Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away

This is exactly right.

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Let's get dirty. Listen to Dirty Rush on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sir, I traverse this day by steamboat, the space between London and Hungerford bridges,

between half past one and two o'clock. It was low water, and I think the tide must have been near the turn. The appearance and the smell of the water forced themselves at once upon my attention. The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid.

In order to test the degree of opacity, I tore up some white card into pieces. Moistened them, so as to make them sink easily below the surface, and then dropped some of these pieces into the water at every pier that boat came to.

“Before they had sunk and inch below the surface,”

they were indistinguishable, though the sun shown brightly at the time. And when the piece's fell edgeways, the lower part was hidden from sight before the upper was underwater. Near the bridges, the feculants rolled up in clouds

so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. The smell was very bad and common to the whole of the water. It was the same as that which now comes up from the gully holes in the streets.

The whole river was for the time a real sewer. Having just returned from out of the country air, I was perhaps more affected by it than others. But I do not think I could have gone on to Lambeth or Chelsea, and I was glad to enter the streets for an atmosphere

which, except near the sinkholes, I found much sweeter than that on the river. I have thought it a duty to record these facts that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power or have responsibility

in relation to the condition of our river. There is nothing figurative in the words I have employed or any approach to exaggeration. They are the simple truth. If there be sufficient authority to remove a putrescent pond

from the neighborhood of a few simple dwellings, surely the river which flows so many miles through London ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer. The condition in which I saw the tens may perhaps be considered as exceptional, but it ought to be an impossible state.

Instead of which, I fear, it is rapidly becoming the general condition. If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity. Nor ought we to be surprised if air many years are over. A hot season gives us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness. I am Sir, your obedient servant, M. Faraday, Royal Institution,

July 7th, 1855. [Music] , there is just so many good parts.

Feculants, the smell was very bad. This smell was very bad. Like I have no more synonyms. Here's for Feculants, and so I'm just going to have to go with the sheer reaction of very bad.

Very bad. Very bad. I mean, and also this is not an exaggeration. Oh, I am not being figurative with this. There is no figurative language in this. Sir, I love it. I love it so much.

I love it too. I love it. I love it. It's ridiculous. And it will, I will touch more on the specific situation that this became the center focus of in this episode. Can't wait. It's going to be great.

And I already said in the first hand, where that came from, M. Faraday.

I'm Faraday. There you go. Okay. Hi, I'm Erin Welch. And I'm Erin, I'm an update. And this is this podcast, we'll kill you. Welcome to Poop Park Doop 2.

Poop number two. Number two. We're way too pleased with ourselves. We just like we're so clever. We do. Okay. So if you have not tuned into the first episode in this Poop series, part two, two part series, do it. Do it. Do it. You know, what are you waiting for?

Go listen to it. You don't have to listen to it in order. But it will make sense. It'll still make sense.

“But you should do it. It's a great episode.”

It's a really proud of it. You're going to learn a lot. Yeah, just like you will in this episode. So last episode, we went over sort of how we make Poop, right? And why Poop is actually a gold mine, rather than like the waste that we presently view it as.

And today, we're going to go over what happens when our Poop doesn't go to plan. Right. And I guess. Yes. Oh, yeah. And also, why Poop is actually gross and what we do about it. The flip side of the coin. You know, Poop is many things. It is so many things. Poop contains multitudes. It really does.

It really, truly, it really does. At young. Thank you. Um, yeah. It's going to be a great episode. I'm really excited about it.

But first. But first. It's quarantine time.

What are we drinking this week? Same thing. We drink last week. Drink number two. The drink number two. We're actually drinking water, which is also important for your poop. But it is. If we learn. Want to drink a quarantine, it's poop number two. It's poop number two. It's how you drink number two.

We keep saying that. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's basically a chocolate mint martini. It's great. It's pretty easy to make. You can do it at home. As you can with all of our quarantine. Yes, I will assume. We'll post the full recipe for that quarantine on our social media channels.

“Are you following us there? Because you should definitely check it out and follow us.”

You should. You should. Um, our website, which we may be putting quarantine needs stuff on. Maybe we'll try that out tonight. You know, you can find other things though. Yep. You can find so many things. You can find transcripts. You can find links to our bookshop.org. Affiliate page, our Goodreads list, which needs some updating.

Links to music by Blood Mobile. First hand account form contact us form

sources for each and every one of our episodes. Yes, like I know it starts with an S. And also YouTube videos. You can find links to that, including this one, which we are very excited to be bringing you from the exactly right network studios. Yes. Yes. Yes. The end. The end. Follow us on YouTube, follow us on social media. Check out our website on the reg. On the reg. What are we? Let's just do it. Let's just do it.

Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Let's take a quick break. And then you'll tell us about Sueers. Sueers. Give it to me. Per. Ever feel like you're being chased by the marriage police? Welcome to Boys and Girls. The podcast by dating isn't dating. A ranged marriage is basically a reality show, except the contestants are strangers and your entire family is judging. You're sipping coffee with one maybe grabbing dinner with another and praying your

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Hello, it's me, Alec Infield, from the girlfriends. The number one hit true crime show that puts women right in the center of their own stories. I'm back with more one of interviews with some truly kick ass women on the girlfriends spotlight. I want to introduce you to Sylvia. I'm going to climb it. And then there's Versaqa. Let's see how we can stop killing and see it later. Dare to ask the question. Is badness hereditary? And finally will meet Rosamund.

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I'm not too intimidated by her. What are you talking about? Listen to the girlfriend spotlight on the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Pup is gross. I love that that's a sentence that you wrote down. Love said. Yeah, I was like, how do I start this?

Pup is gross. Pup is gross. It is, it is. There is no getting around it. Like, okay, yeah, we can talk about how important it is as a resource.

“We can break it down into like, what makes up, Pup? How do we make Pup?”

Everyone, Pup's pooping is not shameful. Yeah. No, I'm behind all that. Yeah. The fact remains, Pup is gross. It's gross. It's gross. After all, it can contain pathogens, or it can signal your presence to a predator or it can attract flies that lay eggs at hatch maggots. Speaking of which, if you are tuning in to the YouTube, we have maggot art. We do

lay eggs. Yes, multiple layers. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, you can see it. It's incredible.

But maggots are also gross. You know, it's just it is what it is. Pup, the disgust that poop evokes in us is probably evolutionarily ingrained because we don't want to be near it. You know, it's all again, the pathogens, all that stuff. Yeah. And this aversion that we feel for Pup, it's not new, right? It's not a product of our modern sanitation system or like a remnant of British Victorian sensibility. That's good to know. It's, yeah, right. It's not just like,

it is, it is normal to feel disgusted by Pup. Okay. Charles Darwin even called discussed one of the six universal emotions. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. And this discussed for Pup, it's not specific to humans. Many animals go out of their way to avoid Pup, like having designated the trees far away from their burrows or grazing only in areas uncontaminated by Pup. This was a real issue in Australia after the poop, uh, cow. Oh, the cow. Yeah. Because they were like, I'm not,

I'm not eating three million tons. Right. Yes. Every year. Yeah. Yeah. For much of human history,

Pup didn't pose too much of a logistical issue for humans, right? We were living in small groups. We were moving around a bunch. It was a simple matter to just like, Oh, the, you know, the call of nature and you just take a little step away from the doorway. You poo. Oh, actually, you didn't go away from the window necessarily. Yeah. Okay. You, but it wouldn't have mattered all that much. Because you were gonna move on. You were gonna move on. Someone else's problems. Yep. And that is how

GRDS everywhere. Yeah. And now it's all of our problem. But yeah. So, and also in addition to like, it not being a huge issue in terms of like having to constantly be around your own poop,

“you're moving on. And our poop was an essential part of that nutrient cycle and seed dispersal.”

