AYURVEDA PERSPECTIVE ON YELLOW STOOL

Why is your poop yellow? There are two main causes of this anomaly of the bowels. The most common is when stools are moving too quickly through the intestines, called a fast bowel transit time. This rapid elimination of stools is usually from intestinal irritation or excess bile.

Irritated Intestines

Why does a rapid stool have a yellow hue? When food first enters the small intestine, bile is released. This bile is a green color. It's purpose is to emulsifies fats in the food you've eaten.

As food winds through the GI tract, bacteria digest the bile, turning the bile from a green to yellow and finally to a cinnamon brown color - so that the finished masterpiece of your poop is a cinnamon brown color. Yellow stool means you eliminated your bowels pre-cinnamon stage, before bacteria finished processing your bile. When stools are eliminated too quickly, the bacteria don't have time to break down the bile into its yellow form. Under these rapid conditions, your body can't complete its task of crafting a healthy poop.

Fast moving poop is usually a sign that your intestines are irritated, a Pitta imbalance. Pitta is hot, sharp, fast, intense, and liquid in nature, just like diarrhea and loose stools. In Ayurveda, fast moving bowels are called ati pravrutti in purisha vaha srotas (the elimination pathway). Soft bowels are called mrdu koshta.

Why are your intestines irritated?

Sometimes your body produces too much bile, especially in hot weather. Bile itself is hot and oily. This excess bile irritates the intestines and paves the pathway for loose stools. Bile is made in the liver, which is one of the primary Pitta locations in your body. In this location Pitta is called Ranjaka Pitta and one of the jobs of Ranjaka Pitta is to color the stool, as in green, yellow or brown.

In hot weather or after eating spicy food, so much blood is moving through the liver that the liver overproduces bile. Pitta people tend to have sensitive livers anyway, and may experience these symptoms even in winter.

Fatty foods also increase bile production. Generally, when a Pitta person consumes too much fat it sends your poop flying through your intestines at top speed. For this reason, Pitta people do not digest fat well.

Intestinal disorders including infection, parasites, IBS, & celiac disease also irritate the intestines leading to rapid bowel transit.

Remedies for Yellow Stools

If yellow stools are due to intestinal irritation, you'll want to address the root cause of the irritation, and favor a Pitta pacifying diet and lifestyle. Yellow stool may be a sign of excess fire and/or water elements. Avoid eating too much salty, sour and spicy foods which further aggravate fire and water. Instead, eat more cooling and astringent foods like legumes and barley to slow things down and help bind the stool. Demulcent foods like oatmeal are soothing to irritated intestines. You might also benefit from decreasing your intake of fat - particularly fried foods and favoring more sweet foods like root veggies, whole grains and animal products.

Herbs like shatavari have both an anti-microbial action and cool the intestines. Arjuna is an astringent herb that bind stools. Marshmallow root is a demulcent to soothe intestines.

Fear & Other Causes

Nothing affects digestion quite like fear. When triggered, you feel a "pit" in your stomach. Your stomach drops, your knees become weak and your bowels churn. Even performance anxiety, before giving a speech for example, triggers bowel evacuation. This can lead to yellow stools due to undigested bile. Belly breathing and rubbing your tummy are remedies that can soothe bowels.

Images of Yellow stool

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