When poop is green

Let’s see why this may happen

Poop tells you important and often vital information about your health and diet. Poop shape and color may vary depending on your diet and lifestyle but when you notice a drastic change you should investigate.

If different shades of brown make you feel calm, you may probably be scared by a green poop.

A green color may be caused by lots of greens in your diet, such as kale, broccoli, and spinach. Blue foods can make your poop turn green too, like blueberries but also certain color dyes in food, such as blue, purple, and black can also turn your stools green when they are expelled from the body.

However, greenish poop is also caused by bile, which is a sign that your liver and pancreas are working well. But if your green poop is accompanied by feeling unwell and diarrhea, it may be a bacterium in your gut like salmonella, giardia, or norovirus. They cause diarrhea, and your poo may pass too fast through your intestine, or the bacteria that helps to turn it brown may be killed off.

Moreover, also medications can turn your feces green, including some antibiotics, contraceptives, and iron supplements. Anyway, green poo is normally nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless, if you want to prevent green poop, you should consider some things:

Have a balanced diet, of which green vegetables are a part, alongside healthy fats, proteins, and carbohydrates;
Help your liver and gallbladder by eating fermented or sour foods like lemons;
Boost your gut bacteria, which contribute their own waste to yours to generate its brown color, by taking a probiotic; including a good variety of vegetables in your diet that will help produce healthy poo.

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If you are fit and well, the color of your poo is basically medium brown, but some slight changes due to your diet are normal. The brownish color comes from dead red blood cells and wastes from gut bacteria.

Poo consistency, instead, ranges from runny, normally a sign of an upset tummy, to hard, cracked, pellets like rabbit droppings. The Bristol Stool Chart describes the ideal form as like a sausage: either slightly cracked, or smooth.

So, your poop is a good consistency if:

It is possible for you to hold it in for a short time;
You can poop without straining;
You can pass it all in one sitting.

Healthy stools can also change day by day but you should watch out for sudden changes to your poop which you can’t account for and in particular extremes of poop color or consistency.

Contact a health professional if you can’t explain any changes in your poop consistency or color, or if:

Your poop has become a dark-black color;
There is red blood in your stool.

At worst these could be signs of bowel cancer, or could indicate piles.

On the contrary, a very light-colored poop, or creamy-white, could indicate an excessively fatty diet but if this is not your case, and the poop is a bit runny, it might be a sign of pancreatic or gallbladder problems.

Source thesun.co.uk