The Blue Poop Challenge

Really, the things I'll do for science! These buns have been made with a hefty dose of concentrated blue colouring.  "Why?" I hear you ask.

Since the early days of the Covid pandemic, I've been logging my health and vaccination status on the Covid Symptoms Study App. The good folk at Kings College London, in collaboration with Zoe Global Ltd, use this data – along with that from over 4½ million other contributors – to plot the rise and fall of infections, then report their findings to the government. 

The study has shown the value of collecting data from millions of people – something that would have been very hard to do before the advent of the Internet and mobile phone apps.  

Professor Tim Spector, who heads up the Kings College team, has once more teamed up with Zoe Global and turned his attention to the study of Gut Biome – the micro-organisms that live in our gut.  It is believed that the diversity of these has a profound impact on our health.  Basically, the more different bugs with have in our gut, the greater will be our resistance to a host of infections and diseases.  And that's where the Blue Poop Challenge comes in.

The 'Challenge' is to eat two blue buns for breakfast, then time how long it takes for blue-coloured poop to appear in the toilet pan. OK, I know it sounds disgusting but I'll do a lot in the name of science. The one thing I won't do, however, is to show you a photo of the poop (for which you are doubtless grateful), so you'll have to take my word for it that it did appear about 40 hours later.  I reported this to Zoe, answered a few dietary questions, and my results appeared.

 

 

 

Ideally, at this point I suppose I would send off a sample of poop for analysis – rather like the bowel screening programme – but Zoe are still developing an Android app to go with an enhanced study.  Instead, using my data, they matched me with someone for whom they had carried out a detailed analysis. 

The analysis shows that I'm munching on a wide variety of nourishing foods that 'good' bugs love to eat.  However, there are probably a few missing bug species that could improve my gut biome still further. 

Sauerkrout (fermented cabbage) and kombucho (fermented tea ) don't sound very appetising to me, but I think Kefir (fermented milk, somewhat like yogurt) has potential, if I can find it on the supermarket shelves.  As for yogurt, I prefer Greek fat-free varieties as they're Slimming World friendly, though it seems that they're not as beneficial for my gut as the full-fat ones.

Finally, here's a summery of what the Kings College team have discovered so far:

•     Gut transit times varied from less than 12 hours to many days, with a typical time of around 29 hours.
•     Gut transit time is not only affected by diet, lifestyle, and hydration, but also by the trillions of bugs living in the gut, known as the gut microbiome.
•     People with faster transit times have different gut microbes compared with those with longer transit times, with specific foods and strains of bacteria associated with speedier or slower transit times.
•     Shorter transit times were generally associated with better health, less abdominal fat, and healthier responses to food.
•     Longer transit times were more strongly associated with microbes that feed on protein and with fewer fibre-loving bugs that produce short-chain fatty acids, which are linked to better gut health.

If you fancy doing the Blue Poop Challenge yourself, and help the Kings team with this important work on dietary health, just follow this link... joinzoe.com/bluepoop.

Happy pooping!