Is water content the reason poos are brown?

Question

I've heard that no-one really knows why, but I recently did some pottery and the wet clay is much darker than the fired or even just dried clay. Maybe some chemist knows the answer?!

Answer 1

As it turns out, not all poop is brown. Sometimes poop can be green, yellow or nearly black. On occasion there are pieces of red pepper, tomato skins, corn, peas, etc in it too. But, by far, most poop is a shade of brown.The color comes mainly from bilirubin, a pigment that arises from the breakdown of red blood cells in the liver and bone marrow. The actual metabolic pathway of bilirubin and its byproducts in the body is very complicated, so we will simply say that a lot of it ends up in the intestine, where it is further modified by bacterial action. But the color itself comes from iron. Iron in hemoglobin in red blood cells gives blood its red color, and iron in the waste product bilirubin gives rise to its brown color.

Answer 2

We eat all different colors of foods. In art class, we learned that if you mix all the colors together, you get a shade of brown. My guess is that depending on what you eat, mixing of all of the food colors results in poo being a shade of brown. An exception is that if you eat beets or blueberries you will really get some odd colored poo. It really doesn't matter though. An old timer once asked me if I knew what the white stuff mixed in with bird poop was. I said no, that I didn't. He said, "That's bird sh*t too".

Answer 3

Yeah Kacki is on the money. It's the pigment bilirubin. Its also the pigment that can give you a black eye.

Answer 4

Kacki, you were right on the poop answer but you completely missed the one about cows with horns!!

Answer 5

your poo is brown because the digestive enzymes made it that way, and yes it looks darker when wet.

Answer 6

Egad, all these answers are making me sick !!