by Bart King
Everyone Poops
All hail the king!
Poop is the Dark Lord of All Things Gross. Yes, it’s guaranteed to get a strong reaction from pretty much everyone. This has given poop a bad reputation, but we have to give it some credit for being a good teacher! After all, it taught you how to be disgusted. You see, there was once a day when you didn’t care how many crickets or hairballs you stuck in your mouth. But at some point, a well-meaning adult (thanks, Mom!) started your potty-training program.
In addition to laying out the basics of where to sit (the toilet) and what to wipe with (no, not your socks!), you were taught NOT TO TOUCH YOUR POOP. Poop was off-limits! It was icky, gross, and to be avoided at all costs.
Of course, people have been training their kids this way for ages. For example, in medieval times, the people in Iceland built their outhouses far, far away from their homes—a symbol of how they felt about poop. And as recounted eight hundred years ago in the best-selling Laxdæla Saga, if you wanted to lay siege to a community in Iceland, you just surrounded it. You weren’t trying to starve the residents out—you were making them poop in their homes (which didn’t have indoor plumbing!). This would ensure a quick surrender.
leep: To wash with cow dung and water. How much cow dung should you mix with the water? Just keep mixing it until it looks right. In other words, look before you leep!
Sadly Sick Synonyms
butt paste
devil’s curry
road apples
night soil
ordure
stool
butt mud
voodoo butter
hazardous material
Lincoln logs
number two
crapola
The Attack of the Living Butt Mud
Okay, kids, gather around the campfire. Is everyone comfortable? No? Good! Now, there’s nothing like a scary story told out in the woods, right?
Okay, okay, stop screaming! I won’t get to the scary part for a bit. First, to understand this story, you need to know where poop comes from. No, not from the Poop Fairy.
Pooping? Pop Off!
Helpful phrases to say when you’re ready to go “number two”:
My colon just sent me an IM.
I’ve got to go bury a Quaker.
Captain, we have a message from the poop deck!
I’m going to go sit on the thunderbox.
Pilot to bombardier: Open main hatchway!
I’ve got to drop the kids off at the pool.
I have to bust a grumpy.
I’ve got to drop the Browns off at the Super Bowl.
I’m experiencing a peristaltic rush (scientific!).
I need to answer nature’s call.
I’m prepared to unhitch a load.
I’m taking a poop/dump.
It turns out that you digest food and make poop by flexing your muscles. What muscles? I’m talking about the digestive muscles deep inside your body.
Here’s how it works. After you chew and swallow something, the chewed-up food starts heading to your food tube. On the way, your body starts closing trapdoors! That’s because you don’t want your food ending up in your lungs or up in your nose, do you?
Once the food finds the food tube (“esophagus”), gravity and a squeezing motion force it down to a valve that sits just above your stomach. That valve opens, and SPLASH! The chewed-up stuff lands in your stomach.
Now, your stomach is shaped sort of like the letter “J” with a big fat middle. Think of the top of the letter as your esophagus. Once it arrives, food might sit in your J—er, stomach—for up to four hours while it gets broken down by the acids that are pooled there. While the food breaks down (from the acid) and gets slimy (from stomach mucus), small contractions of the stomach push the food over to the side toward another valve, which leads to your small intestine.
One Small Poop for Me, One Giant Poop for Mankind
When Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, he left behind an American flag that is still there today. Armstrong also left behind his “Defecation Collection Devices.” (That’s right: there’s astronaut poop on the moon!)
The small intestine should be called the long intestine, because it can be stretched out over thirty feet. Don’t actually do that though, as it’s usually coiled around inside you like a really long, hollow, big hot dog. (That’s about how wide it is!) This is where most of the nutrients get sucked out of your food. Your pancreas, liver, and gallbladder all assist in this process by throwing in their own special chemicals.
Like your stomach, your small intestine is coated on the inside with mucus. This keeps it gooey and disgusting. Sweet! And it also helps keep your digested food (called “chyme”) moving. But digested food doesn’t move very fast; sometimes it only goes about an inch a minute. So it can take up to five hours to move through the small intestine.
Color Coordination
Once upon a time, there was a pirate captain who changed into a red shirt every time his ship engaged in battle. One day, one of his crew members asked the captain why he did this.
“It’s so that if I’m cut or shot, I don’t want my crew seeing the blood and thinking that all is lost!” the captain answered.
At that moment, the lookout cried from the crow’s nest, “Captain, there are ten British warships headed this way!”
The captain whirled around and said to the curious crew member, “Fetch me my brown pants.”
