Does Your Poop Look Like This? (Signs You’re NOT Healthy)

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, we’re going to talk about poop shape and color, and address gut warning signs in your stool. Normal poop should be brown and sausage-shaped. Small, hard, pellet-shaped poop indicates that something may be wrong higher up in the digestive tract.

Soft stool indicates that you may have some missing microbes or food allergies. Pathogens can cause loose stool as your body tries to quickly eliminate them. Unfortunately, with diarrhea and liquid stool, good bacteria are also eliminated. Consume kefir or yogurt with blackberries to restore the good bacteria in your digestive tract.

Thin, pencil or cigar-shaped stool signifies a problem in the colon. This could mean the colon is impacted, you have many polyps, or there’s some obstruction in the bowels. You’d want to get this checked by a medical professional.

Normal stools should be brown in color. If you have a problem with your liver or you have thickened bile or bile sludge in the bile ducts, your poop will be light-colored or gray. Floating stool that is also light-colored further confirms this problem.
If your problem is linked to the pancreas, your stool will have a bad odor and may appear greasy. Rarely, this could be associated with cancer, but most of the time, it is caused by an overworked pancreas.

Black stool is often a sign of something more serious, usually caused by oxidized blood. Blueberries and blackberries can also cause black stool.
Beets can cause your stool to appear red. Hemorrhoids can cause red stool due to fresh blood. Collinsonia root is an excellent remedy for hemorrhoids. Green stool is usually caused by chlorophyll from vegetable consumption.

It’s not normal to poop once every 2 to 3 days. You should have a bowel movement 1 to 2 times daily.

Intermittent fasting is the most important thing you can do for your digestive tract. Frequent eating is very problematic and never allows your digestive system the chance to reset.

Incomplete digestion usually results from low stomach acid. Betaine hydrochloride is the best remedy for this problem.

Dr. Eric Berg DC Bio:Dr. Berg, age 60, is a chiropractor who specializes in Healthy Ketosis & Intermittent Fasting. He is the Director of Dr. Berg Nutritionals and author of the best-selling book The Healthy Keto Plan. He no longer practices, but focuses on health education through social media.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dr. Burke here again. Today we're going to show you what the shape of your poop can tell you about your health.
0:06.3	We're also going to talk about the color of your poop. And I know it's a disgusting topic, but this is very important because first of all, everyone poops and identifying what's going on with your poop.
0:16.1	You can tell what's going on with your entire digestion way before it shows up in a blood test. The most important
0:22.4	thing to understand is a stool sample. Okay, they come like this right here, these little containers.
0:28.6	Okay, you can see, if I open it up, you can see the stool sample right here. Okay, you can see this
0:35.3	right here and that's a little stool sample. That's my first joke. Don't worry,
0:39.7	I'm not going to quit my day job. Let's first talk about what does normal poop look like? It looks like
0:45.2	this. It's brown and it's shaped like a sausage. If the stool is these small little hard pellets
0:52.7	or little balls, this usually means that the transit time
0:56.5	or the time it took you to digest was a lot longer because something is wrong higher up in
1:02.5	this digestive tract. Now let's talk about if your stool is softer, not really form that well,
1:09.6	but it's not quite diarrhea. The most likely reason for this is that
1:12.9	you're missing microbes, because the microbes help you form this stool, and if they're not there,
1:19.7	it's going to be fragmented, and it's going to be soft. It also could be some food allergies.
1:24.1	Anytime your body has some type of allergy or some pathogen, food poison,
1:29.1	for example, your body is going to immediately get rid of it, either with a complete flush,
1:35.3	in which case your stool is going to be liquid or semi-liquid. Problem is when you have diarrhea,
1:40.9	it flushes all the good bacteria out as well. One of the things that
1:44.6	works really good is to start consuming blackberries with some kefir or yogurt. You can blend it up
1:51.9	to help put back in the microbes and it seemed to resolve it pretty quick. There's one more shape
1:57.4	I'm going to talk about. It's kind of a thin pencil or a cigar-shaped stool.
2:02.1	If this thinner stool is present, there's some type of problem in your colon.
	...

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