Dr. Trisha Pasricha

And it kind of helps you with digestion as you go along.

It's a wonderful thing, but without it, not only does your stool become really pale and weird looking, but it's a total emergency because you need that, one, to have appropriate digestion, but two, it tells us there's a block somewhere.

And often that whatever's causing that block can be an emergency.

I always like to tell people that what is normal, what is healthy is what's comfortable for you.

But there's this other aspect that's kind of the consistency of the stool.

And in gastroenterology, we often we look at the Bristol stool scale and you can Google that and you can see what that looks like.

But it's this nice diagram that shows how firm it is and kind of at the top, it's like really firm, small rabbit pebbles.

And at the bottom, it's like very, very loose, like almost watery stool.

This was developed in Bristol, England.

It was this doctor a couple of decades ago who just went around surveying the local healthy population and asking them what their bowel habits look like.

And he figured out that depending on where you are on that scale, how firm, pebbly, all the way down to watery, that very nicely correlated with how long it was taking that stool to travel through the colon.

And that makes sense.

It correlates well with motility because your colon, one of its main jobs has several, but one is to just draw water.

out of that stool and back into the bloodstream.

So the longer it sits there, the harder it gets.

You don't have to use the Bristol stool scale, but you should know where you are in that sort of pattern.

I think you want to sit somewhere in the middle.

And if you are in those extreme ends, you should also talk to your doctor and say, like, what am I doing wrong here?

Like, is there something I can do to get myself a little bit more soft and fluffy?

Most people who have that nice, perfect sausage that is called a Bristol 4