Questions levels: why is poop brown

If you – a happy parent toddler years 4-7, the questions from the "why grass is green, why the sky is blue" and "why is poop brown" – you already know. But if the grass and sky from the curriculum in physics is more or less clear, here's the poop baffled even quite educated and knowledgeable parent.

Why is poop brown?

Let us recall from biology class, what is a feces. Food, pre-shredded and moistened with saliva in the oral cavity through the mouth into the stomach, where emulgiruet and digested with enzymes pepsin and renin (in babies until they are 1 year old) and hydrochloric acid. Then from the stomach the partially digested food is evacuated into the small intestine. In the initial of his Department - the duodenum receives bile. Bile is a secret of the liver, accumulated in the gall bladder, yellow, brown or greenish in color, with a sharp bitter taste. This explains, why poop brown. The bile interacts with the food remnants and substances, which emit bacteria living in the intestines, forming a substance sterkobilina, and gives the corresponding shade.

By the Way, in the absence of sterkobilina in the feces will have white or grayish color. The color of feces can serve as a diagnostic feature that allows you to detect problems with the gall bladder, liver or pancreas.

With the question of why poop is brown, we understand. But what if it is another color?

• If your feces is red color – this may be a signal that you have internal bleeding. You should immediately contact a doctor! By the way, if the source of bleeding – the esophagus or the stomach – the feces will be black and with a sharp odor. But do not immediately panic. Maybe you just ate beets for dinner?
• Yellowish feces suggests that you consume high-fat food. And they will also have an unpleasant odor.
• Green color of feces indicates the presence of a bacterial infection in your digestive tract. Or you – an avid vegetarian and eat a lot of grass and green vegetables.

Interesting facts

• If you swallow a bone, you will certainly find it in their feces, because the cellulose from which it is not digested in our body. Interestingly, undigested will only shell – the inside of the bones are perfectly digested and absorbed into the bloodstream.
• Sometimes children can ask questions not only about why poop brown, but also about why they are so “smell”. The smell they impart rich in sulfur compounds, which emit bacteria that lives in our intestinal tract (indole, skatole, mercaptans), and hydrogen sulfide.
• The Feces of meat eaters smell worse than vegetarians.
• The Faeces of the birds are white, because they have ducts of the kidneys open into the intestine and do not have separate openings, as in humans. And uric acid output by the kidney, is white in color and pasty consistency.
• Scientists can get a lot of information about a person by examining his faeces – until the age, health, culinary preferences, etc.
• In Islam a toilet called the home of Satan and consider it an unclean place. Included in the box with his left foot, all hygiene procedures are carried out using the left hand, and out of the toilet with the right foot. Traditions…
• India does not have toilet paper. With the aim of hygiene used water, and own left hand.
• In Ancient Rome instead of paper used wet sponge, put on a wooden stick. Sounds good, but after using the sponge was placed in a special tray with salt water, where it waited for the next visitor to the toilet.
• Faecal matter in the three quarters consists of water. And the remaining quarter – it is dead bacteria from our intestines, cellulose, dead cells and mucus.