Why does poop smell

The smell of poop is not the most attractive of issues to be discussing, but it is interesting nonetheless to understand the reasons behind the distinctive deterring smell of poop. Ingested food undergoes a lot of processes inside the human digestive system, most of which require some degree of scientific and biological knowledge to grasp. In lay terms, the food gets soaked of as much of the constituent nutrients as the body can possible acquire. After the food passes the filtering process of the small and large intestines, all that is left is a mixture of differentially treated sludge. When the body accumulates more of this sludge than it can possible handle, the pressure on the posterior end of the body increases which results in the process of feces release, otherwise called pooping.

The food ingested through the mouth spends close to fifteen hours inside the body, where the temperature is as much as 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit. This is why the excretion of waste stinks a lot. A more scientific view of the matter suggests that the bacterial action on the food inside the body before it is eventually thrown out as waste is responsible for the distinctive odour of human poop. Many malodorous compounds such as indole, thiols, skatole, some other sulphur rich compounds, along with the hydrogen sulphide gas are released due to the bacterial action on the food. These compounds are allegedly responsible for the stinking smell of poop when it comes out of the body after spending a considerable time acquiring the eventual form.

Sulfur compounds generally give off fumes that do not go well with the human sense of smell. Unfortunately, the treatment of food inside the body involves release of many such compounds. Consequently, the human excreta is particularly foul in odour and it is barely possible to tolerate the smell of it. The human repulsion from bad odour makes poop an almost disgusting topic to be talking about in social circles. However, there are organisms that exhibit some sort of affinity towards the odour of human excreta as well.