If you eat nothing but smoothies, do you still poop?
If you eat nothing but smoothies, do you still poop?
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.
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.
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.
In addition to what you said fiber is an important part of poop. An not just as stuff to push through the tract.
A important function of the liver is body detox. One way the liver does that is to package chemicals so they bind to fiber and get flushed out of the system. Lack of fiber can cause those chemicals to stick around and cause more problems.
I was thinking of this dude: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri's_fast
That's the guy!
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?
Fiber mostly feeds the bacteria in your digestive system and they play an important role in digestion, and general well being.
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.
I mean. Babies drink just milk and they still poop.
And it's generally a similar, though thicker, consistency.
I think breast milk might hold the secret to the answer here. When our baby was newborn and breastfeeding, she was healthy and strong and everything, but BARELY ate enough to sustain and grow. She would go 5+ days without pooping with no signs of constipation. The doctor told us "don't worry about it. Breast milk has all she needs. Nothing more, nothing less".
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, I've tried it. You don't need fiber either. You will always make some liquid and solid waste even if you water fast or dry fast.
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.
For if you eat only smoothies, you'll have extra fruity farts and then become a fruit