloodstream that can have all sorts of negative effects on various parts of your body, especially the kidneys. The more regularly you poop, the more toxins you get to flush out before they start to become a problem.

What you want is plenty of fiber-fermenting bacteria in your gut microbiome that doesn’t stick around so long that it eats up all of the fiber inside of you. That’s why the sweet spot for poops is around one or two per day.

It gives your gut a chance to let all the good bacteria feed on fiber and produce beneficial short-chain fatty acids. Dipping too far into the constipation side or the diarrhea side can disrupt the delicate balance of your all-important gut microbiome.

While the study does take some demographic trends into account, like how young people, women, and people with low body mass indexes tend to poop less frequently, overall it says that if you want to poop once or twice a day you should be eating way more fruits and vegetables than you already do. Combine that with drinking tons of water and remaining physically active.

Next up, Gibbons wants to find out if maintaining a good poop schedule could be the key to preventing some diseases.