Discussing your bathroom habits isn’t exactly considered polite chat, but opening your bowels is a basic function of life and now one doctor is revealing how often you should go.
Gastroenterologist Professor Martin Veysey has said that when it comes to how often you poo, you should go 'when you feel the urge'.
Veysey explained you should never hold onto your number twos and that it can be particularly detrimental for those who have a long transit time.
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According to the NHS, most adults can go anything from a few times a day to once every three to four days, something the expert echoed.
The medical expert said having problems with urgency, such as a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, experience diarrhoea and/or constipation, can all be signs of slow transit.
Writing in The Conversation, Prof Veysey shared: "Getting into the habit of putting it off means the residue from the food you eat stays in your body longer than it should. Your transit time lengthens, and your quality of life deteriorates.
"On average, we produce about six tonnes of poo in our lifetimes, composed of water, bacteria, nitrogenous matter, carbohydrates, undigested plant matter and lipids (fats).
"The longer this mix of stuff sits inside us, the more it is prone to fermentation and decomposition. This produces not just wind but also chemicals known as metabolites, which then sit in contact with the bowel lining and can be absorbed."
He explained that a longer transit time has also been linked to bowel cancer, gallstones, colonic polyps and haemorrhoids.
And if you want to measure your transit time at home, Prof Veysey explained that all you need to do is swallow a handful of raw sweetcorn kernels and look out for the yellow kernels in your bowel movement.
He added that it should be somewhere between eight and 24 hours.
The expert said if you want to improve your bowel habit try increasing your fibre and fluids intake, exercising regularly and most importantly 'when your colon calls, you should listen'.
Elsewhere in poo chat, Dr Karan Rajan recently revealed there may actually be a scientific reason why men spend such a long time on the loo.
Responding to a TikTok user's claim that the reason why women take less than five minutes on the toilet is because unlike men, their poo doesn’t hit their G-spot, the doctor alleged that this theory could in fact be true, and that it was even possible for men to experience a feeling of ‘poo-phoria’ when grappling with a particularly large load.
He explained: "The prostate, often referred to as the male G-spot, is a gland that sits just in front of the rectum. So a particularly large bowel movement may stimulate this land, leading to 'poo-phoria'".
The more you know, eh?
Lisa McLoughlin