WARNING:
If you don’t have enough water in your body, your intestines AND your poop can dry out. If you’ve ever been constipated, you know that your poop can turn into a hard clay. And that hard clay moves slowly inside you, while it gets more and more compacted. And when it’s time for it to come out, you might be making a face like this:
To fix this problem, lay off the junk food, drink LOTS of water, and eat some fruit. And good luck to you.
Pop Quiz!
If you were a king or a queen, would you wear your crown in the bathroom? (Don’t worry, there is no wrong answer.)[10]
And now, on to the large intestine!
Also called the colon, the large intestine is wider than the small intestine, but at three to five feet in length, it’s much shorter. The large intestine looks like a big “n.” It connects to your small intestine on the right side of your body, goes up over the small intestine, and then heads down the left side of your body. Finally, it takes a turn and centers inside the middle of your butt. (More on that later!)
The digested food that hits the large intestine needs another three to ten hours of digestion to finally become “poop.” As the stuff works its way through the large intestine, the last nutrients are pulled out of it. The large intestine also removes most of the water from this neo-poop. This means that as your poop travels, it gets drier and harder. When everything is said and done, only about 35 percent of the food you eat will come back out again.
As your poop heads to the exit (aka, the anal sphincter), it gets molded into the individual logs that you see in the toilet. These logs finally hit the last eight inches of your large intestine, a magical section known as the rectum. As your rectum fills with poop, you’ll start getting that special feeling that could be summed up as: “I gots to go!”
They Cooled Off
In 1971, a band named Hot Poop released a record titled Does Their Own Stuff! They were never heard from again.
Your anal sphincter is what holds back your poop from dropping into your shorts. Do you know how important this is? Think about how many times it has saved you from hideous embarrassment. So let’s have three cheers for the anal sphincter!
And now we come to the scary part of the story. See how I’m shining my flashlight on something big and brown at the edge of the forest over there? Well, you should be scared, because now I’m going to tell you about . . .
the Attack of the Living Butt Mud!
Your poop is ALIVE! Yep, up to 30 percent of your Lincoln logs are
composed of bacteria. Even a tiny dab of it might have trillions of those little poopers. Some of the bacteria are dead (they don’t live very long), but plenty of those little organisms are still eating away at the mucus and indigestible stuff like vegetable and grain fibers. Bacteria is what makes your poop smell like . . . poop. The more bacteria in your poop, the more it stinks!
Food and Poop: The Inside Scoop
The average total weight of a poop is about half a pound.
If you eat a lot of fatty foods, your poop will float! (This is not a good enough reason to eat fatty foods.)
If you eat a lot of meat, your poop will reek!
If you eat a lot of cheese and other dairy products, your poop will stink less than other people’s.
By the way, although you should always avoid other people’s poop, you don’t really have anything to worry about from your own butt mud. You see, it’s difficult to get a disease from your own poop that you don’t have already! Oh, and I should tell you that another thing in your poop’s mix is “bile” from your gallbladder. Bile helps break down fats. It starts off as yellow or green, but by the time you see your poop, it will be a nice brown or maybe a brownish-green color.
A Bowel Movement Is a Many-Splendored Thing
Members of a tribe in the Amazon basin are willing to eat almost anything. So maybe it’s no coincidence that their language has a hundred different words for diarrhea!
And now, the real horror: DIARRHEA!
As you know, your large intestine removes water from the food you’re digesting. But what if there’s something wrong with that food? Maybe it’s way too spicy (chili peppers, anyone?) or your body realizes it has harmful toxins in it. Travelers frequently get diarrhea because they are continually exposed to food (accompanied by germs and bacteria) that they don’t ordinarily eat. That’s why there are names for it like “Montezuma’s revenge,” the “Aztec two-step,” and “Delhi belly.”
As your body realizes it’s in distress, an alarm goes off all the way from your stomach to your colon. Your digestive system decides that the food needs to be removed from the body as quickly as possible. And so the semi-digested food is rushed through your digestive system: “Show those bums the door!” In the large intestine, where water is usually taken from the food, your body will instead actually add water to it. This makes the toxic poop get through your guts that much faster!
The end of the story isn’t pretty. You rush to the toilet and spew diarrhea. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of a nice way to say it.) While this is not a pleasant experience, remember that your body is just doing its job!
The World’s Greatest Headline
A journalist in Sydney, Australia, wrote an article about police officers issuing tickets to smokers caught dumping their cigarette butts in the street. The story’s headline: “May the Butt Force Be with You.”
You’re Always Packin’ Heat
At any given time, your large intestine contains poop, even if you just went to the bathroom.
