We can all agree that pooping is good for you. (There are few such universal, unequivocal truths in the health world.)
But the urge can sometimes come at the most inopportune moments. Perhaps you’re in the middle of an important client meeting, on a hot date, or in an airplane and have a fear of letting it out in the sky (totally reasonable fear, by the way). So you do what any rational adult would do:
You hold it in until you can go a little bit later. It can’t be that bad, can it? To be honest, we can’t believe we’re talking about this either, but somebody’s got to ask the question, and we’ve got answers.
The Need-to-Know
Simply put, poop is a combination of waste material and bacteria, as a result of your body’s digestive process. After you eat, it takes your body a little less than 53 hours for it to do its thing and push that BLT sandwich from your mouth through your digestive tract and out the other end (fun fact: the food spends roughly 40 of those hours just in your large intestine, a.k.a. your colon). When the digested food finally reaches the end, the rectal walls are stretched, and that sends a complex signal to the brain that it’s “go-time.”
Everyone’s schedule and frequency are g…