Why is feces brown
Feces, commonly referred to as “poop” by many individuals around the world, can actually come in a range of colors from a light yellow to a pale green, though the most universally desired color by most people that consider their feces “health” is a light brown pigment. While the color of your own feces can be greatly influenced by a number of different factors the most common and important of them is the processing of bile produced by your gall bladder within your intestinal tract.
Designed to rid your body of many harmful substances and other wastes including bilirubon (dead blood cells), bile is a combination of various chemicals and other waste substances that is regularly excreted into your intestines through the gall bladder. Within your large intestine bile is them metabolized by specialized bacteria that create a byproduct known as stercobilin, and it is this byproduct that produces the brown pigment in feces. Without it feces would be a pale gray color, much like putty or paste (and in some cases this color may still present itself given the right conditions).
Many factors can affect the proper processing of bile within the intestines and thus affect the overall color of your feces, including bacterial infections that can influence the overall effectiveness of bile processing, various medications that kill off the necessary bacteria that help generate the stercobilin and even physical damage, disease or other ailments such as a blockage of the tubes necessary to transfer bile successfully from the gall bladder to the intestines.
Other colors such as red within feces may indicate internal bleeding somewhere within the intestinal tract, while yellow may indicate a high fat content and green some sort of harmful infection. Food may also have an effect upon your feces as our body processes different food products in different ways. Corn shells, for instance, cannot be effectively processed by our body due to our stomachs lacking the necessary enzymes to digest the shell, therefore what we cannot digest is simply passed through for disposal. Other foods such as beets may also cause a reddish tint to develop, while some drinks may also cause a range of feces color alterations.