Robert Cran Clinic blog

Many patients in clinic are bemused by the persistent interrogations about the consistency of their stools.  There is a very important reason for this questioning:  the stools are a very important guide to, among other things, the state of your digestive system.

Nowadays, meaning the last 60 years or so, people have been brow-beaten into a number of belief-systems about stools.

Follow up:

Read more>>

Constipation

Now that people have  news and information  in full multimedia polychrome, paradoxically viewpoints and belief-systems can often become either black or white, with no shades even of grey in between.

And so it is with stools.  Either one has constipation or one is "fine" at one end of the belief-spectrum.

Diarrhoea

At the other end of the spectrum is diarrhoea.  Of course, diarrhoea can be a serious aspect of a number of vigorous, acute diseases.  Hence its notoriety and with good historical reason.

However in normal urban environments of South Africa  it is not normally anything so contagious, not unless you have just arrived from somewhere exotic and have really caught something quite unwholesome.  Or unless you have eaten food that has gone off through improper storage.

In between is an extreme

There is also an in-between belief in the somewhat loose stool.  This belief system started around the 1970s when some "health" writers were addressing a constipated market.

A notion that gained some popularity from this movement was that a person should eat lots of beans and whole-grains in order to achieve rapid peristalsis.  The resultant rather soft stools were taken as an indication that your bowels were working, in distinction to the other extreme, constipation again.

What has this to do with summer?

A number of summer pathologies arise from eating habits which are thought to be "healthy" but which in fact are not so great.  One common causative factor in Summerheat attacks is the presence of an injured digestive system due to over-consumption of cold and/or raw food.  This more often than not shows up in stools that are less firm than those of an optimal digestive system.

The dictum "Cold injures the Spleen", means "Cold and raw foods can be bad for your digestive system".  This is typically what many folk undergo in summer, believing raw food and lots of raw fruit to be somehow "healthy".  That is the theory.  In practice the digestive weakness that results from regular over-consumption of cold and raw food shows up very readily in the exact texture of a person's stools.

For links on this topic please visit my Useful links for patients page and select "Food and eating" from the menu (pun certainly not my fault) on the left.

In simple, physiological terms the cell walls of uncooked plant matter are not broken down in the human digestive system; nutrients within those cell walls are simply excreted with the stools.

Stools which are too smooth, or porridgy, or easily become so are a measure of the need for a stronger digestive system.  This need can often show up in summer, the very time of year when folk want to cool down with a spot of cold food.  Like now,down here in the southern hemisphere.

When overly soft or porridgy stools are telling us that the digestive system is running under par, then it is time to strengthen it with the correct herbs.  The usual procedure applies:

• Right diagnosis (the doctor)
• Right formula (the doctor again)
• Right compliance (the patient)

Cold entering the body rapidly transforms into Heat

The irony is that attempts to cool down by ingesting cold foods actually achieve the opposite.  The easiest example to identify is ice cream:

Ever noticed that, when you take an ice-cream to cool yourself down in summer, you only feel cool for a couple of minutes?  And that you shortly afterwards begin to feel hot again?  Even maybe hotter than before?  Then you have experienced the dictum:  "Cold, once it enters the body, rapidly transforms into Heat".

Right compliance:  how to eat really cool in summer

These two dictums can guide you into a way of eating in summer that is more wholesome:

"Cold injures the Spleen", and

"Cold, once it enters the body, rapidly transforms into Heat"

In other words, eat warm, cooked food as the basic and you will be both better nourished and in better balance in many respects, including Hot and Cold.

This is not necessarily to be taken as a total prohibition on eating salads and raw food.  In moderation, meaning true moderation (!), it's OK.  Heck, I also like an ice cream once in a while; I just don't fool myself that it's going to cool me down or be good for me.  It will make me feel hotter for a while, and it does bloat the belly and spoil the appetite, etc, etc, etc...  But once in a while, as long as the norm is three hot meals per day.

How to restore your digestion

On the other hand, if you regularly experience stools that are:

• watery
• porridgy
• soft with a smooth contour, like moist potter's clay

then you really must:

• avoid all cold and raw food
• eat three, regular, hot meals per day
• preferably also take properly prescribed herbs to restore digestive strength more efficiently

That way your stools will become firmer, not too hard, with a contour showing crevices:  this is what normality should be but often isn't.

The Last Emperor

The preceding partly explains one incident in the film "The Last Emperor":

The princling lived in the inner sanctum of the palace and could not be seen by most mortals including his own doctor.  Therefore a servant was sent with a potty containing the Princling's most recent stools, carrying them through many layers of the palace to an outer layer where the doctor was waiting.

The doctor looked at the stools.  He smelt them.   And he shook them in the potty and listened to their sound.

In a situation where this was almost the only diagnostic evidence available to him, the Princling's doctor in those days had to make the most of every small detail of his patient's stools.