feces...

BEAT

I know someone asked this before but I cant remember what the answer was and I found it interesteing,
but why is feces brown, and more interestingly, why would it be green?

Capt'n Midnight

Mostly bile, byproducts of red-blood cell Iron recycling, if you have problems with this, your skin may change colour - jaundice.

If you are anemic then the colour may lighen up a lot or colour from undigested food may be more visible.

Not too sure about the green - do you mean chlorophyll colour as in vegetables or darker green ?

heme metabolism
http://web.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/heme-porphyrin.html

DrIndy

chlorophyll is broke down in the gut - so its probably more likely to be from green food dye than anything else.

Beetroot makes it red......

If you have obstruction to your bile system like having gall stones, then your faeces will become very pale due to the loss of bile which makes it the characteristic colour. It is the obstruction of the bile canals that makes your stool pale and your urine brown (and make you jaundiced - yellow coloured).

Breakdown of blood (causing anaemia) does cause jaundice, but it doesn't affect the colour of your faeces.

I suspect you have been eating something green and that caused the effects.

Do an experiment - eat loads of beetroot. If you eat enough, then your urine will become red too.......

BEAT

huh, I ate nothing green yesterday or today...what I ate:
apple for breakfast
tuna, saltine crakers and piece of cheese for lunch
potato perogies for dinner, drank water all day
ate this yesterday and today.

a bright green color was produced, I found it strange. I have done nothing different in my diet.

oh ya, I dont know if its connected but I woke up with a headache and have had it all day, wont go away. an hour or so after i woke was when the green was produced.

DrIndy

Its possible that if your bowels transited through very quickly then the billirubin (bile) may have not been broken down by the gut bacteria quickly resulting in the dark greenish pigment being carried through.

Its an interesting occurence........

Capt'n Midnight

On the subject of green , just wondering if fluorescein / methylene blue get fully metabolised in the body ?

DrIndy

No it doesn't - thats why you pee blue/green for a while after a retinal imaging exam of the eyes.....

rugbug86

oooh, blue pee!
babies sometimes have green poo and that means they have a bug.
maybe go to your doctor though, green poo isnt exactly normal!

Victor

BEAT wrote:

oh ya, I dont know if its connected but I woke up with a headache and have had it all day, wont go away. an hour or so after i woke was when the green was produced.

Too much Crème de Menthe?

r3boot

Depends on the greeness and smell of the pooo ......

4Xcut

Enough guiness make it go black.

BEAT

yes and apparently 2 heaping bowls of Boo-Berry cereal makes it bright green

emu-addict

poo is only brown in the sense it is percieved as brown by us humans. because poo is full of harmful germs for us it is best we avoid it, the perception of the colour "brown" is part and parcel of behavioural dispositions of avoidance. for a hamster, for which it is safe to eat its own poo in fact nutritious to do so, its perception would be different; something inviting, like the colour "green". the same thing applies to the smell.

John

how do you explain chocolate?

emu-addict

chocolate is a recent invention that has played no part in our evolution: cave-men didnt eat mars bars.

RDM_83

What about beef, venison and rabbit all of which are delicious and brownish (sure the cavemen liked them)

Capt'n Midnight

emu-addict wrote:

because poo is full of harmful germs for us it is best we avoid it, the perception of the colour "brown" is part and parcel of behavioural dispositions of avoidance.

I would have thought that smell would be the main/only clue there as both colour and texture vary.

Mr. Presentable

LATIN BEAT wrote:

I know someone asked this before but I cant remember what the answer was and I found it interesteing,
but why is feces brown, and more interestingly, why would it be green?

Faeces or feces (sic) is a plural. Only Yanks call them the latter. I don't know why they are brown, but sh1t is brown because the colour suits it.

Mr. Presentable

LATIN BEAT wrote:

I know someone asked this before but I cant remember what the answer was and I found it interesteing,
but why is feces brown, and more interestingly, why would it be green?

Or, further to my previous post:

Red blood cells are continually being broken down and replaced. The main byproduct of this process is called bilirubin, which is (specifically) a breakdown product of hemoglobin, the molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen. Bilirubin (like many other biochemical wastes) is dumped by the liver into the large intestine via the gall bladder. Stuff that the gall bladder secretes (including bilirubin) is called 'bile', and it is the characteristic color of bile (the main component of which is bilirubin) that gives feces its typical color. Without bile, feces would probably be the color of vomit, as you might expect (but not really like to think about).

As you might expect, feces can change color in sickness.

Dave Featherstone
Dept. of Biology
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT

wheresthebeef

we were told that a lot of the colour of faeces was to do with the excretion of damaged and deaminated red blood cells.

Talliesin

There's a particular chemical in bile that tends to make it brown. Hannibal Lecter makes a pun upon its chemical formula in the book, but not the film, _Silence of the Lambs_.

John

Bili rubin?

Shabadu

LATIN BEAT wrote:

yes and apparently 2 heaping bowls of Boo-Berry cereal makes it bright green

The colourants or should I say 'colorants' in the States are unreal. My son had that vicious Blue Moon Ice-cream which resulted in a forest green nappy. Obviously one colour spectrum of the dye is broken down in the body and the unnatural green remains.

RE*AC*TOR

RDM_83 wrote:

What about beef, venison and rabbit all of which are delicious and brownish (sure the cavemen liked them)

they aren't brown in their natural state.

Shabadu

This whole 'the colour brown is unappealing' stuff is rubbish imo. The soil is brown, and humans have long associated the earth and soil as life-giving and nourishing.

