Why you should turn your poop blue
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A new trend has taken over social media, and this time it involves “blue poop”.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But, this viral trend might actually be beneficial.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Blue Poop challenge involves eating food made with blue food colouring - usually two muffins - for breakfast to turn your poop blue.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why, you might ask? Because the viral challenge, started by nutrition research company ZOE, wants you to find out the state of your gut health by tracking how long it takes for food to travel through.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Poop is like a message from your gut, and it has a lot to say,” gut health nutritionist Amanda Sauceda, RDN, said in a </span><a href="https://joinzoe.com/bluepoop"><span style="font-weight: 400;">video</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> about the challenge.</span></p>
<p>How does it work?</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">You can bake the muffins using a </span><a href="https://joinzoe.com/bluepoop/bake-blue-muffins"><span style="font-weight: 400;">blue muffin recipe</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on ZOE’s website, and you should eat two for breakfast and record the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When you see the blue or green-tinted poop, write down the time again so that you can find out just how healthy your gut is via the </span><a href="https://bluepoop.joinzoe.com/why"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ZOE website</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The recipe can also be altered to be gluten-free, but the company advises to use enough blue dye for the test to work.</span></p>
<p>Why blue poop?</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr Sarah Berry, leader of nutrition sciences at King’s College London, worked with ZOE to publish a study asking participants to eat specially-tinted muffins to measure their transit time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“There are several scientific ways of measuring gut transit time, such as swallowing a special capsule or small wireless device,” Dr Berry said in a statement.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“But these methods are complicated and invasive and can’t easily be done at home. Our data shows that transit time, tracked with blue dye, is an indicator of gut health, and is better than other non-invasive methods.”</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p dir="ltr">My blue muffins for the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/bluepoopchallenge?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#bluepoopchallenge</a> <a href="https://t.co/PA1zvK3U4c">pic.twitter.com/PA1zvK3U4c</a></p>
— Livia Văduva (@shamrockraver) <a href="https://twitter.com/shamrockraver/status/1394747513467514880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2021</a></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scientists found that transit time - the amount of time it takes for food to move through your gut - varied from under 12 hours to several days, with an average of around 29 hours.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to </span><a href="https://joinzoe.com/post/bluepoopchallenge"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ZOE</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the tests showed that shorter transit times were generally linked with better health, having less abdominal fat, and healthier responses to food.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gut transit time is affected by diet, lifestyle, hydration, and the gut microbiome - the trillions of bugs living in the gut.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Those who took more time to poop had more microbes that fed on protein and fewer fibre-loving bugs that produce short-chain fatty acids, helpful molecules that are linked to better gut health.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Interestingly, we also found that people with longer transit times were more likely to have a greater diversity of microbes in their gut, which is often associated with better gut health. This suggests that more microbiome diversity may not always be a sign of better health for people who don’t poop very often,” it said in a statement.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“People with the very fastest transit times, suggesting they had diarrhoea, tended to have a less healthy gut microbiome,” the statement continued.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Professor Tim Spector, epidemiologist at King’s College London and scientific founder of ZOE, said: “The Blue Poop Challenge is a simple way to find out what is going on in your gut. All you need are a couple of blue muffins and a spirit of curiosity to take that first step,”</span></p>
<p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Image credit: ZOE / Instagram</span></em></p>
