Everything Your Poop Is Trying to Tell You About Your Health, According to Gastroenterologists

Remember the last time you pooped, stood up, turned around, and carefully took note of your log’s shape and texture?… No? Can’t recall? Well, according to gastroenterologists, you might want to start. The color and consistency of stool, and dump frequency, can provide insight into your overall health and whether you could be exercising just a little too much. Here’s what to know.

What Your Poop Color Reveals About Your Health

According to Dr. Ashkan Farhadi, a board-certified gastroenterologist at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California, your poop color is “often a reflection of the color of the food and the bacteria in the gut,” he explains. “It’s not really a direct effect of health, as many people like to believe.”

Still, Farhadi says it’s important to consider your health holistically here. Did you start a new medication? Or are you experiencing other symptoms, like abdominal swelling?

Here’s how poop color can give you some clues as to what’s going on intestinally:

• Brown: The gold standard. When poop moves through your digestive tract, it naturally turns from green to brown when chemically altered by certain enzymes.
• Green: This often means you’re eating a lot of green foods or foods with green dye in them, but it can also signal that food is passing through you too quickly via diarrhea. It stays green because the bile doesn’t have enough time to break down.
• Red: You might be eating plenty of red-colored foods, like beets. But this could also signal hemorrhoids or rectal bleeding.
• Black: Again, the color of your food can play a big role here—black licorice and consuming lots of blueberries can make stool a deep tar color. But if the poop stinks (way more than normal) and is super dark, it could signal intestine or liver issues.
• Yellow: This often occurs when fat isn’t absorbed properly, which can occur if you’ve got a parasite in the intestine or stomach flu. But you could just be eating a lot of sweet potatoes or carrots.
• White: Too much dairy can cause this, alongside some over-the-counter meds such as antacids. But it can also mean there’s an underlying problem with the liver, bile ducts, gallbladder, or pancreas.

Bottom line: If your poop doesn’t go back to brown within a few days, or you have other symptoms, including a fever or pain, check in with a doctor.

The Low-Down on Poop Texture

There are seven types of poop textures, per the Bristol Stool Chart. Poops that are firm enough to stay together but not too hard to pass are often considered the healthiest kind.

Are You Dehydrated or Not Getting Enough Fiber?

As Dr. Ira Leeds, a colon and rectal surgeon at the Yale School of Medicine, says, poop texture can be particularly revealing when it comes to your overall health. “Healthy poop should characteristically look smooth and sausage-shaped,” he says. “Lots of cracks are suggestive of dehydration.”

Beyond that, Leeds offers some other key insights into poop texture as it relates to health. Poop that doesn’t hold its shape, is loose, requires lots of wiping, often means there’s a lack of fiber or too much water in your poop. Poop with small, broken-off pieces may indicate a fiber deficiency or dehydration.

How to know if you have optimal poop texture? Leeds suggests relying on what he calls  The Toilet Square Test. “If you’re pooping and only require a square or two of toilet paper to clean up the mess, you are right in the money for optimal healthy bowel function,” he says.

How Exercise Impacts Your Poop and Colon Health

Exercise can be one of the best things you can do to ensure healthy poops. “We have less knowledge about what the right level of exercise is for healthy bowel function, but we do know the opposite: a sedentary lifestyle can slow down all bodily processes, including worsening constipation,” Leeds says.

As Farhadi notes, from a physiological perspective, the fact that exercise can be so good for bowel movements might seem counterintuitive. “During exercise, the only organ that suffers from lower blood flow is the gastrointestinal tract,” he says. The real benefit of exercise on pooping, Farhadi explains, comes down to stress management. The more stressed you are, the less healthy your gut will be. “When we exercise, we are getting a distraction from a busy mind, and the gut gets a break so it can regulate dysfunction,” he says.

Of course, not every exercise is going to be colon-friendly, Farhadi says. Take endurance running, for example. A 2025 study from the Journal of Clinical Oncology found a link between long-distance running and adenomas (small precancerous polyps) in the colon. While it’s uncommon for these polyps to become cancerous, fewer than ten percent are malignant; they can be a warning sign of colorectal cancer. That said, it’s important to get regular colonoscopies.

“Marathon-running is notorious for causing diarrhea,” Farhadi says. “Doing it regularly can have consistent negative effects on the bowels.” He adds that dehydration—something you can easily experience with high-intensity or long-distance exercise—can also hinder healthy bowel movements.

But so long as whatever form of exercise you do reduces your stress, be it running or weightlifting, that’s the most important thing for gut health, Farhadi says.

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