One of my favourite TV heroines, nutritionist Gillian McKeith of the British show “You Are What You Eat” certainly believes that a poo is a valuable indicator of a person’s health. (If you haven’t caught this little gem on TV yet, do yourself a favour and check it out. You’ll laugh your head off.) During the course of tweaking a clients diet, she actually makes them crap in a Tupperware dish and then she and they examine it together. This is pretty funny when it’s one single person being humiliated by the inadequacy of their droppings, and positively gut busting when you get a whole family playing “Guess Whose Poo”. A veritable crap riot.

As funny as it all is, she certainly has a point that a crappy diet will result is crummy crap. Poo is not meant to shoot out of you like little hard machine-gun pellets, and is also not meant to explode all over the inside of the throne, coating the inside of the bowl like so much molasses.

(Funny story: I worked for a brief time in a nursing home during my college years, and one of my patients was a very fat lady in a wheelchair. One day, I had to help her to the bathroom. What ensued was a very loud, very fragrant explosion of poo, which happened to contain a extraordinarily large number of corn niblets. Unfortunately, the force of the defecation coated her entire backside, most of which was hanging in the bowl. What followed was a very entertaining comedy involving me trying to hold this lady up with one arm, while the other arm was buried practically up to the elbow in yellow, corny diarrhea. (I can laugh about it now. I wasn’t laughing that day. Especially since I didn’t have gloves on…)

But I digress. See above the Bristol Poo Chart, designed to allow you to classify the quality of your poo. A perfect poo is a number four. As Gillian would say, a perfect poo is “sausage shaped and conker-brown in colour.” She also claims that a perfect poo will be curved like a banana and should be long enough to hit the water in the bowl with one end before it leaves your ass with the other. (I swear I’m not making this up.)

Now, when I do finally get through this course and set up my own practice, I am reluctantly going to be forced to quiz folks about the specifics of their daily dump. (But I refuse to look at it, dammit.) See, here’s the thing: If you frequently have poos that are either a big wet splat OR a dry hard lump that almost rips you a new hole, you’re doing something wrong. A little more care an attention needs to be taken with what you’re stuffing your face with. Poor quality poo is a sign that your internals are due for some serious TLC.

Liquid diarrhea means that something that you’re eating does not agree with you, AT ALL. This is the body’s way of getting rid of the offending substance as quick as possible. You may be allergic to something that you’re eating; perhaps even something you are eating every day. It would be worth trying to eliminate some of the most common offenders one at a time for a week, and then reintroducing it and seeing what happens.

On the other hand, turds that ricochet off the bottom of the toilet and smack you in the cheeks aren’t good either. Clearly, if this describes you, you need to increase the fibre in your diet, especially the fibre found in fruits and vegetables. But don’t overdo the bran! Bran is very scratchy and can irritate your poor guts even more. Also, fibre makes your poo softer by holding on to water in your intestine, but if you aren’t getting enough water, all the fibre in the world won’t help you. So drink up! And please, if you are planning to dramatically raise the amount of fibre in your diet, for God’s sake don’t do it all at once. Take it from one who knows, you’ll end up bound up tighter than the hinges of Hell. A gradual increase is best.

I would also take note of any undigested food in your poo (gotta chew your food better!) or any strange colours. Black tarry poo can mean intestinal bleeding, while yellow poo means you should maybe get thee to the doctor, as you might have liver or gallbladder problems. And if your stool is purple, well, lay off the beets, man!!

And that’s all I have to say about poo. This has been a really shi**y topic.