Poop Facts You Didn't Know About - Thrillist.

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HEALTH

13 Ridiculous Facts
About Poop That'll
Make You Sh*t Your
Pants
By Christina Stiehl Published on 11/22/2016 at 12:01 AM
Daniel Fishel/Thrillist
You know coffee makes you poop. You
know poop shapes are important, tracking
your bowel movements is a thing now, and
sometimes poop can be green.

But even if you've been dropping logs your

whole life, there's a lot of weird and
wonderful facts you might not know about
feces. Here are some of the craziest things
we've found.

There's a phenomenon that

makes people have to poop
upon entering a bookstore
There's something so calming, so relaxing
about bookstores: the smell of fresh ink
and paper, the quiet atmosphere, the
raging urge to run to the bathroom and
drop a deuce. Maybe it's the coffee you
downed from the requisite cafe, but
people getting the urge to poop in
bookstores is a rather common
phenomenon.
So common, in fact, it has a name: the
Mariko Aoki phenomenon. The name
comes from a Japanese woman who first
described the feeling in 1985. While
there's no real clinical definition of the
condition, or any established causes, there
are a few theories about why people
suddenly have to poop after browsing the
latest YA fantasy novels: The smell of ink
or paper could have a laxative effect,
people associate reading in bookstores
with reading at home on the toilet, and the
posture you have while you're looking at
books is prime for taking a dump.
Sounds super-legit, right?! The Mariko
Aoki phenomenon isn't in any medical
literature, obviously, but there are
plenty of different people who experience
this urge, enough to make it a veritable
phenomenon.

Lots of poop can

spontaneously combust
If you've ever been the victim of the ole
light-a-bag-of-shit-and-leave-it-on-the-
doorstep prank, then you know a pile of
poop somehow smells even worse when
it's aflame. It turns out that you might not
even need a lighter to pull this off; on a
record-hot July day in 2016, a huge pile of
horse manure spontaneously caught fire
in upstate New York. How lovely for
residents in all the neighboring towns!

The conditions were just hot and dry

enough to have the massive pile of shit
catch fire, sans spark. All that a fire needs
is the proper mixture of heat, oxygen, and
fuel, which the horse manure
unfortunately had. Although there aren't
any recorded incidents of this happening
with human feces -- why would there be
huge piles of human poop just baking out
in the summer heat anyway? --
hypothetically, if the conditions were just
right (or wrong?) enough, it could.
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Speaking of fire... you

can start one in your colon
Your GI system thrives thanks to a
collection of healthy bacteria. These
bacteria ultimately produce gas, which is
why you fart all the time. If one of those
gases happens to be hydrogen sulfide, this
can spell disaster during a colonoscopy
procedure.

Gastroenterologist Urvish Shah explains

that when someone is getting a polyp
removed from the colon, it's usually
burned off with a cautery. With an
abundance of gas, however, the cautery
can spark, resulting in a brief flame.

"If the person has too much hydrogen

sulfide in [the colon] and if you are using
cautery to cut the polyp... it can happen,"
he says. Yikes! Luckily, this fire-in-your-ass
situation is incredibly rare. He's only ever
heard about it, and never seen it in
practice.

It's possible to poop out of

your mouth
It's called fecal vomiting, and aside from
being utterly disgusting and terrifying, it's
an indicator of a major health problem.
Though if you're vomiting your own poop,
you probably know you have a major
health problem. When people have a
blockage in their small or large intestine,
known as an intestinal obstruction, waste
can't travel to the rectum.

"If you have an obstruction generally in

the lower small intestine or within the
colon, you can eat food but it has nowhere
to go," says Dr. Ben Dalton,
gastroenterologist at the University of
Tennessee Medical Center. "Eventually,
you hit a critical mass and if it cannot get
out from the south, it'll come out the
north." That means you will vomit fecal
matter; it probably won't look like regular
poop, but it's as disgusting as it sounds.
Fecal vomiting is usually accompanied by
abdominal pain, dehydration, and
constipation, and untreated blockages
could lead to death. Fortunately, Dr.
Dalton says this is pretty rare.

Your poop is full of fat,

bacteria, dead cells, and
more!
Turds (usually) slide nicely out of your
digestive tract because they're made
mostly out of water, about 75% percent. Of
the 25% that's solid, the biggest
component is bacteria, with the rest being
a mix of indigestible food matter, fat,
inorganic substances, and protein. Your
poop is (usually) brown because of the
way bacteria work on bilirubin, a pigment
in bile that's the end result of dead red
blood cells. So there's a lot of dead stuff
and bacteria in your crap.
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There's millions of dollars in

silver and gold hiding in
poop
One of the fortunate results of modern
sewage systems is that you don't have to
use outhouses. One of the unfortunate
results is that a bunch of precious metal
winds up in the sewage, incapable of being
put to good use.
Scientists presenting to the American
Chemical Society last year said that there
are tiny fragments of metal everywhere --
beauty products, deodorant, even socks --
that wind up literally flushed down the
drain. Metals like gold, silver, platinum,
and everyone's favorite, vanadium, are
present in commercially viable amounts
in poop. One estimate calculated that the
shit of 1 million Americans may contain
$13 million in metal. All someone has to
do is go get it.

