So you got green poop floating in your toilet and you’re concerned something is off in your body — like perhaps a martian invaded your body while asleep, or worse.
I’m not a doctor, but I am here to tell you that your green poop isn’t likely anything serious. Trust me, I read the internet — every chapter.
Only in the rarest scenarios does the color of your doo-doo indicate a serious condition. More than likely, the cause of your green stool is because you ate or drank something green and it went through the intestine without being fully-digested and broken down.
To see why you have supernatural stool, go through the list of twelve candidates to see if you consumed any combination of the following in the last 36 hours:
Kale: This leafy green is high in fiber and a likely candidate as to why your poo is green. With huge amounts of chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green, having eaten kale in the last 24-36 hours is the reason why you’re pooping out the green stuff.
Well, kale and any of the following foods, events or pills….
St. Patrick’s Day: If you’ve just recently celebrated this holiday with Irish flag-inspired libations such as green beer or a green milkshake then this is very likely the reason why your dookie is green. Beer and milkshakes don’t wander out of the forest green, so the dyes to make it so is what is coloring your stool.
Artificial Dyes: Basically anything that isn’t naturally green means that it’s artificially green. That fake green color in foods are achieved by dyes and coloring so if we’re consuming these fake-green foods, our bodies can’t always process them, so the byproduct comes out looking like radioactive waste. Also, drinking green food coloring will turn your shit green.
Iron supplements: It has been reported that taking too much of iron via pills or supplements can cause your stool to be dark green.
Spinach: Like Kale, spinach is a leafy green that is high in fiber (and high in the green pigment chlorophyll) so it’s ejected out of the body rather quickly, so quickly that sometimes the color comes out with them. Light green poop and spinach-colored poop can be a result of… eating spinach!
Broccoli: See Spinach.
Asparagus: See Broccoli.
The Black Whopper: Yes, the trendy Japanese version of the fast food burger will make your poop a neon green that will light up your toilet like Times Square at New Years… or as green as the Irish countryside after a quenching rain (on St. Patrick’s Day). The green is likely coming from a concentrated form of the A1 sauce being used. And yes, it’s weird that the Black Whopper doesn’t make you shit black.
Kool-Aid: See artificial dyes.
Popsicles: See Kool-Aid.
Green Jello: Yes, Jello isn’t naturally green, and consuming it can make you poop out green jello, too. Another possibility is that your intestines got slimed.
So, it’s not just the color of your green foods that causing the green doo, but our friend bile, the chemical that breaks down the food in your body contributes to your alien dung.
Bile is naturally a greenish-yellow-brown color (YUM!). When our stomach is behaving normally and working with foods it can easily process, we’ll rarely see the green component, but things don’t work instantaneously. If our beautiful green-brown-yellow bile can’t or doesn’t have the chance — your poop will come out the color of money.
So depending on what you consumed, green poop can be the result of bile, the food you ate, or combination of both. In the majority of cases, you don’t have anything to be alarmed if green poop is coming out (in any form or texture) because 99% of the time, you are what you eat.
