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Hello and welcome to the excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, March 27, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

We eat for a variety of reasons, most importantly, to sustain life. Unsurprisingly, the decisions we make about

what we consume can have a huge impact on our health. Equally important is how our bodies

eliminate the waste created by what we ingest. After all, what goes in must come out. Are there

hard and fast rules about what constitutes a healthy, let's just say it, poo?

Sean Gibbons, a microbiologist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle,

now joins us to discuss what bowel movement or a lack of them reveal about our health.

Thanks for joining me, Sean.

Thanks for having me, Dana.

I think we all have an idea about

what's normal for us, but how often should we be going? Is there an ideal frequency?

There's no hard and fast ideal frequency, I would say. Currently, clinically, there's a wide

range that's considered healthy, everything from, you know, three times a

week to three times a day is considered fairly normal. And that's very wide. But based on what we'll

talk about here soon, I would say maybe once every other day or a couple times a day is probably

where you want to be. That's kind of the Goldilocks zone.

You conducted a study last year that gave you insights into the effects of having a regular or irregular bowel movement in that effect on our gut microbiome. First, how many people

took part in this study and how were they categorized? So this was a large cohort of individuals from a scientific wellness company called Aravail,

and we had, you know, approximately three to four thousand people in this cohort.

...