Bowel movement: 13 questions & answers

How long does it take from eating to having a bowel movement?

The time it takes for the leftovers of a roll to go from being eaten at the breakfast table to being in the toilet bowl can vary greatly. Some people digest slowly, and those who have fast-digesting intestines. Women’s intestines digest more slowly than men’s. In the case of constipation and hard stools, the indigestible parts of food take about a hundred hours to leave the body, while in the case of diarrhoea, it takes less than 10 hours. Around 24 hours is usual.

And how many bowel movements a day is typical? Most adults need to go to the bathroom once a day for a big deal. However, frequent bowel movements (three times a day) and infrequent bowel movements (every three days) are also standard.

What colours can stool be?

The stool is usually brown to tan in colour. This comes from the red blood pigment, which is freshly produced daily and must be broken down again. In the intestine, the bacteria have a brown colour from the breakdown products of the blood components.

The chair can also take other colours. This is often caused by foods that contain intense colourings, such as spinach, which can lead to green stools, or beetroot, which leads to red-tinged stools.

It would help to be more careful with other discolourations, such as black, dark, grey or yellow stools. If you observe these colours regularly, an illness can be behind it. In this case, the cause should be clarified by the doctor.

What does it mean when the chair floats on top?

The stool in the toilet’s water does not sink immediately but floats or floats on top. This is due to the many light plant fibres or tiny gas bubbles in the stool. The bacteria of the natural intestinal flora are responsible for this gas. The amount of fibre and gas in the stool depends on what you eat.

As long as you don’t suffer from flatulence, everything is fine. However, if you observe over a more extended period that the stool is floating or that you have a lot of air in your stomach, then a food intolerance or an illness can be the cause. In this case, the doctor should clarify the cause of the floating stool.

What is a chair made of?

The stool is three-quarters water. The remaining quarter comprises indigestible leftovers from our food, such as roughage, plant fibres or metabolic breakdown products. In addition, there are intestinal flora bacteria and dead cells of the intestinal mucosa. So, everything the body can no longer use and wants to get rid of.

Which is healthier: squatting or sitting?

In this country, we only know the sitting toilet, the ordinary toilet on which you can sit and do your business – and read the newspaper, answer emails, make phone calls or check football results. In other countries, however, there is another toilet model: the squat toilet, also known as a squat toilet.

The squat toilet is a basin set into the floor over which one can relieve oneself in a squatting position. This has several advantages:

• With this posture, the rectum is relaxed and straight, and the chair can slide out more quickly.
• You spend less time on the toilet because defecation is faster, and you can’t sit comfortably, so it saves time.
• Touching the toilet is hardly possible, which makes sense from a hygienic point of view.

The sitting toilet is considered a “modern” feature of the quiet place. However, considering the advantages of the squat toilet, this model should not be dismissed as archaic. You can easily retrofit in this country with so-called toilet stools in front of the bathroom. If you put your feet on it, you also create a squatting position.

What can affect bowel movements?

Food sensitivities, allergies, diseases, pathogens, and toxins can cause bowel movement problems and impact stool frequency, colour, and consistency. It can cause diarrhoea, gas, constipation, pain, slimy stools, unusual stool colours, or blood.

If you see a little bright red blood on the toilet paper when wiping and have pain when having a bowel movement, this can indicate small tears in the anus ( anal fissures ). These mainly occur with tough stools and chronic constipation. However, haemorrhoids are also a possible cause of fresh blood, especially when itching co-occurs. Clotted blood, also called occult blood, can be recognized because it is black and not red.

A doctor should check blood in the stool and during bowel movements to rule out serious diseases such as inflammation, diverticula or malignant tumours ( colon cancer ).

How can you support the emptying of the bowel?

Defecation is particularly difficult in the case of constipation when the stool is hard and dry. But even without constipation, the bowel movement sometimes does not work as quickly as one would like. What can you do?

It can help to check the sitting position on the toilet. It is best to lean forward a little to relax the bowels. Then the chair slides better outside. To avoid constipation in the first place, you can keep your intestines busy and your stool supple with diet and exercise.

Consuming plenty of fibre in the form of fruits and vegetables can be helpful, as can:

• Sour milk milk products ( yoghurt, quark, soured milk, kefir)
• Sufficient drinking quantities (water and unsweetened tea)
• regular walks or other light exercise program

On the other hand, Laxatives should only be used in the short term for acute symptoms. Long-term use of laxatives can cause health problems.

What is the three-day rule?

The three-day rule states the following: after a complete colon emptying, for example, after using a solid laxative for constipation, it usually takes three days for the entire colon to fill up and empty. One should, therefore, not wait impatiently for the next bowel movement after purging and take the next portion of laxative too early.

What types of chairs are there?

According to the 1997 Bristol chair shape scale, the following chair shapes are distinguished:

• Type 1: Hard and nodular
• Type 2: Sausage-shaped and lumpy
• Type 3: Sausage shaped with cracks on the surface
• Type 4: Sausage shaped and smooth
• Type 5: Soft blobs
• Type 6: Mushy
• Type 7: Liquid

This classification can be helpful if there are problems with bowel movements and the doctor needs to be told what type of bowel movements are present. This way, he can better understand ​​the type of chair.

Type 3 and type 4 (sometimes also type 5) are considered the “ideal chair”. While types 1 and 2 indicate constipation, types 6 and 7 are classified as diarrhoea.

Why can you get diarrhoea from fear?

Anxiety is a condition of the body that also affects the gut. The nervousness hits you, so to speak, on the digestion.

Usually, the stool is thickened in the large intestine. Water is extracted from the previously liquid food pulp to give the stool its familiar shape. This process takes a little longer.

In the case of great fear, stress hormones are released immediately, ensuring energy is available for the “escape”. Heart, lungs and muscles are now the number one priority. For this purpose, blood is withdrawn from the digestive process, and leftover food should be disposed of as quickly as possible. The intestines do not have enough time to remove liquid from the stool, and the “unfinished” stool leaves the body with diarrhoea in no time at all.

Where does the name “stool” come from?

Everyone knows what the word “defecating” means, but where did this term for the elimination of faeces from the digestive tract come from?

“Stool” is composed of the words “stool” and “gait”. And that brings us to the origin of the term: as early as the 15th century, there was a box in elegant townhouses and, later, a special chair with a hole in the seat. A bowl was placed underneath. Since then, walking on this chair with the aim of defecating has been referred to as “defecation”.

How did the chair get on the moon?

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew to the moon in 1969, going to the toilet was difficult for the two astronauts. Her spaceship did not have a quiet place. In zero gravity, they had to do their business in small pouches that they could attach to the back of their space suits.

The two astronauts took their legacies back to Earth. With one exception: they left a chair bag on the moon. It is still there today, along with other bags that other astronauts later left there.