Assume the smoothies have the same nutrient profile as a regular diet. Like if you drank runny mashed potatoes and protein powder to simulate a normal food intake.
If you do poop because of the nutrients, is there a healthy diet at which waste products are no longer left in the intestine to turn into poop?
Drag has no intention of doing this, drag is just curious about the science.
Sorry mate, there is no current way to eat without eventually needing to poop and remain healthy.
Best case scenario, you can figure out an IV nutrition regimen and end up not pooping poop, while your intestines are damaged through non use. You’ll likely suffer immensely if you ever decide to eat again.
Even then, things will still come out of you. Patients with extreme starvation, regardless of cause, still produce some intestinal mucosa. That stuff can and will eventually come out in small amounts.
See, the gut atrophies when it isn’t being used. It takes a while to reach that point, but it’s inevitable, no matter how well you keep up with IV feeding
In terms of smoothies, there’s ways to feed people through a tube when they can no longer eat. The products that are used for that minimize waste, but there’s still poop of some kind. So any smoothie you make yourself is also going to contain enough content that’s indigestible that you’ll poop eventually unless you take care to balance the soluble and insoluble fiber in the smoothie, you’ll end up with smoothie poop. In other words, it comes out in a very similar state of fluidity as it went in. It takes some effort to build a smoothie recipe that doesn’t have skewed proportions of fiber.
And if you want to have a healthy body, you can’t just let the intestines atrophy at all. The inflammation and other secondary issues that come with gut atrophy can’t be called healthy by any stretching of the term. So even IV feeding isn’t healthy, no matter how well done it is.
I’m trying to remember exactly how far into IV feeding you run into atrophy issues though. There was a fairly famous case of a man that was on an IV feeding plan to lose weight, but with the recent discovery of wegovy and related drugs for weight loss, there’s too damn many hits to sort through to find any of that info. But his case did include intake of low/no calorie intake orally to prevent that atrophy, I just can’t remember the details of what did happen to his gut health. I know he had at least a few months where he had trouble after resuming eating, but I’m damned if I can remember any details.
I’m fairly certain you could minimize pooping with oral nutrition that lacks any products that would form waste in the digestive tract though. It wouldn’t be a smoothie, since that’s pureed food; and it wouldn’t be healthy long term for all of the above reasons regarding the gut. But you might be able to work with specialists and figure out how to keep things from becoming so detrimental as to be inherently harmful. You’d definitely need a team though, I don’t think any single specialty in medicine would cover all of the knowledge necessary to make it work long term.
You seem like you might know:
Someone told me that poop isn’t actually food waste, but more the bacteria (or whatever lives down there) that died while helping your body digest said food.
How accurate is that?
Ehhh, it’s not entirely off, more of a mischaracterization.
Most of poop is water, even when someone is constipated.
The non water part is a mix of food waste, dead bacteria, live bacteria, and undigestible matter (like microplastics).
The exact percentages of all that varies. Water, for example, ranges from about 60-75% in healthy feces. But with extreme constipation or diarrhea, it can go higher or lower.
The remaining matter is going to be roughly 25% bacterial, viral, or fungal. Of which, roughly half is going to be alive still.
The rest is stuff that we swallowed, and either can’t be digested, or wasn’t completely digested. Carbohydrates tend to be the lowest presence, as they digest the easiest. Then proteins, then fats. Fats are the hardest to digest of the three, and tend to be the majority of partially digested substances.
Fiber makes up the majority of the indigestible matter, with various man-made substances making up the rest of that category.
No two poops are the exact same though. Our gut is a living, active biome. Our digestive enzymes and acids break down food into component parts very effectively, but microbes, bacteria in particular, help along the way, breaking things down more, and that makes the components we need better able to be taken up by the intestines.
Research into the gut biome and how it can affect the rest of the body is in its infancy, even compared to research on the brain, which is a big mystery despite much longer efforts to understand it. Gut flora really wasn’t considered as a factor in overall health until widely until the last twenty years or so. But, it turns out to have influence on everything about our bodies. So, poop science is strangely cutting edge work right now.
Awesome, thanks for taking the time.
No worries :)
Thank you for the in depth answer, but drag assures you that drag enjoys taking a nice shit.
For similar reasons that’s why chewing is important too.
I mean. Babies drink just milk and they still poop.
And it’s generally a similar, though thicker, consistency.
Smoothies with a proper dietary balance still have fiber. So yeah.
But even beyond that, waste products from the gut microbiome, and left over bits that the body doesn’t use. Best case scenario, you would have small, liquid poops.
Your best bet? Intravenous feeding. Not that Drag has any intention of doing this.
If the fiber is required for a proper diet, why isn’t it absorbed by the intestines?
Because its role is to aid in the voiding process. Much as part of the role of water is to serve as a carrier of urea out of the body, fiber’s job is to provide, bulk of a sort that’s easy on your intestines for the removal of waste. We could have evolved different dietary needs, but as fiber is plentiful in what we ate in the wild we adapted around it. Similar to how cats need external sources of taurine but we don’t.
Fiber mostly feeds the bacteria in your digestive system and they play an important role in digestion, and general well being.
Fiber doesn’t actually have any nutritional value. It functionally just scrubs your intestines when you eat it. If you don’t have enough fiber it can cause very weird digestive issues as strange things build up in your guts.
Well, physical scrubbing, sure. But also, specific fibers are required for a healthy gut microbiome to function and maintain a proper balance of microbes that produce other micronutrients that your body cannot make on its own as well as fending off the types of microbes that subsist of sugars and fats alone.
And constipation!
Thank you!
Adding to what they said, without fibers your shit will be liquid and runny, because it’s fibers that give rigidity to it.
The task for dietary fibers is to give volume in the colon and give the peristaltic muscles something to do.
They have limited nutritional value.
And they are an energy source for the good microbes there too.
Gotta get those microbial micronutrients.
Why are volume and muscle movement needed?
It’s the optimal for our digestive system, of course in some cases like in the hospital or nursing home people have trouble with getting the correct diet they then get laxatives to help.
That’s not actually an answer. “It’s needed because it’s optimal”, that doesn’t explain any science. Drag wants to know the science.
If you want science then start with Wikipedias articles:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_digestive_system
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_diet
And then read all the references when you want to dig deeper.
Tangentially related, but when I switched my cat from commercial cat food to a raw chicken (w/ supplements) diet, her poops went from very bulky once a day, to shrivelled poops every-other day.
The amount of water in the chicken, and the lack of bulking ingredients made a huge difference.
A lot of what makes up poop is body waste like dead cells.
How do they move from wherever they die to the general poop area?
I donno, blood or something.
I expect they won’t be good poops.
Yes. But it would be the same consistency coming out as it went in eventually. Unless your body uses 100% of what goes in, you’ll always poop. And since you can’t absorb 100% of what you take in, even if you only take in what you need, you will never not poop unless you stop eating entirely. And you wouldn’t not poop while alive very long until you’re not pooping while dead.
