The Free Health Testing You Don’t Know About
There is free health testing you can do, daily that will give you important insight when assessing your health.
Regardless if you’re dealing with a chronic health condition or trying to optimize your health. This free health testing is looking at your stool. For those of you who don’t know what stool is, it’s your poop.
Many people know that checking your stool is vital to understanding your digestive health. For those of us who are familiar with gut health, we know to check the consistency shape and size of stool.
For those of you who don’t know, the Bristol stool chart is a tool used to compare the shapes and sizes of stools. You can look at the Bristol stool chart to see where you lie and begin to optimize your health from there. We always aim for snake like stools. I always tell my patients “if you’re not looking at your poops everyday, start today.”
If your stools are little pellets or liquid, there’s a problem with your digestion. This may lead to a long term problem with your health. If you’re not familiar with the Bristol stool chart, we’ll attach a link HERE. Aside from the Bristol stool chart, there are other ‘free home testing’ indicators that can give you deeper gut health insight.
The first way to delve deeper into assessing your gut health is to look at the colour of your stool.
What colour should your stool be? Between brown, yellow and green is considered normal. If you see that you have clay or light colour stools, this is an indication that digestion is off. Oftentimes, it’s an indicator of gallbladder dysfunction and/or digestive enzyme problems.
When you see red or dark colour stools, this could be a serious problem. Certain foods cause red stool. Eating beets or licorice could be the reason that your stool is red. This only applies if you have eaten these foods in the last day or two. Otherwise, this could be an indicator of bleeding somewhere in the gastrointestinal tract. It needs to be checked out by your doctor as soon as possible.
Other free health testing that you can do to assess your gut health, is to look for undigested particles in your stool.
If there are green leafy pieces or chunks of food, one of two things could be happening.
The first reason is because you’re not chewing enough. Chewing is so vitally important. If you’re racing through your meals without chewing, you will most likely see undigested pieces of food in your stool.
The second reason is because you may not have enough enzymes, or sufficient stomach acid to turn those enzymes on, to help break down your food. This is incredibly important to know. You could be eating the most beautiful, healthy, organic whole foods that are plant-based, without absorbing any nutrients. All because your body doesn’t have the ability to produce the enzymes. If this is the case, you should seek the help of a professional to figure out why you’re not digesting your food.
Another way to assess your gut health for free is to see if your poop is sinking or floating. Which one is normal?
Your stool should be sinking to the bottom. If you see a little bit of a floaty stool, you may have had too much fiber or fat that day. Like when the fruit is fresh and you decide to eat a whole bowl of cherries. The next day you might have a floating stool. However, if your stool is floating regularly, this could indicate something more serious.
Your stool may be floating because you’re eating too much fat. It could also be that you’re not able to properly digest fat. For anyone who has recently begun a higher fat diet, you may be eating too much fat at once. This means your body isn’t able to produce the enzyme lipase to break down that fat, quick enough. If this is the case, ease off and slowly introduce the amount of fat.
The most obvious free health testing out there is called the smell test.
Either you or your family members know when a bowel movement is really smelly. Stool is normally smelly but when it’s particularly putrid, for example when everyone needs to evacuate the room, that could indicate digestive issues and more.
Your gut microbes, both the healthy and unhealthy ones, feed on the food you give it. An imbalance of the good and bad bacteria in your gut could create an inability to break down your food properly. When food isn’t broken down it can putrefy and that ends up coming out really smelly.
Often my patients will have a hard time digesting protein. This is either because they don’t have enough stomach acid or they don’t have enough of the protease enzyme to break it down. That protein will putrefy on its way through the digestive tract. That ends up being very smelly as well.
Another reason you are having a smelly poop is after eating a lot of processed food or food that your body is having a very hard breaking down. Often times you will notice that you’ve been out and you’ve been somewhere eating a lot of things that you don’t normally eat.
You may not only have a really smelly poop, but you may have really smelly gas. These are all signs from our body that something is off. If you or one of your family members passes the smelly smelly poop test, you want to look deeper into figuring out what is the root cause of the problem.
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