The only way to get all of that poop out is with an enema! If you don’t know what an enema is, ask your science teacher or your grandparents. Or just read the following:
Getting an enema involves sticking a tube into the anus. This tube is attached to a container or bladder filled with water. Then water is squirted through the tube and into the rectum. As the large intestine fills with water, the person feels pretty weird.
Why would a person go through this torture? Enemas clean out the large intestine. And they can help with really bad constipation. So even though it sounds ridiculous, some people who aren’t being held at gunpoint have been known to voluntarily get enemas.
Life is crazy!
Remote-Control Enema
A Japanese company sells a high-tech bidet (bih-DAY) that will spray and clean your backside. It even has a remote control to use for an enema wash! According to the company, “The warm water stream passes directly through the rectum and fills the lower colon for a more thorough cleansing and expelling of feces and gas.”
Chart Your Success!
Doctors have come up with a simple way of measuring how long it takes poop to go through a patient. Specifically, by looking at the shape and form of a poop, they can tell how long it’s been in the patient’s colon. This “transit time” helps the doctors make judgments about the patient’s health.
Little Coconuts
See the lumpies? It’s hard to bust those grumpies!
Ease of Pooping: Very difficult
The Baby Ruth
A candy bar chock-full of nuts never looked so bad.
Ease of Pooping: Can be difficult
The Voodoo Pickle
Some say this is the perfect poop!
Ease of Pooping: Pretty good
The Snake
Voted most likely to circle into a tidy coil.
Ease of Pooping: Just right?
Shotgun Blast
Soft pellets.
Ease of Pooping: Easy
Mango Express
First you’re dashing, then you’re splashing.
Ease of Pooping: Too Easy
The Dreaded Gombu
Since this is pure liquid, splashing is a major drawback.
Ease of Pooping: Good grief, what happened?
A person suffering from really bad constipation can suffer from what’s known as “fecal impaction.” Translation: The poop in the rectum has hardened into plaster. No amount of fluid, fruit, or enemas can fix this. In order to get things moving again, a doctor has to actually go in and physically break up the hard poop in the colon. (If you’ve ever had to use a coat hanger to break up the poop in a clogged toilet pipe, you get the idea.)
So remember to avoid all forms of constipation by eating lots of bran, vegetables, and fruit!
Now we can all sit back and relax—oh, rats, I thought I was done with the back door’s gross stuff. But I forgot to mention that there are a lot of veins in the region of your poop chute. Sometimes these veins can get enlarged and swollen. This hurts, and it’s also pretty horrible to see because the veins can get pretty big. This condition is called hemorrhoids. That’s a nasty name for an unfortunate condition.
Who Will Sit on the Stool of Power?
Are you interested in the sport of competitive pooping? To play, you need to have at least one opponent who isn’t shy about showing the results of his or her bowel movements. There are an infinite number of ways to play! Here are just a couple:
1. Environmental Gladiators: Who can use the least amount of toilet paper? Not only does this save trees, but it also gives your wastewater plant a lighter load. In terms of strategy, keep in mind that the more solid a poop is, the easier it is to wipe.
Caution: Don’t wipe less just to win. Nothing is worse than walking around with “dew on your lily,” “dingleberries,” or “butt lint.”
2. Batter Up! Using the chart on page 105, agree on a scoring system like baseball for your poops. A reasonably healthy and sizable poop could be judged as a single or double. A really impressive poop that requires little or no wiping could be a triple. And one that breaks the surface of the toilet water could be a home run!
Other categories:
Little squirt = foul ball
Meager pellets = bunt
Person has an “at bat” and can’t produce = inning over!
Clogged toilet = game called on account of rain
Note: You may need to enlist an umpire who is willing to impartially score your poops. (I’m sure there are all sorts of people who would like to do this.)
Public Service Announcement
The time will come when you have to poop really bad and there’s no toilet in sight. We’ve all been through this torture, and it’s horrible. But there is, apparently, a solution to it. No, don’t poop your pants! What’s wrong with you?
A Korean scientist came up with something called the “Su-jok therapy.” I am not making this up. When you feel the need to bury a Quaker, get a pen or pencil (or somethi
ng similar) and trace a circle clockwise on your left palm, or counterclockwise on your right. I’ll admit that I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but a trusted source tells me it works!
Bathroom Reading
When reading the classics of literature (like this book!), many people are shocked by the language they find. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in the 1300s, is required reading for today’s English scholars. One of the tales features a character who says, “You would make me kiss the seat of your old pants and swear it was the relic of a saint, even though it was smeared by your—”[11]
Antisocial Poopers