Also, Venison and beef are more brown than red pretty much instantly after cutting them and exposing them to the air. The only reason they're red in supermarkets is because of packaging/dye in the case of some cheap meat.

RE*AC*TOR

Shabadu wrote:

This whole 'the colour brown is unappealing' stuff is rubbish imo. The soil is brown, and humans have long associated the earth and soil as life-giving and nourishing.

Also, Venison and beef are more brown than red pretty much instantly after cutting them and exposing them to the air. The only reason they're red in supermarkets is because of packaging/dye in the case of some cheap meat.

I'm not saying the point isn't complete nonsense - but the beef, venison and rabbit point is also nonsense. As for the packaging dye in supermarkets, well I'd like to avoid whatever supermarkets you are using.

Its more to do with refrigeration than dye that they maintain their red colour. Either way a freshly killed deer has red flesh as would be the case in caveman society. Rabbit never has dark brown flesh - goes from pink (raw) to beige (cooked).

Shabadu

Note I didn't mention rabbit, only venison and beef. The red is sometimes preserved by packing with gases that won't react with the iron in the flesh.

Tesco cheap crappy meat is quite often died pink. I wouldn't eat it, I'm just saying it happens. Nitrites are sometimes used in beef as well as pork.

Also- most people don't eat freshly cut meat, meat has been hung to age it, which does turn it brown, for generations upon generations- quite probably since the era of the caveman. Meat is supposed to be brown, not red.

RE*AC*TOR

Shabadu wrote:

quite probably since the era of the caveman

This sentence says it all.

You're making an assumption that includes a human practice of hanging meat. I would debate that assumtion on a number of grounds.

(a) hunger - depending on whether the food was readily available or not at they may have eaten immediately.

(b) hanging meat - where? There are plenty of other predators that would take the meat that was lying around. It would probably attract larger predators as well due to the smell.

Either way unless we have some evidence to suggest when dry aging began - we cannot confer that it influences the evolutionary predisposition against brown (which i do believe is a load of crap). Moreso - judging by other mammals - they tend to eat their meat red.

Shabadu

Well actually, there is evidence that the indians hung their meat since the B.C.'s on tall wooden structures that I can't remember the name of. Actually, there is quite a bit of evidence that people have hung their meat since pre-egyptian times iirc. Let me just crack open me Stephen Mennell and I'll get back to you.

I've been studying gastronomy for 4 years, by the way.

And as for the 'other mammals eating meat red'- that would be because yes, as you said, they would be at risk of losing it to a predatory carnivore, or competing peers. Humans have had a lot more ingenuity than that. Gimme a while and i'll dig up something in one of my books.

RE*AC*TOR

That would be interesting to find out - but bear in mind that homo sapiens as we know them have been around for about 200,000 years. So to infer an evolutionary trait (or to disprove another) you would have to go back along time.

Shabadu

RE*AC*TOR wrote:

That would be interesting to find out - but bear in mind that homo sapiens as we know them have been around for about 200,000 years. So to infer an evolutionary trait (or to disprove another) you would have to go back along time.

NOOOOOoooooooo! I just hit the quick reply button again instead of the Post Quick Reply button and got rid of my post.

Anyhoo. Will go make a coffee and try again.

I take your point about the span of time you need to imply an evolutionary development, I feel that the knowledge/desire to age meat would possibly have been more of a skill that's passed on through the generations. This does make it a cognitive decision rather than an evolutionary one, but it could help dispell yer man's notion that brown in food is unappealing, as they hardly passed on a social tabboo as good food practise. (I know you don't agree with what he said, I just thought I'd throw it in)

There is evidence of animal husbandry going back to around 9,000 B.C. This is not evidence that they didn't or did know how to age fresh meat, but long before they had 'tamed' animals for meat and other animal products humans had been processing meat in various ways, for example smoking/drying/salting meat. There is evidence for these techniques being used since prehistoric times.

I know it's not the same as evidence of ageing the meat, but if one examines the evidence of meat being left in ice caves in prehistoric times, one could argue that people became aware that the meat became more tender and flavourful over time as it was stored in cool places. This could be the origin of ageing meat to improve texture and taste. Meat is also more readily digested after ageing, as it is also after cooking, one could think that in much the same way as cooked food tastes more appealing to us, aged meat might also be percieved as more appealing upon consumption as it is easier for our bodies to process.

As taste seems to rely more upon tabboo, social instruction and cognitive rather than instinctive reasoning though, there is no real way we can prove this.

I did fúck up when I was referring to the Native American wooden structures though, on reflection I think they were used for smoking/airdrying the meat to create jerky. Sorry- bit brainless with the flu at the mo. Will go look at notes more constructively and try to find something a bit more transparent and irrefutably fact.

DrIndy

its more the smell and the fact it comes from your arse that makes it unattractive and people don't eat it.

certain herbivores, notably rabbits do eat their own crap, but this is because they are not ruminants like a cow and cannot digest in their 4 stomachs. They rely on the bacteria in their small intestine instead to digest cellulose. Rabbits have 2 different crap, one greenish that they eat and the second brown and drier which they do not.

Dogs have an instinct to eat crap - this is because when they were wolves, they would eat moose/deer faeces - which contained a lot of unabsorbed nutrients and vitamins. they also have an instinct to roll in it to cover their own scent which is particularily revolting.

Do you know horses eat a phenomenal amount of grass to keep themselves going? This is why, cows are more efficient.

BEAT

what I find most facinating is that I started this thread for a laugh, and now it has turned into a serious debate...yay for green poo
go me!