You know, you eat some berries here. You walk for a while. You poop over there. Now you have a new berry bush. Yeah. And then it was also not just seeds for, you know, berry plants. It was also where we're providing material for decomposers. We're fertilizing the ground. It's

in larger groups and for longer periods. We developed agriculture. We bred livestock. We built

“permanent settlements. And poop became a problem. Yeah. Okay. We used as much as we could to”

fertilize crops, aka night soil. We dug poop pits on the fringes of our settlements. We designated communal pooping areas. We pooped on river banks and near stream so that the water would wash the poo away and out of sight. Okay. But every fix proved to be a temporary one as human populations

grew and grew. Pit toilets filled to the brim. Poop shoots didn't always extend to the

cesspit that collected sewage. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. A poop shoot is a real thing. Is that a technical? I don't know. I was just imagining like a tube. You know, what they used for construction? Exactly. I always thought your poop shoot was your butt. Well, yeah. I think that that's, but I like the idea of a multiple meaning shoot. Like that was a thing that they really had. I mean, there were, I'll get into it. Okay. But yes, there were

pipes more or less. Or they would be uncovered essentially gutters. Poop gutters. Poop gutters. Poop shoot just sounds better. I love it. Yeah. And then there were indoor chamber pots that required frequent emptying at locations not within a quiet or a quick walk. You know, this was there were a lot of different ways that poop just, you can't, you turn your back and suddenly there's

“a massive pile of stuff. It's another thing you have to do. Of course. Yeah. It's just like laundry. Okay,”

it's just like laundry. Okay, so to put the poop overload into perspective, let's consider Canosa, which is the largest city of the Manoan civilization older than ancient Greece, located on the island of Creep. Around its peak, say 1700 BCE, there were 100,000 people living in Canosa, each pooping every day. Of course. Well, on average, for a total of 50 tons of poop per day. Wow. That's a lot of poop. Even in 1700 BCE, that's a lot of poop. Yeah. And it

of course pales in comparison to what the city of New York makes in a single day today. And I singled out New York because that is where the data are available. Give it to you know. Okay, so poop

and poop and pee combine to about 1200 tons or 2.4 million pounds daily. Every day. Every day.

2.4 million pounds of waste from our bodies. Is it waste, though, Erin? I thought we learned

“that it wasn't. It's just synonym for poop and pee. It turns, turns and pee. We can't forget the”

pee. Yeah, it's a substantial portion. It is. Yeah. Okay, so it's not, it's not New York today, but you could, you could see why it would quickly become a pressing matter. Absolutely. And effective solution. Right. For the manoans, that solution turned out to be water. A handful of engineering minded individuals realized the power of water as transportation and they devised water supply systems that piped in rain water to flush toilets. Toilets. They had flushing toilets in 1700 BCE.

Yeah. I mean, so the toilets were pretty much like localized to the manoans civilization. Okay. And, but they were not just in palaces like they started out just in palaces, but yeah. I mean, and it wasn't like continuous supply. Okay. You had to, you know, dump it. You've been somewhere. You had to dump it in water. Yeah. It's like that. Wow. That's so cool. And then they had pipes. I mean, it also the seats were like really wooded in splintary.

Okay. For sure. I mean, where did the poop go? Okay. So the water flushed the poop out of the building and down into the sewers that ran into the streams that ran into the sea. So it was all

just sort of like connected downstream. Yeah. And since then, the world has never been the same.

And remarkably, 4,000 years later, those drains still function perfectly after a large rain shower. Are you serious? They still wash every, they still wash right down like to the streams to the sea. Yeah. For thousands of years now, though, we have used water to do our dirty work, separating us from the poo that we produce so that we don't have to look at it or smell it or have it contaminate the water that we use. The invention of flush toilets and sewers,

which we're all talk about the modern flush toilet because this wasn't one that was like this didn't go everywhere. Yeah. Exactly. They has catered to saved countless lives. And it has made our day-to-day much more pleasant, right? But in allowing us to flush and forget, we have become divorced from the reality of poop. Not as a waste product, but again, as a resource. From those first splintry wooden minowin toilets to the seatwarming water spraying high-tech

toilets of today, we've been moving poop from here to way over there, radically upsetting the

minowins confronted the mounting poop problem in their city and devised a solution,

“we finally seem to be coming to term to the fact that it's time for a new solution or sweet”

of solutions to contend with our growing poop issue, our cockatastrophies. I can't let that one go. No, that was very great. It was in the moment too. It was. We've proof of that. We didn't had take a break and then headed that out to brainstorm. Now, it sounds like we did, but we really didn't. So what I want to do now is take us through how we've dealt with our poo and pee and other liquid waste throughout history and how a change in how we think of and deal with poop is

really the only path forward. The minowins were not the first or the only group in the ancient

world to devise ways to manage the sewage that was produced in large cities. Around the same time, the Herapin civilization and what is now India also had a similar drainage system using deep gutters which were moved with removable covers so you could get rid of any, yeah, exactly. Connected from house to house, similar to the way that many of our modern sewed drainage systems work. Wow. Yeah. And so for cities that numbered in the tens of thousands, these minowins

and Herapin sewage systems, they did a decent job. No doubt things were still stinky, especially if there wasn't a lot of rainfall and, like, cesspits probably got clogged. But it did all right,

considering. Yeah. Unfortunately, they were no match for the more than one million occupants

of ancient Rome. I mean, really the history of sewage systems and poop comes down to like, oh, no, there's too much poop. Oh, we fixed it. Oh, no, there's too much poop again. Oh, we fixed it again. Oh, no, you know, it's just like just over and ever, forever, forever. Yeah. Okay, so how did ancient Romans fix it? Okay. With something called the cloaca maxima. cloaca. Now, that's a great word. It is a great word. Okay. cloaca maxima. No, cloaca. I feel like we should define because

some people might know why. Yeah, yeah. No, we, I mean, we can, so my first exposure to the word cloake came from what we use at the biological term, meaning the single orifice in which many animals do all their business, poop, pee reproduce cloaca. That usage only came into existence in like the 1800s. Okay. So the word cloake existed before then and it was, it translated, it was basically translates into the word sewer. So cloaca maxima, greatest sewer, greatest sewer of all the

meaning like biggest. I love, I love imagining ancient roping like this is the great word,

“it's like very in line with how I think about it. Yeah, Roman. I don't go too much. Yeah.”

Okay, but cloaca comes from the Roman goddess cloacina based on the word to clean. Oh, okay. Yeah. It has the same words are clean and clean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. The cloaca maxima, it really did live up to its name, though, in terms of its size. It was so big that entire wagons filled with hay could travel through it. It was massive. It's like like storm drain. Like rivers that we have here in Southern California today. Like like those. Like you could take a boat. Like a

small boat. Okay. Throughout it. Wow. Isn't that amazing? But it was just for sewage. It was just

but well, no, actually. So every day it would handle a lot millions of gallons of water and a million pounds of poop probably flowed through the cloaca maxima every day. Mm-hmm. Something around there. Okay. But like our sewer systems of today, it was not created necessarily to just handle human waste. Okay. It was mostly to prevent, to remove excess water during a rainstorm and roam was built on a swamp, basically. Oh. It's the Houston of the, uh, ancient world.

Okay. No, I'm a ancient world. Thank Houston. Someone's going to get real mad about that. Houston is on a swamp. Yes. I know that. Okay. I'm just stating back here.

“It's true. Um, and so you have to drain, you have to drain the swamps to prevent flooding.”

Okay. And so that is what with the cloaca maxima also did was mostly to just drain the swamp. I don't know why this is so funny, but it really is. Uh, but with the cloaca maxima, I'm just going to say it's many times as possible. Wasn't engineering marvel. And the Romans poured money into its construction and its upkeep. It was a real like, uh, it's a real testament to how much they cared about sewage and sewer systems is that the cloaca maxima parts of it are

still standing where many, many, many other buildings have fallen. Uh, but they were like this. This is real stand. Yes. Okay. Do you want to hear more about what the toilet experience might

own private latrine in your big house likely situated over a dugout pit or you'd be like, no,

“I'm going to get a chamber pot and have someone just get that. Get that way for four. I don't want”

even this in my pain. I want to do that. Yeah, pay someone nothing. Many wealthy citizens didn't want to connect to their house to the cloaca maxima because the smell. It wasn't also like, there wasn't water piping continuously through. Okay. And so you kind of, it wasn't a stunt. Things just would have hung out there and then vermin. Yeah. You know, it's, uh, I, I get it. Uh, but so that, but they were really the only people to enjoy privacy while pooping,

where the wealthy, everyone else that was, it was a luxury for them. Public toilets were constructed used almost exclusively by men. It was not a safe place for women. They were found throughout

the city paid for, often, by the wealthier citizens who wanted to avoid pooping the streets.

