Does Poop Hold the Secret to Your Health? | Sarah Greenfield RD, CSSD | TEDxWilmingtonLive

I love talking about

poop

and today you will too. They say that our eyes are the windows to our soul. Well, I say that our

poop

is the window to our

health

. I am Jewish, I grew up Jewish and between 50 and 80% of Ashkenazi Jews are. lactose intolerant, but do we love eating bagels and cream cheese? This is a recipe for ravenous panting. The only reason I mention this is to paint a picture of how I grew up. I grew up talking about digestive gas bloating in my family and in my larger Jewish community there was a lot of obedience and farting and if you don't believe me, go see any Mel Brooks movie, he will confirm it, but I didn't know what kind of impact I would have that in my career and my relationship. with

health

, that's a word, 15 years old I am a dietitian.

I help people navigate the complexities of their health, but I struggle with my own digestive issues. I would often bend over with severe stomach cramps or sit on the toilet crying because I couldn't go to the bathroom, so I understand how vulnerable it can be to struggle with

your

health and how overwhelming it is to search for answers. I went from doctor to doctor looking for solutions for my digestive health and they told me things like just take some antibiotics or eat less fiber eat more white things like white bread potatoes pasta and luckily as a dietician I had the understanding and awareness to know that that probably wasn't the case.

It was the best solution for my health and surely having studied nutrition I could heal myself, but I couldn't, it wasn't until I found functional medicine that everything changed. You see, functional medicine is the study of the root cause of health imbalances and nine times out of ten, maybe even ten out of ten, that root cause is focused. In

your

Center in your digestion you know when someone has a near-death experience and says that his entire life passes before his eyes. Well, in that moment when I connected digestive health with overall health, I felt like my life was flashing before my eyes, except everything I was remembering was about digestion and I realized I had the answers all along.

I just didn't know where to look for who read the book. Everyone poops. It is a classic. We read this book when things were simple. We were simple. Life was simple. And guess what? We did it, we talked about poop, we were actually rewarded for going potty when I was younger. I got really angry because I couldn't remember the last time I had gone to the bathroom. I went to my mom crying and I was like mom. I can't remember the last time I pooped, we came up with a brilliant idea: we were going to make a daily poop chart, we would hang it outside the bathroom and every time I went to the bathroom I had to put a sticker on the chart.

I think the next week I was so excited to take that damn sticker, put it on that graph, turns out I was pooping every day. The crisis was averted, so to return to that moment when I connected digestive health with general health, I returned to this relationship. I had poop when I was a kid and started talking about it. I talked about it with my clients, which made sense. I talked about it in job interviews, which was a little weirder, but I'm a dietitian, so I got away with it and Here I am. Talking about poop today, it's amazing what you can learn about what's going on internally by paying attention to that one thing we all try to hide: daily poop, so now I want to walk you through a series of five questions so you can become an expert. .

Reach out with your number one poop question: Do I go to the bathroom regularly? It is one of the most powerful ways our body releases toxins. It is also very important for absorbing nutrients, so if you are constipated if you don't go to the bathroom enough. your body is retaining these toxins which can harm your health if you consume too much if you have diarrhea then you are probably at risk for some nutrient deficiency and dehydration if this happens over a long period of time I suggest you go To the doctor question number two , what is the consistency?

I've created this beautiful modified Bristol poop chart so you can see exactly what your poop looks like, what it means, and what you can do about it, but generally you want your poop to have shapes, but it

