Dr. Oz Tip #1
"You want to hear what the stool, the poop, sounds like when it hits the water. If it sounds like a bombardier, you know, 'plop, plop, plop,' that's not right because it means you're constipated. It means the food is too hard by the time it comes out. It should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco hits the water [swoosh]."
Dr. Oz Tip #2
The next thing Dr. Oz recommends is looking at your stool—c'mon, you've done it before! You should look twice—look at the shape and then, the color.
"It should be an S shape and you want to make sure the color's normal because the color of the poop tells you a lot about how you made it," Dr. Oz says. "You don't want [pieces]. Food is a medicine for you. It helps you. [If the stool is in pieces] by the time you finished digesting your food, you don't have enough of it left to poop out in the right way and probably it's hurt the colon that has to process it. At the end of the day you can analyze your body really effectively by looking at what comes out of your body."
Dr. Oz Tip #3
This one wasn't listed on the website but I remember it form watching the show. He talked about what it means if you poop floats. Its either because you are eating to much fat in your diet. Also if you are losing weight your fat can leave your body in your poop. So there's another easy way to tell if you are either eating to much fat or you are losing a lot of fat. Interesting, right?!
Here's a pop quiz. What part of your body is most similar to your brain? The surprising answer is your small bowel, where most digestion occurs.
"That's the saying, you know, you've got blank for blank," Dr. Oz jokes. "But the thing about the small bowel is it has primitive messenger chemicals that tell the bowel how to work. If your bowel's not happy, those same chemicals influence your brain."
Dr. Oz FAQHow long does it take food to digest?
Have you ever wondered what happens to the food you eat? First, it passes through the esophagus. It moves by a wave of muscle contractions that squeeze the food down at about two inches per second. When the food reaches the stomach, it falls into a churning pool of digestive juices. In the stomach, the food is broken down into easily absorbable ingredients: proteins, sugars and fats.
Then greenish brown bile produced in the liver is added to help the breakdown of these fats. By the time the food leaves your stomach and passes into the small intestine, it's unrecognizable. The walls of our intestines absorb the nutrients into our blood and that's how we get the energy we all need to live.
How long does this vital process take? It depends on what you're eating, Dr. Oz says. "A steak dinner can take you two, maybe three days to get out of your intestine. What that means is the way you digest it is basically to rot it in your intestines. On the other hand, if you eat vegetables and fruits, they're out of your system in less than 12 hours."
What about chewing gum? Is it true that it takes seven years for it to digest? "No," Dr. Oz says. However, this little urban legend can be a good way to "get kids to stop chewing gum."
What is sweat good for?
If you listen to commercials, you should never let anyone see you sweat. However, that sweat is very important. "During heavy exercise, your muscles generate enough heat to boil several cups of coffee," Dr. Oz says. Without sweating, "heat would literally cook your internal organs and kill you."
Just below your skin are 3 million sweat glands, each a coiled tube four feet long loaded with liquid. As your body heats up the tubes contract and squeeze a droplet of sweat out onto your skin. As the sweat evaporates, it draws heat away from your body, cooling you.
And, as a special bonus feature, sweat can influence and attract people around you. "The apocrine glands—they're the ones in your armpits and in your genital areas—they actually release chemicals that signal to each other like animals: pheromones. You will instinctively like somebody or not based on their smell," Dr. Oz says.
What causes burping and farting?
Many of you logged on to Oprah.com and told us your most embarrassing health questions. Thirty-eight percent of you said that gas was a major problem in your lives. On a previous show, Dr. Oz explained that the average person...both men and women...passes gas 14 times a day. What's causing this phenomenal natural gas leak?
"Many of those bacteria that are on your side and protecting you normally will eat up the foods that you're eating and release their waste product: gas, which, by the way, is good for you. You want to have a regular amount of gas. The problem happens when you eat certain foods that give you more gas than you want."
Probably the most infamous gas-producing foods are beans, which, Dr. Oz explains, contain sugar. "In fact, sugars in general are the problem." Bacteria love simple sugars and simple carbohydrates because they're so easy to digest.