And that happened all the time pooping the streets. Yeah. There are so many inscriptions warning

“people against pooping in this alley or against this building or whatever. So there's one found in”

Pompeii that warned quote, "deficator. Watch out for what might happen to you." In an alley. In an alley. Yeah. Oh, stop pooping here. Deficator. Deficator. If you, if you, if you, if you, you will be famous by the way. Yeah. We should call more people. Everyone is a defecator. That's true. So what we, you know, use it as a desk. I know. Intentional. It does. It does. Okay. So these, these public toilets were housed under a low ceiling.

Okay. With small windows. So like not a very pleasant, you know, place to be. And they were essentially marble benches carved with rows of holes. Just, just, just roll, hole after hole after hole. No dividers between the holes. So close that you could hold hands. You could carry on a whispered conversation or make after work plans with your pooping partner. People weren't really wearing pants. It was more like a toga vibe situation. As far as I read, you know, I don't know how widespread

toga's were. That's just like my image of ancient Rome. But you weren't totally exposed. So like, you weren't drop in trout the way that you would be today. Yeah. Okay. And so for wiping your honey, there were, which I love wiping, honey is another great word. For wiping your honey, there were communal communal sea sponges on a stick, a word called tersorium or wiping thing. Yeah. So they just were like a few of them scattered about. I don't know the, I don't know,

the numerator. Yeah. I don't know how many there were. Was there like water? Yes. There was a bucket of water. There was a dead. A gutter of clean water to clean the sponge between uses. Okay. A sea sponge. That's actually genius. It is. Yeah. I mean, I love it. I don't know if I love it. You know, the community, it's the communal part that really gets to me. Yeah. And whether there was hand washing, probably not. It's, it doesn't seem to be so,

you know, so you're like, let me check. Right. Yeah. Let me find out. Yeah. Okay. So the poop and pee would flow from these public toilets away into a sewer system where they eventually emptied into the river type or, which is also where people got their drinking and bathing water. The filth might have been out of sight, out of mind. But it didn't mean it wasn't an issue. There was water born illness all over the place. It was, I mean, based on descriptions like it seemed pretty,

pretty overrun with poop poop. And there was a lot of like issues related to disease because of that. Yes. Okay. So moving on from ancient Rome, though, throughout the medieval period and beyond, sewage construction in most of Europe was guided by the, get this poop as far away from me as possible, principle. Okay. Livestock manure was spread on fields for fertilization and toilets operated under a similar logic as an ancient Rome, not the Minoan Civilization. Okay.

Minus the cloakemaxima that effectively, more or less, effectively drain things away. Okay. So there would be like outdoor latrines for the poor, you know, pits or barrels, which could then be like buried or taken away while the rich built private toilet rooms in their castles where they like stuck out over the moat so that the poop and pee would travel down a shoot into the water.

A poop shoot. Poop shoot. This, that always makes me think of the game of Throne's the guy who died on

the toilet. There was a, anyways, it doesn't matter, but there was a guy who died on the toilet. He got shot with an arrow in the toilet and his toilet room was like way up and off away in the castle. Just was like historically accurate, just right at that. It's historical show.

“But no, I mean, that that, I think that is, that's what I'm just sort of imagining these little rooms,”

like just sort of cut out. Yeah. And then like, poop. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Into the surrounding moats. So like it just would just be poop or in the moat. In the moat, just feeding the crocodiles or whatever.

the reins grew heavy enough and the currents could carry it away. Okay. Okay. So as your

appeansities exploded in population, the situation grew dire and more dire. It does. poop piled up, multiple laws were passed. Like this is how bad the poop was, right? There were many laws in many countries about public pooping. They were trying to regulate how much poop there was on the streets. So for instance in Berlin, a 1671 law was passed that instructed every peasant visiting St. Peter's church to take a pile of poop away. It was a popular dump in ground. So people with so many people would

“poop there. It was like you need to take poop away. Yeah. Fascinating. I know. In 1531, a law in Paris”

required landlords to provide a latrine for every house. Oh, not until 1531. Yeah. Okay. We're the laws

enforced by many people did their business in chamber pots in their home, which they then emptied

out of the window after a yelled warning. Like look out the window. Yeah. The descriptions of people pooping everywhere in the streets are alleys and waste piled high. Like there are many of them. But it's too much. Okay. For example, quote, "The Louvre was a mess." People defecated without restraint or attempted secrecy in the courtyards on the stairs and balconies and behind doors without hindrance from palace attendance. On August 8, 1606, an order was given prohibiting

any resident of the palace of Saint Germain from committing a nuisance therein. That same day

“the king's son urinated against the wall of his room. And quote. So like people just seem to be”

pooping everywhere. That is so fascinating to me. It is to me, too. Yeah. That's like, you're just, I mean, I guess if you don't really have an alternative. Great. If you don't have an alternative, you gotta go. Nature calls. In Nature calls. And so it's like, and the laws were not effective. And it just kind of, of course, the problem keeps growing. But keeping in the theme with one man's trash is another's treasure, there was an entire occupation that sprung out from these soiled

streets. The so-called nightmare. Oh. Okay. So also known as scavengers. These nightmare would walk the streets at night. They would empty out chamber pots and public toilets to either sell to farmers or just dump in the countryside. They would be like, I will handle your waste. People had

“like signs on like, uh, carriages or like wagons that were like, I am the best at this. I will make”

sure. I love to do this. Yeah. Yeah. And when transport became a challenge, like there was just too much to carry or whatever, they dug out big pits and they held the waste there. And this is when they began to experiment with different chemicals and other additives to dissipate the smell or they would heat the night soil to desiccate it. But guess what happened, Darren? Something bad. I mean, kind of just populations keep growing. Yeah. And there's too much of growing. And the nightmen just

couldn't keep up. And so the situation was again becoming dire. Fortunately, a hero is about to emerge.

How is it? Ajax, the first modern flushing toilet. Oh. It was invented by Sir John Herring to the

Ajax was the name he could put. Yeah. Yeah. In England, 1584, after being sent away by the queen, whom he offended with his poetry, it's true story. Okay. Oh, no one knows the exact details. But like, I can imagine the gossip was just, what did he say this time? Yeah. But he embarked on some home construction projects and out of this creative retreat sprung the toilet. And it wasn't the first, like I mentioned, the Minowans and her happens whole that tile. But it did involve a more advanced

flushing system with valves in a sister and kind of like what we think of today where it has that on top. And then yeah, he named it Ajax and wrote an ode in its honor. And then the queen, after getting over her irritation towards him, she visited, she tried it out. And she was like, I need one of these. So she had one built in her palace home castle, whatever it was, whatever it is. Over the next couple of centuries, the toilet underwent several technological

improvements that made it more feasible to be installed in lots of homes. And soon, everyone, it was like, I need this. I want a standard part of your home. It's popularity was helped along by British Plummer Thomas Krapper, who did not invent the toilet, nor give his name to a slang word for poop. Like, sorry, but his name really was on the paper. Yeah. And, but he did a great job at marketing it. And he's kind of helped to turn the toilet into a status symbol.