does

n't. too hard like small granules, which could mean you're not drinking enough water or getting enough soluble fiber like beans, oats, psyllium husk. Soluble fiber draws water into our intestines and helps lubricate our stools if it is too loose, which may mean you are not eating enough binding foods like bananas, rice, applesauce, toast, it could also mean you have an underlying food allergy or food sensitivity question. number three what color is your poop brown we want our poop to be on that brown spectrum I had a A friend once went to the emergency room because he went to the bathroom he looked back and got scared he thought his life was ending his poop was red, he went to the emergency room and they asked him a series of questions and discovered that he had eaten. beet Beets will always turn your poop red, so I warned you to be worried, although if your poop is black, black can mean you have internal bleeding or if your poop is yellow, that can mean something is going on with your liver. liver or gallbladder in that case go to the doctor question number four is your poop sinking or floating is an important question we want our poop to sink this means that everything is working very well if your poop is floating that could mean that you have trouble breaking down fat and we need fat to absorb some key nutrients vitamin A vitamin K vitamin E which is an antioxidant and the most important one I'm sure you all are familiar with and maybe some of us are even deficient in vitamin D , it is really important that our bodies break down fat so that we can absorb these nutrients final question question number five: can you see pieces of food in your stool?

Our body naturally produces digestive enzymes and that helps us break down larger food particles, but as we age if we lead a stressful lifestyle it decreases the amount of enzymes we have and our body cannot break down food and you will see it in your poop However, there is one exception to this rule and that is corn, no one can break down corn, you always will. look at that one in your poop so it's a free pass. This last question was the most important for me because I realized that I wasn't breaking down my food properly, so I started taking a cold digestive enzyme which helped improve my symptoms significantly and then from there I thought, you know, I'm going. to try your luck with probiotics.

I mean, it seemed like a good idea to swallow live bacteria and I'm so grateful I did because that led me to my next profound discovery, the gut microbiome. let me paint a picture for you before we get into that gut microbiome in more detail you're throwing a party you invite your friends you're having fun you're drinking some wine telling jokes categories of plants and you look and realize there are a couple of people who have come to your party that you didn't invite and they're a little small, maybe a little creepy, but you know they're not bothering anyone, so you go back to your friends.

Another hour goes by and you look and you realize that these creepy people have multiplied, there are more of them, but they still aren't bothering anyone and you're about to kick ass in that game of scattegories, so you go back to your friends, another hour goes by and you realize. that those creepy people are more numerous than your friends and your friends start to leave and suddenly all the energy and the party changes the music gets louder things are breaking the mailbox is stolen I'm not speaking from personal experience the police will call you and then you go out and see scattegories at the bottom of the pool this party is officially a disaster ladies and gentlemen this is your gut microbiome you always have good and bad bacteria there but you want the good bacteria or in the case of the party you want your friends to overcome the amount of bad bacteria, the creepy people we run into, we run into problems when those bad bacteria outweigh the good and that's when it starts to affect our health, but the good thing is that any functional medicine practitioner can run a simple stool test, you can get a detailed report showing what strains are in your gut and what kind of party is going on here and science is just beginning to scratch the surface of the power of the gut microbiome, they are linking some of the most prevalent diseases that we have in this country, such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, they are linking it to the intestine.

There is a strain of bacteria that produces an acid that protects against type 2 diabetes. There are other strains of bacteria that when you eat certain foods increase compounds or increase compounds that can increase the risk of heart disease. A study was done with obese mice and healthy weight mice and they took the microbiome from the healthy mice and put it into the obese mice and, within weeks, into the obese mice. his body his body weight dropped to normal as a marathon runner and any of my fellow runners are always looking for ways to have a competitive advantage to improve our performance.

A research study was conducted on endurance athletes that found that they have a specific strain that allows them to recover faster. Another strain was found to kill acne-causing bacteria. Think about being able to take a probiotic to treat acne from the inside out instead of all those harsh topical treatments that we put on our face, but the most important thing I want you to learn from this and what I want you to realize is that All this research, all this information was gathered by looking at people's stool, so now I want everyone to take their hand and put it on their stomach. and take a deep breath, inhale and exhale, feel gratitude for all those good bacteria that you have in your gut and maybe the next time you go to the bathroom you will look back and smile and know that you have the power to change your health, so just eat They say your eyes are the window to your soul your poop is the window to your health look through it look at it and listen to what it tells you thank you