Dr. Oz says it's not just what you eat. It's also in the air you breathe. "Twenty percent of the gas comes from the air you take in your mouth," he says. "That comes because you're eating too quickly, you're drinking carbonated beverages, you're chewing gum, you're smoking cigarettes, you're sucking air into your body that gets into your intestines."
Think of your body as a refrigerator, Dr. Oz says. If you let food sit in there, it's going to smell after a while. In your body, sulfur-rich foods like eggs, meat, beer, beans and cauliflower are decomposed by bacteria to release hydrogen sulfide—a smell strong enough to flatten a bear. Avoiding these foods is the ideal solution, but when stinky gas persists, the best solutions are leafy green vegetables and probiotics, specifically lactobacilli GG. These can be found in some yogurts. The product Beano can sometimes work with beans, but soaking the beans ahead of time is useful as well.
Why do I get diarrhea?
Holly from Indiana speaks for about 90 million fellow sufferers of this problem. Here's the small and large story about the intestines: Serotonin is the natural chemical in the body that antidepressants affect. Though 5 percent of your body's serotonin is in your brain, 95 percent is in your intestines. "You have a second brain down there," Dr. Oz says. "There are 100 million nerves in that intestine tract. That's the same amount of nerves as you have in your spine."
If your intestines become confused, Dr. Oz says, one effect could be diarrhea, bloating and discomfort from inflammatory bowel disease, or IBS, a very common problem. If you have this problem for more than a day or so, "take chicken soup with some rice because it will help you reabsorb sugar and salt." If you get diarrhea chronically, Dr. Oz says the cause may be food allergies. Some common food allergies include milk products and wheat.
According to Dr. Oz, diarrhea is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it's just your body's way of protecting itself. "The immune system in your intestines is a very intricate one and it knows when food is not right for you," he says. "So it will tell your body, 'You know what? Get rid of that. We don't want this in us!'"
Why does poop smell?
You might want to light a match because Dr. Oz has something to tell you: The origin of poop's odor is sulfur, which smells like a rotten egg.
Many foods contain sulfur. "Eggs are one of them. Cheese—there's a reason they say, 'Don't cut the cheese,'" Dr. Oz says. Other sulfurous foods include meats and vegetables.
Why is poop brown?The reason that heartburn, or GERD, is such a problem is that so many people are unaware that they can deal with it. "Our intestinal system provides all kinds of clues," Dr. Oz says. Try investigating the color of your stool. "If you don't have any bile, your poop will turn white. What makes the poop brown is the bile. It's what allows your body to surround fats and absorb them healthily. It's like the soap of our intestines. It hatches to be green. So as it gets metabolized through the bowel, it turns brown."
What could be the cause of red poop? "If you've got red poop, a lot of times that's because you've had beets or red Jell-O," Dr. Oz says. "But red poop can also mean blood. It doesn't take a lot of blood to make it red but if you've got blood in your poop, you've got to get someone to look at you."
How long does it take food to digest?
Have you ever wondered what happens to the food you eat? First, it passes through the esophagus. It moves by a wave of muscle contractions that squeeze the food down at about two inches per second. When the food reaches the stomach, it falls into a churning pool of digestive juices. In the stomach, the food is broken down into easily absorbable ingredients: proteins, sugars and fats.
Then greenish brown bile produced in the liver is added to help the breakdown of these fats. By the time the food leaves your stomach and passes into the small intestine, it's unrecognizable. The walls of our intestines absorb the nutrients into our blood and that's how we get the energy we all need to live.
How long does this vital process take? It depends on what you're eating, Dr. Oz says. "A steak dinner can take you two, maybe three days to get out of your intestine. What that means is the way you digest it is basically to rot it in your intestines. On the other hand, if you eat vegetables and fruits, they're out of your system in less than 12 hours."
What about chewing gum? Is it true that it takes seven years for it to digest? "No," Dr. Oz says. However, this little urban legend can be a good way to "get kids to stop chewing gum."
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/health/Everybody-Poops#ixzz27GZxcVPT
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