Oh, wow. Everyone wanted one for him. I want a scrapper. I mean, yeah. And guess what happened?

brief period of time. What the toilet had effectively done was move those individual suspects from the home to the rivers that supplied the city with water, making one giant cesspit out of it. The situation again grew dire. How dire you might ask? Let's go to London 1858. So full picture. Okay. That summer was unusually hot and dry. But any enjoyment of sunny weather was thwarted by the shocking stench that emanated from the tents. I've mentioned the

great stink of 1858 before in our typhoid fever episode. And I read a quote in that episode

“that I think is worth dredging up for this one. Okay. This is from a newspaper reporting on the great”

stink quote. For the first time in the history of men, the sewage of nearly three million people

had been brought to seize and ferment under a burning sun in one vast open cloica lying in their midst. I remember this quote now because we made it into a real. It was like the first reals that we ever made. I don't know why it just comes married time because it's like cut. It's like cut. It's the good word cloica. But it's also poetic and it is. It's beautiful and disgusting. It's really effective. It is. That is effective language right there. So okay. The the temps had been getting more disgusting

for years. But the great stink really galvanized many Londoners. Something had to be done about this. Not just because of the unpleasantness of having to breathe that vile air, but also because that

“air was thought to spread disease. My asthma was sort of the leading idea at the time. And it wasn't”

the air itself. But it certainly was the water. As John Snow revealed in his investigations of the

London collar outbreaks from a few years before, which was of course caused by the nasty and poorly functioning drainage systems in the city. Those collar outbreaks. So it took a few decades. I'm skipping over so much here in terms of like the history of sewage. It's okay. But eventually a massive and intricate sewer system was built to manage London's waste. The project was spearheaded by visionary engineer Joseph Basilgett and the completed system truly a modern marvel still serves

the city today. Wow. And there's a whole book about its design and basilgett and the great stink if you'd like to learn more. It's on one of these shelves here. The London sewer system

“which acted as inspiration for many other cities, it operates with the goal of using water to”

wash away the city's poop and liquid waste. And in the brainstorming phase of this design, several options were presented and dismissed before landing on this present layout. One of these ideas involved transporting the waste to farms in the surrounding countryside to use

as fertilizer. The annual value of four million people's excrement, which is in the city of London,

was estimated to be about worth about 1.7 million pounds in the 1880s, which is 178 million pounds today. Oh, wow. In terms of fertilizer. Yep. But England, not seeing the tremendous worth of the substance opted to flush it away. A strategy in keeping with the sentiment of past centuries that poop was waste and nothing more. And this sentiment wasn't universally shared even across Europe. In his book, "Lame is a Victor Hugo question." Question to the similar approach that Paris took with its

sewers. "What do we do with all this golden dung?" It is swept into an abyss. All the human and animal manure, which the world wastes if returned to the land instead of thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world." And "proof." Yeah. He's not wrong. And he wasn't just discussing a hypothetical strategy. For millennia, many cultures had a much different perspective on how best to deal with the amount of poop and pee that a growing city produced. Where the ancient Romans and modern

Londoners saw the value of poop in its absence, other cultures saw its value as a fertilizer. Why did some parts of the world adopt the view of human excrement as a valuable thing in others as a thing to get as far away from as possible? One aspect was need. How many livestock you had or how fertile your soil already was or how much pasture land was even available? Okay. Maybe you were land limited, right? You couldn't just clear more land when all the nutrients were

leeched out of your soil. Or maybe you didn't have and didn't have the land to have at these ample amounts of livestock that were producing manure that could be used as fertilizer. And so you're just like, "I'm going to use what's right in front of me." This is for sure. It's a great

was sold to farmers to fertilize their crops called night soil. Japan didn't really have

acres and acres of pasture land or many large livestock and so night soil was highly valued. If you rented an apartment, your landlord technically owned the night soil that you produced. And so the rent was adjusted based on the number of people living in a room. How many people are pooping here? Yeah. How much can I get for their poop? So five people lived in one room rent was free. For example. Yeah. That's hilarious. pooping at a friend's house was considered a generous act.

Yeah, you're like, "Thank you for that." Oh my god, I love that. I know. So you might wonder how this practice, which the use of night soil is still used in many parts around the world today, how it didn't lead to the spread of pathogens transmitted by poop. You know, we just talked about the great stink and cry out outbreaks and all of that. And a big part of it was how you

“processed the poop composting, right? You have to, what is the word ferment, ferment the poop,”

I guess. And so this, what would happen is like in this composting process, it would help to reduce the proliferation of pathogenic bacteria in the poop and break it down into its raw components, which were more readily used by plants. Yeah. It's a part of the, it's the decomposition. It's like,

right, right. Right. And the second was just like standard hygienic practices, right,

washing hands, boiling water, cooking vegetables, things like that. Japan wasn't alone in seeing the value of night soil. China was also well ahead of the curve when it came to seeing poop as a resource rather than waste. One strategy that people used in China was to let all the refuse from humans, animals, other parts of agriculture all mixed together with water and covered tubs and pits. And then after the fermentation process was complete, they would either pour

“this liquid manure directly onto the roots or let it dry in the sun forming cakes, which would”

desiccate and then they could sell. Yeah. Mixed with water and there's instant fertilizer. Poop was so valued that in 1737 in China, there was an imperial treatise that commanded treasure night soil as if it were gold. Wow. Yeah. 1700s, 1700s for that. But it had been going on for much longer. Yeah. And so while most of Europe treated poop as a waste product exclusively, there were a few pockets that saw it differently. Some places that paid for poop rather than paying

to have it be taken away in parts of Belgium. And in the Netherlands, farmers utilized night soil for crop fertilization. They constructed specialized casks that could hold over 100 gallons. The casks were loaded onto carts where they were dragged around by a horse. The farmer on the horse lifting the rope that like controlled a lever to be like, now really smart. It's now really some more. It's pretty ingenious. And even in the U.S. in the late 1800s, there was a very successful

night soil company based in New Jersey who got paid twice for their labor. First to remove the poop

in the first place. And in the second to sell fertilizer. Love it. And so inspired by their success, a few sewage farms sprung up around the U.S., but eventually they fell out of favor by the end of the 19th century. As did night soil almost across the board. What changed? The invention of commercial fertilizer and the introduction of germ theory whereby poop became the enemy and nothing

“more. And I think it's important to note, and I feel like we didn't cover this in an actual”

episode, like a regular episode. But in a, there was the devil's, the devil's element, book club book, he talked about fertilizer and like guano, these islands of guano, and then people harvesting like bones from battlefields, like old battlefields to use as fertilizer. And I just find that so because a lot of that was happening in like the 1800s or so, and there was this huge rush prior to the introduction of commercial fertilizer. And poop was there all the long. Right. It's just yeah.

It is really, really interesting. Right. Especially to think about that alongside the rise of germ theory, which like we talked about so much on this podcast. Yeah. And it is like so important and your poop can make you quite sick. And so it's, it is just really interesting to think of those things as like side by side and like how, yeah. Right. To see it in one, like one, one angle. Right. One, one perspective of poop is just that it is waste and nothing more in the enemy,

and it's going to make you sick. The end of it. And that is true. It is true. And two things can be true. But what has so that when these things change the introduction of commercial fertilizer and in germ theory, things even places that had long used night soil, it just, they kind of stopped, like many places stopped. Commercial fertilizer took over in the 20th century and that decree of

It was a thing to rid yourself of, a thing to fear. And today, most of the world is still

“stuck in that mentality, the really we should be following that 18th century decree, because it is”

wild, how much waste we let go to waste. Functioning sewage systems are foundational to public health, and everyone should have access to clean water because waterborne disease kills so many people every year. But it's also clear that our massive sewage plants have solved one big problem, removal of poop from our immediate proximity, while simultaneously creating another too much poop in all the wrong places. We raise livestock on large scale farms where their manure leaches into the waterways near the

farms. Meet and other food gets shipped to our local stores, removing those nutrients from where they were grown, then we eat the food and poop it out, and that gets flushed into waterways, again, far from the original source of these nutrients. Yeah, and then it goes into the ocean, goes into the ocean. It goes into the ocean. It goes into the ocean. It goes into the ocean. It goes into the ocean.

