SPECIAL | How bowel frequency impacts your health
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, March 27, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. We eat for a variety of reasons, most importantly, to sustain life. Unsurprisingly, the decisions we make about what we consume can have a huge impact on our health. Equally important is how our bodies eliminate the waste created by what we ingest. After all, what goes in must come out. Are there hard and fast rules about what constitutes a healthy, let's just say it, poo? Sean Gibbons, a microbiologist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, now joins us to discuss what bowel movements, or a lack of them, reveal about our health. Thanks for joining me, Sean.
Thanks for having me, Dana.
I think we all have an idea about what's normal for us, but how often should we be going? Is there an ideal frequency?
What is considered a healthy bowel movement frequency?
There's no hard and fast ideal frequency, I would say. Currently, clinically, there's a wide range that's considered healthy. Everything from three times a week to three times a day is considered fairly normal. And that's very wide. But based on what we'll talk about here soon, I would say maybe once every other day or a couple times a day is probably where you want to be. That's kind of the Goldilocks zone.
You conducted a study last year that gave you insights into the effects of having a regular or irregular bowel movement and that effect on our gut microbiome. First, how many people took part in the study and how were they categorized?
So this was a large cohort of individuals from a scientific wellness company called Aravale. And we had approximately three to four thousand people in this cohort. We filtered down the number of people who were a part of this particular study by looking at those who were the healthiest among them. So we got down to maybe two thousand or so people who had no reported diseases.
What were the key findings from Sean's study on bowel movements?
whose clinical chemistries like their LDL cholesterol and their insulin resistance were all in the sort of healthy range. So these were as healthy as we could find.
And what did you learn regarding frequency and our gut microbiome? Let's start with those with high level frequency.
Those who had a high bowel movement frequency, which is maybe four or more bowel movements a day, which is classified as diarrhea, they showed signatures of stress on their liver. Their liver enzymes were out of range. They also saw higher levels of inflammation. This isn't perhaps that surprising because we know that we produce bile. That's excreted into our bowel. And if we are experiencing diarrhea, we actually lose a lot of our bile through defecation. And our body has to work hard to produce more of it. And that puts strain on the liver. And inflammation has long been known to be associated with diarrhea as well.
And what about those who experience low frequency?
So those who are on the low end, which is, you know, three or fewer times per week, kind of constipated individuals, they showed a rise in microbially derived metabolites in the bloodstream from the fermentation of proteins. So microbes fermenting proteins into these molecules like p-creosol or endoxyl or phenylacetate.
How does bowel movement frequency relate to gut health?
And many of these molecules are toxins to the kidneys, the liver, and even to the brain. So these are not necessarily that good for us, and they've been linked to chronic diseases.
What are some of the underlying conditions that our bowels may be warning us about?
One of the main reasons we embarked on this study is that there are all of these associations out there between several different chronic diseases and bowel movement frequency. So for example, those who have neurological conditions like Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, Oftentimes before they get diagnosed with these diseases, they have had maybe decades of chronic constipation. So constipation tends to precede these things. Similar for chronic kidney disease, we see that constipation often precedes the disease condition, but no one really knew whether that was correlation or causation.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic of this episode?
0:03–1:04
2
What is considered a healthy bowel movement frequency?
1:04–2:08
3
What were the key findings from Sean's study on bowel movements?
2:08–3:29
4
How does bowel movement frequency relate to gut health?
3:29–7:14
5
What does the Bristol stool chart reveal about bowel health?
7:14–8:07
6
How does diet affect gut transit time?
8:07–13:22
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Excerpt
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