Even if you don't eat, you'll

still poop
Sure, some foods make you poop more
than others, and it can take on the color
and texture of your latest meal. But even if
you don't eat anything, you'll still need to
take a dump. That's because poo is made
up of more than just the food you ingest.

"If you don’t eat, you can still have feces

because the body produces secretions.
Juices from the pancreas, intestinal lining,
bile, gastric juices, all those juices are
mixed together, that produces the liquid
stool that empties from the small bowel
into the colon, which is the large bowel,"
Dr. Shah says. "And the large bowel’s
function is to absorb all the water from the
feces. That’s why the feces that comes out
of the rectum is really solid."

There's poop on the moon

One giant leap for bowel movement-kind?
When the Apollo astronauts wanted to
take back some moon rocks as souvenirs,
they had to make some room on the
spaceship to accommodate the weight.
That meant letting go of some waste -- 96
bags, to be exact, of poop, pee, and puke.
Although it makes total sense, it's an
unfortunate discovery for the next group
of astronauts or Martians who make a
moon landing. Although the smell on the
moon probably isn't nearly as bad as it is
on a hot July day on Earth...

Poop transplants are a

thing
Thanks to poop transplants, people
suffering from Clostridium difficile
infections -- when healthy bacteria in the
gut die off, often as the result of
antibiotics, and C. diff takes over, causing
bad GI symptoms like raging diarrhea or
life-threatening inflammation of the colon
-- can finally find relief.

The process, although potentially life-

saving, sounds pretty gross. Doctors take
fresh poop, blend it into a slurry, and
inject it into patients, usually via
colonoscopy. Or, you can straight-up just
eat the poop... sort of.

"A patient ingests somebody else's poop,"

Dr. Shah says. "Now, they’re making it into
pills. And it's very effective."

About 90% of people who get them are

cured of their C. diff infections, compared
to only 26% from medication. Thanks to
its wild success, doctors are looking into
using poop transplants for other GI issues,
such as IBS or ulcerative colitis. Poop --
saving lives, one transplant at a time.

You can grow full plants

from undigested seeds in
your poop
Not everything you eat gets completely
digested; this is why you can sometimes
see little kernels of corn in your turds (fun
fact: it's not the whole kernel, just the
outside layer that isn't absorbed). The
same thing goes for tomato seeds, as
evidenced by this whole tomato plant
grown out of human poop.

Another tomato plant was discovered in a

pile of feces on Surtsey, a volcanic island
in Iceland, which begs the question: What
else can be grown out of human poop?
Watermelons? Lemons? The possibilities
of a poop produce farm seem endless.

You can drink poop

Well, technically you can drink water
taken from poop, but it's basically the
same thing. Not to worry; Bill Gates gives
his stamp of approval for
the Omniprocessor, a machine that takes
human waste, extracts water, and sanitizes
it to be used for drinking and to power
electricity. Gates hopes this will solve the
sanitation and contaminated drinking
water problems poor countries face. And
if the billionaire tech mogul says the water
is just as good as bottled water, it must be
legit. He did drink it himself, after all.

There's a name for people

who willingly eat poop
They're called coprophagics, which comes
from the word coprophagy: the eating of
feces. Although loads of animals do this
too, it's most alarming in humans. The act
of coprophagy is (you're not going to
believe this) usually an indicator of a
mental or developmental disorder. Doesn't
exactly take a psychiatry degree to sort
that one out.
A 19-year-old man in South India was
brought in for a psychiatric evaluation
after he was observed eating not only his
own poop after defecating, but also the
poop of goats, cows, and dogs. Looking to
possibly treat coprophagia, scientists
studied a 6-year-old girl who enjoyed
eating, smearing, and playing with poop
so much, the researchers recreated a less
toxic copycat version of poop made from
flour, water, and food coloring. The little
girl still loved playing with and eating it.

Human poop could be the

power source of the future
Imagine if "gassing up" meant literally
using poop to fuel your vehicle. That eco-
friendly dream is now a reality in Bristol,
England, thanks to a bus that's run entirely
on household and human waste. It's
powered by biomethane gas, which is
created from sewage and food waste,
collected from local households.

Although there's only one bus running at

the moment, it's a pretty genius idea -- and
riders swear it doesn't smell!

Turns out, poop is more than just the

smelly stuff in your toilet bowl and the
inspiration behind your favorite emoji; it
can save lives, power buses, create safe
drinking water, and has even been to the
moon. So maybe show your feces a little
respect: Next time, instead of just flushing
it down the toilet like some ungrateful
human, donate it to someone in need, or
use your turds to grow tomato plants in
the backyard. (OK, maybe that's taking it a
little too far.)

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Christina Stiehl is a Health and fitness staff
writer for Thrillist. She's very familiar with the
bathrooms in her neighborhood Barnes &
Noble. Follow her on Twitter @ChristinaStiehl.
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