“Out of the globe's March to K, Baron farmland eroding soils, ecosystem collapse. Like these are”

the consequences of nutrient redistribution across the landscape. Oh, man, this situation is again, be tired, dire. What do we do about it this time? I don't have any answer. I don't have any answer personally, but there are so many people, so many people who are working on this problem from many, many different angles. They're designing more efficient toilets, revisiting the idea of sewage farms, transforming human waste into fuel or fertilizer, even just rebranding poop into

something that's like not shameful, props to the poop emoji for that one. It doesn't, you know, which is like, it's really funny. It was like a very popular emoji. Oh, I love the poop. It's a green emoji. Yeah. And it doesn't mean like there are many people working on this, and it doesn't mean that we have everything under control right now, but we do have possible paths forward and a ton of

amazing innovators that are dedicated to this work and really passionate about it. Poop is a valuable

resource. As a fertilizer, as a source of public health data, like wastewater can tell us what pathogens are currently participating, huge and it's also valuable resource on an individual level. Like, what does your poo say about you? Such a good question. Well, Erin, this is where I post that question to you. So you can tell me all about what we can learn from our poop. I cannot wait to do that. Ever feel like you're being chased by the marriage police. Welcome to Boys and Girls,

the podcast by dating isn't dating. A ranged marriage is basically a reality show, except the contestants, our strangers and your entire family is judging. You're sipping coffee with one maybe, grabbing dinner with another, and praying your carmy can or Bobby appears before your shelf life runs out. Trust me, I've been through this ancient and unshakable tradition. I jumped in hoping to find love the right way, and instead I found

chaos, cringe, and comedy. And now I'm looking for healing. Boys and girls dives into every twist and turn of the arranged marriage carousel. For me to awkward, the near misses, the heartbreak, and let's not forget all the jokes. Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast,

here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policy makers, and performers that compose

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“That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together, laughing.”

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If it wasn't for the air, where Ella lived, she wouldn't have died on that fatal night.

You'll even get to meet my mum in that one who I can always count on to keep my feet on the ground.

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Listen to the girlfriend spotlight. On the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I ended last week's episode. Mostly just talking about what is typical when it comes to our poops, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you talked us through, in last week's episode, if anyone missed it, all of the different ways that animals use our poop as a resource. And poop on a landscape level scale tells us so much about how we're dealing with our poop can tell us a lot. But you're right.

On an individual level, our poop can also tell us quite a lot. And I think there's an interesting balance, I guess, where a lot of us don't think about our poop at all. Like we poop and it's done. It is out of our mind. We're not worried about it. We're not looking at it. We're not thinking about it. We're just maybe trying to think about it as little as possible. And there are also many people who maybe spend a little too much time thinking about their poops, or worrying about their

poops, or what is this one poop? Did I eat beets, or is this cool in cancer? I mean, that's a reasonable question to ask after a beat. After a beat poop? After a beat poop. But it is true that our poops can tell us so much about our health. And a lot of times changes in our bowel movements might actually be an indicator of an underlying disease. Though my point with today is not necessarily to make everyone worried about their poops, it's more just to kind of understand the spectrum.

Okay? Yeah. And since we already covered the range of typical, we can look back at our Bristol stool scale to understand the ways in which our poop can become atypical. If that makes sense. Love this. So if a perfect poop on that Bristol scale, which again goes from one to seven, where one are these hard separate lumps, kind of like a nut of poop, chunk, chunk, plop, plop. And type sorry. I appreciate that extra little too much. And a type seven is entirely liquid. Those are

“our two extremes, constipation and diarrhea. Yes. And so that's what I'm going to kind of focus on.”

Constipation and diarrhea. Constipation and diarrhea, cool. So and there's a lot of different ways to classify. Those are not the only poop problems that you can have. But constipation and diarrhea, I think give us a lot of insight because that does kind of cover that whole spectrum, right? So there's a lot of different ways to classify or define both of these things. And I'll start with constipation because I love talking about constipation. So has that word been uttered in this story?

I think in the office all the time. I love talking about constipation. How we actually define it.

It's either with this Bristol stool scale, but it's never just exclusively with the Bristol stool.

So it's usually hard or lumpy stools or needing to strain during the bowel movement, or sometimes feeling like I just can't completely evacuate. Like you poop and you just feel like there's something still there that needs to come out, but it cannot come out. Okay. Feeling? If those things

“are happening usually more than 25 percent of your poops, that's what's considered constipated.”

Huh. Okay. Or sometimes it can be if you're having fewer than three bowel movements per week. That might also be considered or constipated. Okay. How often? Like, okay. I love that you're asking questions already. I know. I know. When you said fewer that you said

more than or 25 percent of your poops. Yeah. Who's watching that? That's such a great question.

Who, like, how many of us are paying that much attention to our poop? Right. I don't know. Unless maybe you're dealing with constipation and then you probably are, because a lot of times it's maybe more than 25 percent. Right. It has to be at least that for us to call it constipation according to the like Rome criteria, which is the criteria that we use. But a lot of people who deal with constipation have been dealing with it for a really long time, it's estimated most of

the studies site that in the US, something like 12 to 15 percent are dealing with constipation and a lot of times unless we can identify the cause of constipation, it gets lumped under what's called

what the mechanisms are. But it's estimated that up to 30 percent of people deal with constipation

at least on an occasional basis, so they like sometimes have issues pooping. And that is thought to be an underestimate because these are data that are based on people who seek care. Right, of course. Are you going to talk about the causes of constipation because I want to talk about functional

“constipation? Yeah, like to me. What's your question? What are the causes of constipation?”

Great question. And at what point do you go, we don't know, but you're clearly constipated? Yeah, I mean, it totally depends on the scenario and also depends on how well it responds to the various treatment options, right? Yeah. But there's a lot of things that could cause it. It could be that you have slow gut transit, right? Which we know from last episode can be caused by a number of

different things. Some of it might be genetics. Some of it might be medications that you're on.

Some of it might be the diet that you are eating. Was that right? The diet that you're eating? The diet? Your diet? Some of it might be diet because fiber, as we know, can increase your stool transit time. And so if your diet is very low in fiber, then you might have prolonged transit time, so you might be more prone to constipation. Also dehydration can put you at risk of harder stools. Physical activity increases your motility of your guts. And so we all live

much more sedentary lifestyles, especially like in the U.S. we're quite sedentary. And so that is actually probably contributing to constipation. I see. But then there's other things too. There's like just actual disability. There's something called hersprungs, which is like where it's a genetic disorder, where some of your nerve endings of your colon have not developed all of the way.

“And so you cannot get contraction the way that you should. So that can make it very hard to poop.”

And you can get huge amounts of stool build up and things. Yeah. There's pelvic floor dysfunction and anal sphincter issues. Like there's a lot of possibilities. A lot of possibilities. Are there a lot of solutions? Is that okay? Question. I mean, yes and no, right? Okay. The main like ways that we go and deal with constipation for like a general rule are going to be using things like laxatives, which are going to hold on to water in your stool. So that is going to make your stool

softer. That how they work. That's how they tell me. Tell me everything. They just so like okay, mirror lax, which is polyethylene glycol. There's lots of different brand names of it. It's just a very large molecule. Okay. And so it just attracts water. And so you have this molecule. It doesn't get broken down in your digestive tract. So it's sitting in your colon, a holding on to water. And therefore you have more water in your poop. Therefore it is softer and easier to pass. And other other

“osmotic laxatives work the same way. Lactylose, magnesium citrate, all these things. There's also some”

other ones that you can use like stimulant laxatives. Those are things like bisocodal is one or sena is another. And these are helping to stimulate peristals. They're helping to stimulate muscular contractions. So it's not like a laxative in the water aspect, but in the movement. It's moving. Yeah, it's helping with movement. And so what you might use might depend on what you think the underlying issue is. Okay. So it's going to be kind of person dependent. There's also stool

softeners with my favorite thing about stool softeners in medicine is that we use them all the time. And there's like no data that they work. Wait, what? Dock you say it is like one of the most commonly used things in hospitals and like people like to help people to use it all the time. And there's like very little if any evidence that it. It's supposed to just like help make your stool more slippery. Is the idea? Like mucusy. Me. I don't know. But it doesn't work. Okay. So so when you say

it doesn't work. Do you mean that there have been studies that have found no effect? There have been no studies that have had no effect. Yeah. Unlike osmotic laxatives and things. Which, so why would you use the stool softener over a laxative? I don't know. I don't. Okay. But lots of people do. I don't know. It's thought to be less harsh. Okay. Right. Because it's not going to like grab onto a bunch of water and then like have you at risk of diarrhea or something quite as much, right? Where you can easily

overdo it with some laxatives. So you could end up with electrolyte imbalances if you overdo it on laxatives. Things like that. But realistically, I don't know because I don't. But what about the prep

for a colonoscopy? It's basically a huge jug of polyethylene glycol or sometimes we use sodium based

ones too. So like other electrolyte. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's basically what it is just like a huge jug of it. Chug, chug, chug with a lot of water because you're going to be pooping out of a lot of water. I know. Isn't that fun? Yeah. It's great. Fun. Yeah. Fun. That's exactly the word that I would use. Yeah. But so that's like, I mean, that's that's most of the ways that we try. And there's other newer medicines too. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of newer medicines that have mechanisms that I'm not going

to get into because I'm not as familiar with it. But there's a lot of because constipation is such an

not effective. This is like, go to first line, try it out. If it's not working, you need to see

