• Question: When you are looking through someones poop can you tell how they were feeling?

    Asked by xXRhysXx to Ciarán on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Not in any great detail, but we could tell whether they’re sick or under a lot of stress, and make guess from that about how they feel. Some illness can make you feel very sad and miserable because they affect your brain, and signs of that will show up in someone’s poop. And being very stressed affects your gut (your brain can communicate directly with your intestines using the vagus nerve), and it won’t absorb food as well as normal, or it might cramp up or even start bleeding, and we’ll be able to tell from signs like that that a person is stressed.

      We can tell what someone has been eating as well, so if we see from your poop that you’ve been eating a lot of ice cream or chocolate, we can tell that you were probably feeling pretty good about it 🙂

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