Conversations are lively when popular Canadian mental health advocate and journalist Kevin Frankish and alternative medicine expert Bryce Wylde get together. During episode four of a five-part podcast series called Your Healthy House, the two spoke candidly about poop. Watch to see Wylde’s visual demonstration, from within his bathroom, of Nature’s Calling Sunfiber.
The series, which ran in November to coincide with Men’s Health Month, was created to help men get their house in order. Each episode compared a man’s body to a different room of the house. Episode four was the bathroom.
Frankish prefaced the discussion by admitting that men don’t like talking about their bodily functions. Yet changes to poop or pee “can be warning signs that there’s something wrong in our house.”
He continued, “Sometimes your stools are darker; sometimes they are lighter. Sometimes they are loose. Sometimes they are big. Sometimes they are pellets. And they all mean something!”
Many men might be surprised to learn that only about 20% of poop is remnants of what we eat. Wylde revealed that the other 80% is a combination of water, insoluble fiber (needed to move things through), and bacteria. “Sixty percent of your stool is live organisms!” he stressed.
Referencing the Bristol Stool Chart, which illustrates the seven different poo shapes, Wylde reassured viewers that there’s no such thing as the perfect poo. However, some are more preferred than others.
For example, “You don’t want the little pellets that fire off into the toilet bowl like a machine gun. That’s severe constipation. It’s a problem with fiber and dehydration.” Type 4, which is S-shaped, is the preferred normal. “It dives into the toilet bowl like an Olympic diver.”
Wylde, who participated in this podcast from his bathroom, demonstrated two different types of fiber supplements from his bathroom counter. “I’m going to focus on the right kind of fiber. When folks have constipation or diarrhea, they get trapped with this idea that psyllium husk is the way to go.” He showed how psyllium husk turns into an orange “gloppy, goopy mess” when mixed with water, and cautioned that it “may ultimately constipate you.”
Stirring Nature’s Calling Sunfiber in a glass of water, he explained that it is tasteless, odorless and becomes transparent when fully dissolved. “This is a prebiotic fiber,” he explained, adding “it will give you regularity and feed the good bacteria properly.”
Click to learn more about fiber supplements for constipation.
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