“a specialist kind of a thing. Okay. Question about constipation and treatments. The like polyethylene”

glycol, et cetera. Yes. Of the world are those for acute relief or in is the more like chronic relief fiber? Yes. It's yes and. Okay. Um, do you want to talk about fiber? I could skip. We can know. We, we keep your notes the way you want them to keep. Let's talk about fiber. Great.

I'm always, I'm always out of talk about fiber. I know. Me too. Okay. So, yes. Laxatives, stool softeners,

motility agents. These are things that are going to help treat constipation. Yes. What if you are constipated? Fiber does not necessarily treat constipation, but it can help prevent constipation. Right. Okay. Because like we talked about last episode, it's holding on to water in your stool. And so, it is hugely beneficial in increasing transit time and in making your stool softer and in providing that bulking agent. And there's two major divisions of fiber. There's soluble fibers, which is like

sodium husk, oats, pectins, and then there's insoluble fibers, which is like wheat, brands, cellulose, lots of the things that are in our fruits and veggies and things. Okay. I can't believe we're getting to talk about insoluble and soluble fiber. Is it fun? So excited. Yeah. And most of that if you're getting your fiber from food sources and not from like a fiber drink that you're mixing, then you're getting a combination of soluble and insoluble fibers in most of the foods

that you're eating. And then there's also some of the fibers are like fermentable. And I talked a little bit about this last episode. Like the bacteria in our guts can break them down and ferment them, specifically to produce these like short chain fatty acids that they can then use to eat. Like the bacteria eat, break down this fermentable fiber and eat it. And then some of the cells in our colon can also use what they break down as an energy source. These short

“chain fatty acids. Okay. Why choose one fiber over the other and why are they all important?”

They're all important. The answer is that they're all important. Some of them are increasing

bulk in our stool and some of them are helping to feed the gut microbiome and all of them are kind of doing both like really if we get into it. And so that like that is why fiber. That's why people get so like stoked about fiber and why fiber is such an important part. There's also so much interesting data on like fiber because of its effects on our gut microbiome in helping to treat or at least prevent the worsening of a lot of inflammatory diseases. Colen cancer we think is

involved like our low fiber diets. We think are maybe involved in the increasing incidence of colon cancer that we see especially in early onset colon cancer. It's not one thing. It's many things but fibers apart of that story. So it's it's huge. And part of the reason that this is important to is because constipation while it's an issue in and of itself. It can be very painful. It can like constipation can cause its own set of problems. Constipation can also cause other problems.

Constipation can put you at risk of things like diverticularosis which are these little outpouchings of your gut wall especially in the stigmaied colon the part that sneaks around back before they're rectum. And those little outpouchings can trap poop and then can get infected or can burst or can burst into a blood vessel and cause a lot of bleeding. So diverticularosis

“can be a problem and constipation is a big contributor to diverticularosis. It's not the only thing”

but it's one. Also hemorrhoids. Okay. Hemorrhoids are basically everyone actually has hemorrhoids.

Can I before we go on to hemorrhoids? Because I do want to talk about hemorrhoids. But I want to go back to fiber unless we're done. Are you? No, that's my type of fiber. Yeah, tell me a question. Um, the relationship between fiber. I'm just stuck on these different insoluble soluble. It's fermentable. Don't ask me more details. No, but like when we talk about a low fiber diet, it is of course across the board. But are we getting like, is the low fiber diet more low in

soluble insoluble? It's a good measure of relationships between these different fiber types and colon cancer for instance or like other outcomes. It's a good question. It's beyond. I don't know. And then, um, how much? So no one's getting enough fiber. How much is enough fiber? What does that look like? Are fiber, uh, do, do our fiber? What do you call them? Fiber, fiber cereals, fiber bars, fiber supplement, fibers, powders, yeah. Yeah. I love these questions. Okay.

Um, the recommended amount in the U.S. is like 28 to 35 grams of fiber a day. Okay. Okay.

write anything. We talked about this because raspberries especially are very high fiber. Of all the fruits.

“They're one of the best because a cup of raspberries is like eight grams or so of fiber? A cup of”

okay. So it's like pretty dease. Um, Kiwi's also have a lot of fiber. Broccoli has a ton of fiber. Beans, especially white beans, so much fiber. White beans. White beans. Interesting. Navy beans have more fiber than most other beans. Don't ask me why. No clue. Oh, lentils. Lentils lots of fiber. Don't know how much. I don't have the rest of them memorized because I usually just give people a chart. Oh, and it's one of my, that's my standard

handout. If you come see me for a physical, but it's literally part of my hand. They don't want bring one next time. Yeah. Time we're together. Okay. I just got it from the like NIH website or whatever. Okay. Yeah. Still, I didn't make it. Um, but no, so that's the recommended amount and most of us are probably getting much less than that. Like if you, but your question about like fiber supplements and things like that can be really helpful. Um, especially some of those soluble fibers like

“silly and husk and things like that. Um, you tend to tolerate really well because they're not”

going to be as fermentable. You're going to get a little bit less bloating potentially with those. But you could, you could get bloating with anything, especially if you're going from like no

fiber right to some fiber. Start, start small baby steps. Baby steps always. Yeah. This is not a medical

advice podcast. Yeah. Let me remind you all. We're just talking generalities. Um, but yeah, so that's the answer to those questions. Those account. But of course, it is better if you're getting your fiber from Whole Foods because then you are getting a mix. And I don't know the answer as to like what percentage should be this or that. And like there's probably people who are doing those studies to kind of really look, look into it. Yeah. Um, but I don't know the answer to that. I know

and this like we haven't said this yet, which I'm shocked that we haven't said this, but there are so many other topics that are made into poop. Yes. That we will cover. There's so many that I'm like, I will say this word and then we need to do a whole episode on it. Colin Cancer. Colin Cancer. Early onset, Colin Cancer. So many things. Huge. Yeah. Diverticulosis. Speaking of hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids. So this could be a whole episode. Oh my god. It would actually be

it. I want to know about the, because I was thinking about the development of laxatives. Oh, interesting. Right. Okay. So we should do a whole episode of the development of something

“hemorrhoid cream. And whether it is true that you should put them under, put it under your eye for”

puffiness. I feel like I feel like that was something in miscongeniality. Really? It's where I learned that. I mean, it's just like a low-puncy steroid usually. Anyways, we're getting off the point. Listen, hemorrhoids. Everyone has hemorrhoids. They're just collections of blood vessels that are

in your rectum and your anus. So the function like cushions, basically, that help keep your

anal canal closed because we want it closed most of the time. They help soften the transitive poop. So your poop has like, do, do, do. Think of it as like boiling off. Like a little pinball generally, but they also, they're basically collections of blood vessels. And because they are venous vessels, like their veins, not arteries, our veins can get swollen. And as they get swollen, they can sometimes burst open and bleed, either in small amounts or sometimes in larger amounts.

