Does the Viral Blue Poop Challenge Really Tell You Anything About Your Gut Health?
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If you check out the toilet bowl after you go No. 2, well, join the club: People are fascinated by their poop. After all, it constantly varies in size, shape, and color—and that’s one major reason why the #BluePoopChallenge has gone viral on social media.
The challenge, which was created by healthcare technology company ZOE, invites people to eat blue muffins, track how long it takes to see blue poop in the toilet, and then report the results. From there, you’ll be given a “poop personality” and information on what your transit time—how long it takes for food to be pooped out after it’s eaten—means for your gut health.
People are even sharing photos of their muffins and their poop personality on Instagram. (Yes, we’re getting really comfortable with each other!)
The challenge looks fun, but does transit time really tell you anything meaningful about your health—or is it just an interesting experiment? We asked GI doctors to weigh in.
What is the Blue Poop Challenge based on?
The Blue Poop Challenge stems from research by a group of scientists who work with ZOE. That research, which was published in the journal Gut in March, used several different methods—including the use of blue dye—to track gut transit time in 863 healthy people.
The researchers concluded that blue dye is a “more informative marker” of gut microbiome function than traditional measures of examining poop frequency and appearance. (Remember: Your gut microbiome is the vast variety of essential microbes and bacteria that live in your digestive tract.)
That research builds on a previous study by the same team published in the journal Nature Medicine, which found a strong link between your overall health, the foods you eat, and the presence of certain gut microbes.
How does the Blue Poop Challenge work?
It’s actually pretty simple. You bake an easy muffin recipe that contains plenty of blue food dye. (ZOE put the recipe on YouTube.) If you’re not a baker, though, you can buy them online. Then, you eat two muffins for breakfast and track how long it takes until blue or blue-green poop appears.
After that, head to the site and answer a few questions about your experience and your overall health. You’ll get a “poop profile” with a hilarious name (hello, Thunderpoop) and a bunch of information about how your transit time compares to other people, plus what your poop might say about your health. It even matches you with a “gut twin,” who has a similar gut microbiome to you.
Can the Blue Poop Challenge really tell you anything about your health, though?
The blue poop study published in Nature Medicine found that shorter transit times were generally linked with better health overall, less abdominal fat, and healthier responses to food. “Findings also showed differences in diet and gut microbiome composition between people with shorter and longer transit times, with specific foods and strains of bacteria associated with speedier or slower poops,” says ZOE publicist Fiana Tulip.
The takeaway? The faster your body moves the blue dye through your body, the healthier your gut microbiome seems to be.
But doctors who specialize in the gastrointestinal system say it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions about your health based on transit time alone. Transit time is often used in experiments to determine if someone is struggling with constipation, says Liping Zhao, M.D., professor and chair of Applied Microbiology at the Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. During those experiments, a patient might ingest food dye or eat undigestible seeds and note when they come out.
“It’s an indication of motility of your gut,” he says. “If it moves very quickly, you have a short transit time. If it moves very slowly, you have a long transit time or may struggle with constipation.”
But he says there hasn’t been enough scientific data yet to determine what transit time should be for optimal health. “Everything from one to four bowel movements a day to one bowel movement every three days would be considered normal by physicians,” he says. “We actually don’t know yet what would be the perfect transit time.”
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Bryan Curtin, M.D., a board-certified gastroenterologist at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, says that other factors are important here, too. If someone is struggling with signs of constipation, for example, having actual data to determine if they do have a slow transit time can help doctors determine if that could be the issue, along with the right medications to use, Dr. Curtin says.
That said, transit time can be dictated by a lot of factors, including your diet, medications you may be taking, your hydration levels, and how active you are, says Jacob Skeans, M.D., a gastroenterologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Even your body’s own natural timing can play a role.
Bottom line: The Blue Poop Challenge only gives you a snapshot of your transit time.
“This tells you what your transit time is in that particular moment,” says Rudolph Bedford, M.D., gastroenterologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA. “Tomorrow, it may be completely different.”
Dr. Curtin calls the Blue Poop Challenge “more of a fun experiment.” To really make sense of the results, he says, you’d have to work with a doctor, who could ask questions about your medical history and any GI symptoms you’ve personally struggled with. From there, they could use that information (which may or may not include your transit time) to create an action plan to keep your GI system healthy.
So, sure, you could try the Blue Poop Challenge. You get to eat fun muffins while on the quest for interesting information—but there’s no need to stress over your transit, Dr. Zhao says. There’s not enough data at this point to say what, exactly, it means.
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