And depending on where they form in the anal canal, your anal canal is so interesting. Because some of it has sensory sensation, the external part you can feel. It has a lot of nerve endings. And the inner part does not. So if you have internal hemorrhoids, they generally don't have any like pain or discomfort or itching, but external hemorrhoids can cause quite a lot of itching and pain. Because especially, they don't tend to burst open, though they can. But they can get

very large and very, very painful because they're like external. So you're basically like sitting

on them. So those can be quite painful. Like little water balloons filled with blood basically, right around your anal opening. And so those are, you are at higher risk for those with constipation, like big, big, big time. Because it is all of that increased pressure and the straining, straining to poop really puts a lot of pressure on that anal canal. And so it really increases the pressure in those veins. So then blood pools up in there. I'm just, I'm thinking of

as someone who listens to a lot of like books on tape. And in my car, and when I'm running and walking the dog. And when someone gets in the car with me. And I have like, you know, like a colorful scene in one of five months. And I'm imagining all of our episodes. Someone is playing this and they're like, I don't know, brother-in-law gets in the car. He's like, I'm, you know, what exactly they have on the Bluetooth speaker. Yeah. Yeah. This is one to share with your family.

Please do. Because I'll keep going to tell you about anal fissures, which are another consequence of constipation, and the consequence of constipation, not related to hemorrhoids.

fissures are also this increased pressure sitting constipation issue. They're just teeny tiny little

“like paper cuts almost in the skin of the anus. And so they're super, super painful. So treatment”

for that is really to like avoid constipation. And sometimes sometimes you need surgeries and things like that to kind of treat those. So yeah. So constipation's a big deal, right? Because again, be a problem in of itself. And it can cause all of these other problems. There's something called structural colitis. We won't even get there because it's quite extreme. But on the other hand, now I'm like, I don't Google it after that. Okay. On the other end of the spectrum is diarrhea. Yes.

And we've talked a lot about diarrhea. I spent more time on constipation because we don't

ever really cover it on the podcast. We've talked quite a lot about diarrhea. You define a cute

diarrhea as like three loose or watery stools in 24 hours. As my kid will tell you, I only had two. So it's not diarrhea. They're well trained. But chronic diarrhea, we define as loose or watery stools, similar to constipation in at least 25% of your stools lasting for at least three weeks. Okay. That would call chronic diarrhea. Yeah. And one of the biggest issues with diarrhea is that you're getting a lot of water loss with it, right? Right. And diarrhea poops tend to be

not only higher in water content. They also tend to be higher in protein content. And as you're losing all this water, you're also losing all those electrolytes that are with that water. So with

diarrhea, you're at really high risk of dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Protein. Yeah,

because things are just not getting digested and broken down all the way. So fats too. So fats too, depending on the type of diarrhea, it could be. It just depends on what your GI tract is able to absorb versus not. What do you mean by types of diarrhea? I mean, what the, what is causing your diarrhea? Can affect the type of diarrhea that you are having. So for example, if you have an infection that's just tearing through your GI tract so that your say colon just isn't really

absorbing any water, then you're just going to have really watery stools, but you're still going to probably be absorbing all those nutrients because that happens in your small intestine. Yes. Okay. On the other hand, if you have no more gall bladder, then you are leaking out by all the time. Yeah. So you might have less ability to digest fats. So you have more fat that just made it all the way through to your colon. And that is providing a slippery slide, then you might have diarrhea.

That is more fatty and is floaty fatty. But there's just, I mean, there's lots of ranges of diarrhea. Okay. And like you were talking about, there's lots of ranges of smells of diarrhea.

“There's some people who are like, I can smell as he does diarrhea versus not. So is it infectious?”

Is it not? Is it chronic diarrhea? Is it more of an acute diarrhea? All of them, though, can put you at risk of things like electrolyte imbalance and dehydration and all of that. Chronic diarrhea. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And prevalence rates when it comes to diarrhea, I don't have like a one statistic, like we do for constipation because they range hugely. Right. And we've talked so much on this podcast about acute infectious diarrhea, especially in low

and middle income countries, how many kids die from diarrhea every year is in the millions. It's very depressing. But even in high income countries, it's estimated that chronic diarrhea, the prevalence can range from like three to eight percent, which is not a small amount of people. No. So there's a lot of different things that can cause both constipation and diarrhea. But one that I want to kind of talk about because it can actually cause both. Okay.

Is IBS? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And again, this probably deserves its whole life. It does. We need to do one. Yeah. We do. Don't please don't take this as we're just going to throw this in. No. No. But I can't do a whole two episodes about poop and not talk about IBS. Or stuff, especially about problematic poops because talk about the poster child is problematic pooping. Yes. IBS. So IBS or irritable bowel syndrome, not the same thing by the way as IBD or inflammatory

bowel disease, which very commonly causes diarrhea, especially bloody diarrhea and is an autoimmune disease and inflammatory and a huge problem. Yeah. IBS is not that. It used to be like a diagnosis of

“exclusion, but it's not anymore. Oh, interesting. Now it's very much like you should positively”

diagnose this as IBS. What is a criteria? Well, they can they can range a little bit. But the core core criteria are recurrent cramping abdominal pain. Okay. So you get cramping pain. And then

called IBS C, which is IBS with constipation. Uh-huh. Some people have IBS D, which is IBS with diarrhea.

And some people have mixed CD. C, D, M. We call it though. Oh, mixed. Because you have both either constipation or diarrhea, but you're having these changes in your stool frequency. Like I'm having to poop all the time all of a sudden. Okay. Or consistency where like I was having like a Bristol three or four. And now I'm a seven. Okay. I'm just so confused about changes in. Yeah. Because that implies a time period. Yes. This has to be for at least three months. And it has to be

“happening at least three, I think three times a week. Is the three times a week? This is the criteria.”

The D or C is the changes in your stool. Yeah. So like what is your and it's associated with this cramping. So you're having this pain. Having a cramping. And then you have either a constipated poop or a diarrhea, poop, or one or the other. And it's happening for three months. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And we still do not understand IBS. It's diffreserving of its whole own episode. But we are pretty sure that it is at least in part a disorder of the gut brain access, which is just so

interesting and fascinating to me. I know. I mean the phrase itself is really compelling.

And what's underneath the surface? We don't know. I question question. But yeah. So it's basically like

your guts and your brain are not talking to each other the way that they should. Yeah. Uh your neurotransmitters are probably involved serotonin. You have more of it and you're got the new do in your brain, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. But then you also see with this intestinal dismotility. So whether that is your guts are going too fast and so you're just pooping your brains out because you're not absorbing things because they're moving too quickly or you're going really slow.

“And that's why you're constipated. And this is really interesting. Visceral hypersensitivity.”

And that's where you get this pain. So viscera is like your guts and hypersensitive

meaning that your nerve endings are feeling more pain than they should. Interesting. So

because we've we've talked about hypersensitivity before. When? I don't remember. I mean the metriosis, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's the same sort of thing. It's like those pathways have been carved out and so like it's like a super highway to pain. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. But so yeah. So there's a lot. There's a lot of research being done in IBS. There are a lot of new medications especially to treat like IBS with constipation. There's medicine that are

specific for that. Same thing with IBS with diarrhea. So like there's a lot of research. But there's also a lot of people who just like suffer with either constipation or diarrhea and they're looking for ways to manage it. And so they turn to things like fiber or prebiotics, which are all the rage right now, which is usually just fiber. Really? Yeah. They just market it

“in a weird and different way. Prebiotics. Prebiotics. That's what they're. Okay. And then probiotics is the”

other one. So let's talk a little bit more about probiotics because again, you can't talk about poop and not talk about probiotics. Can't. Not. I think the last time we talked about probiotics was in our C-diff episode. Yeah. I'm sure. I don't remember. I believe you. Honestly though, that was a long time ago, that episode. And I'm not sure that we have that much more data than we did way back then. People use probiotics and they will recommend that you take probiotics for anything from diarrhea

to constipation to bloating. Whether that's acute infectious diarrhea or chronic diarrhea, right? There's a very little data that show that there is a benefit to probiotics depending on the certain circumstance that you're using them for. Tell me about those circumstances. Well, most of the data, most of the data is on antibiotic associated diarrhea or like, a few use antibiotics or you're using antibiotics for something like C-diff. And even then,

the data is really, really mixed. The biggest issue is that there's huge heterogeneity in how each of these studies are conducted and who's conducting those, conducting them. Mostly, it's like people who are making supplements or yogurt or something, so there's that issue. But there's also just huge heterogeneity in like which bacterial strains are they actually using in this study? How many bacteria are you actually getting in that capsule? Well,

because it's gotta go through your stomach. Exactly. It has to survive the acidic environment of your stomach. It has to make it through your small intestine to try and colonize your colon. We know now that that's like a 20+ foot journey. So that's not necessarily easy. There's also a huge issue with the fact that in the US, there's absolutely no regulation on these things. Because probiotics are regulated as supplements. So you are supplement, I was so sorry.

something like that. So we don't have really any data on how much live bacteria are even in your gummy or your capsule or your juice drink. How much of those will survive? Or if that particular

“strain is necessarily beneficial for you in your specific clinical scenario? I know. Honestly,”

it is really frustrating. Like the, I think in particular, one of my, one of my irritants is the probiotic soda. Yes. And I'm just like, it's soda. It's sugar. Yeah. What? It's just, I mean, for there's more stuff in there. But like, some of them are have prebiotics. So again, it's got like fiber or like non digestible sugar. Okay. Great. The other issue, too, is that we have some data on a few species. We've got some decent data on

bifidobacterium that at least it's probably not harmful on a few species of lactobacillus that, again, they are good colonizers and they're not harmful and sacromycees, which is actually a yeast. Great. But that's just like three and like a couple species of lactobacillus, right? So we've we're talking a handful of species out of the thousands that colonize our guts. Like we don't know what we're doing when it comes to probiotics. We don't. So there are people who say, well,

taking one or two species is never going to be enough. It's never going to do the thing that you

needed to do. What we need is a fecal transplant area. Okay. Before we talk about fecal transplants, yeah. I do. I feel like every time we end up talking about the microbiome, we didn't more

“recently air and I don't remember what it was. We're always like the hype is overrated and it's”

the hype is not overrated for the microbiome itself. No. It is for our understanding of it. Correct. And how we are able to manage and optimize it because we just aren't there yet. Right. Maybe we will be, but we're not there. No, not even closed. And we are there with fecal transplants. Are we there with fecal transplants? Are we? No, we're not. But fecal transplants are essentially like that, that is one of the answers. It's like, well, okay, giving someone just some lactobacillus

or lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, like two little bacteria, is that going to change the entire architecture of their gut microbiome? Probably not, right? But hitting them with someone else's entire gut microbiome might. And that's the idea behind fecal microbiota transplant or FMT.

This is a huge field of research. I will not do it justice. However, the idea is basically that

you take a microbial community from a healthy person's guts. Someone with Bristol three or four is all the time. Beautiful poop. No bloatiest. Exceptional. Love it all the time. Yeah. And you give it to a person with some kind of gut disease. You give them some of their poop. Because in that poop, again, 50% of the biomass of their poop is bacteria. You can do this a few different ways. You can instill the poop into somebody via colonoscopy

from the bottom or an NG tube from the top because you wouldn't want to just eat it because that's gross. But you could make it into pellets. Yeah. And then you could take it as a capsule. You can freeze dry them or you can freeze them either way. And there is so much research being done on this. It is used clinically already, but only in one scenario so far outside of the research sphere. As of recording. So, there is a FDA approved treatment here in the U.S. for recurrent

c-diff infection that is an FMT. Then there's two approved products. One of them is given via an NMS suspension. Right. And the other one is oral capsules, which is just really exciting because that's so much more palatable to people. Yeah. Then and also like lower barrier to energy. Because you don't have to go into the FES. You don't have to do it in clinic, etc. We could just, oops. Exactly. You just pop it in your mouth. Yeah, pop it all over down.

So, it's a very exciting area of research. But that's all that I really have about it. Because there's a lot of people who are wanting to use it for treatment of IBD. There's some really promising

“research in that area. There's some promising research on it for IBS even, which I think is very”

exciting. But that's all that I really have about that. I mean, we could do a whole another whole, I know that in our C-diff episode, we did like a big segment on. We did FMT shout out to Dr. and Mach D. Awesome. And we had on the pod. Great. But I think that we could do a whole whole like update episode on it because I also want to know like, okay, people who got a fecal transplant five years ago. How are they doing now? What if they're poop like today? Do they

have the same microbes that they were, you know, laced with in that first FMT? Certainly not.

I would think that there's some turnover. Oh, but I mean, like, how much is the community? Yeah. Oh, it's so interesting, Erin. I know. There's just so much I think about our guts and our poop

talk about or to be excited about or be like, it's really interesting or anything like that. And so it's discouraged, interest in this really, because I'm assuming it's gross. Right. But it's also awesome. Yeah. I love it. That's pretty much the end of what I got Erin. poop is gross. It is awesome. We love it. We love it. The more to it. We'll wash our hands after we poop. And we will certainly do that. Oh, should we tell the people where they can read more shit about

fun poop stuff and poop stuff? There is so much more when it comes to a, uh, the history of sewers and be what people are doing about solving the poop problem. I'm excited about that. So there's a book by Lena Zeldovich who, if I, I interviewed for a book club episode earlier this year, um, for about phased therapy. Yeah. Uh, but her earlier book is called the other dark matter. The science and business of turning waste into wealth and health really fascinating. Then by

Stephen Halliday, the great stink of London, Sergio Siff, Basil Get and the cleansing of the Victorian metropolis and then another book by him as well. But it's like an illustrated coffee table book for sewers. And it's called an underground guide to sewers or down through and out in Paris, London, New York. I love. And it's, it's here. It's, it is honestly beautiful and really fun

and I loved it. It was great. Uh, I also actually had a book for this one. I never have books.

Um, but I did enjoy by Dr. Fong. It's called Constipation Nation, which is such a good type of title. Um, I really did enjoy that book. Um, I, I rarely read entire books and I actually read

“that whole entire thing. So that's how you know it was good. Um, and that there's like a lot more”

detail on constipation. Um, I think there's even like, treat your constipation smoothies at the end, which is hilarious to me. Um, but then I also loved, oh, this is where I have the citation for the paper. We actually mentioned the last episode about how it takes only 12 seconds to poop because I didn't even get into like, we spent so much time on the toilet. I mean, and that's related to hemorrhoids and that's related to it. There was a 2025 paper that was like, if you spend time on the

phone, you're at high risk of hemorrhoids and I was like, there's so much to this. Let's keep going to the hemorrhoids episode. Anyways, that paper was from 2017. It was called the hydrodynamics of defecation published in soft matter. Soft matter. Uh, and then I've got several papers on like the global prevalence of constipation on FMT. I also have some more data on, um, because we didn't get deep into this, but on colon cancer rates. And we're going to talk more about colon cancer

related to this season. Um, so you can find all of it on our website, this podcast will kill you dot com under the episodes tab. You can, uh, thank you to Blood Mobile for providing the music for

“this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to everyone here. I think exactly right. Studio. Thank”

you. Thank you. And Tom and Leanna and Brent and Pete and everyone who is involved in making this podcast possible. Heck yeah, uh, I big thank you to our listeners who listen or watch or read the transcripts even anyone, you know, you have somehow enjoys or, you know, just partakes in this podcast.

You don't even have to enjoy it. Thank you. Thank you. You helped us out. As always, thank you,

also to our patrons, your support really, really does mean the world to us. So we, we really appreciate it. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Well, until next time, wash your hands, filthy animals. [Music] Hello, it's me, Anna Sinfield, the host of the Girl Friends. I'm back with more one of interviews with some truly kick ass women on the Girl Friends Spotlight. I'm going to climb it.

It's badness hereditary. Let's see how we can stop healing. I'm not too intimidated by her. What are you talking about? Listen to the Girl Friends Spotlight on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Alex Baldwin. This season on my podcast

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Every White House staffer, they work in a bubble called the West Wing and it's exponentially more so in the Trump White House. Listen to the new season of here's the thing on the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Dirty Rush, the truth about Sir Arty Life, the good, the bad, and the sisterhood. With your host, me, J.Judy, Daisy Kent, and Jennifer Fessler.

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