Femi Kusa
When IAM asked the question, I ask a counter question: What is the water closet designed for? Is it for stool to sink into the water, probably dissolve in it, and then be flushed away towards the septic tank? Or, is it for the poor stool to float and remain afloat, unyielding, despite several flushings? If my counter question does not resolve the question, I switch the table around and present myself as the enquirer.
So, if my bowels empty once in three days or twice in one week, and I notice that my abdomen is bloated, that I am belching and farting, if I feel full when I eat small meals, even snacks, that I have tummy aches, that my stool is hard, tormenting to evacuate, smells awfully and floats, sometimes requiring about three or more flushings to free the water closet (wc) of it…and I take some herbal medicines which clear all these problems, and my stool begins to sink and then disappear with the first flush of the water closet…which is the better and healthier stool to have…the stool that sinks or the stool that floats?
This was the tongue twisting brain storming of sort I had last week when a member of the KUSA GREEN PASTURE chat group called me in respect of the cancer challenge of her high school classmate.
Our discussion quite naturally drifted to the observation about a decade or more ago by the British Royal College of Surgeons that DEATH BEGINS SLOWLY BUT SURELY IN THE COLON. And one way to learn if death is on the way, slowly or quickly, is to learn and to listen to the language which the intestine or better still, the digestive system, is speaking everyday.
For it speaks, loud and clear, in the frequency of the stool, duration, the colour, the shape, whether it sinks in the water closet or whether it floats.
An acquaintance of mine, a tiler who cares too little about the language of the body, called me on the telephone sometime last year to frantically announce that he was dying. He had been having some difficulties with his bowels for some time.
By the time he called, he had been unable to evacuate his bowels for about 10 days. The stool was so hard that each attempt he made to force it out threatened to “tear” his anus. As he was a man who had no respect for women, I teased him about whether he now appreciated what it was taking them to populate the earth, and if he would respect them henceforth.
As he had no money for the hospital, I advised him about what he could immediately do to help himself, before he would address the lifestyle questions which caused his problem. He was to heat the handle of a teaspoon and allow it to cool.
Then, he was to place it about a quarter of an inch beside the stool head, strain a little and scoop out some stool cake. He was to repeat this process a number of times until the soft stool would appear which he could naturally void.
As much as possible, he was to avoid plunging the spoon handle into rectal tissue as this could cause an injury and infection. If he found the spoon handle discomforting or unhelpful, he may use an index finger.
But this would pose the problem, later, of deodorising the finger and keeping the nail bed free of germs, especially if a good deodorising agent was not immediately available. Using the finger does help us to appreciate how toxic and smelly fecal matter can be, why the bowels need our help to make their job less tedious and killing.
For deodorising the finger after this therapy is not all about washing it with scented soap; it is about killing billions of germs the finger may have picked up and which may keep reproducing their kinds through binary fusion. The first time I rescued myself from this experience, I got rid of the odour with the help of powerful essential plant oils!
Should stools float?
If I have to pointedly answer this question, I would say stools should sink. But I recognise that not all floating stools are signs of trouble brewing in the bowels.Normal stool does not float or stick to the side of the water closet plate.
Sometimes, however, normal stool may float. It may, for example, when a person is trying to prevent weight gain with the use of food supplements which block fat absorbtion. One of these supplements which was popular in the 1980s and 1990s was CHITOSAN.
It blocks the absorbtion of fat in the intestine. Such blocked fat would be caught in the stool or surround it. We know that fat floats on water. In the water closet stool with an overload of unprocessed fat would cause a buoy which would make the stool to float.
This condition is not degenerative and can be reversed as soon as dietary fat is well metabolised into energy. In this case, floated stool does not speak the language of disease.
But it may be ,where the stool is fat embalmed because the pancreas is not producing enough enzymes to digest fat, or if the liver does not produce enough bile salts for this purpose, or if the liver is producing, but enough bile does not get into the digestive process because of a blockage in the bile ducts.
This may present a pain in the upper right abdomen where palpation of the liver may reveal a tender and inflamed liver. Blockage of pancreatic juice flow to the intestine can also hamper efficient digestion and predispose the stool to changes.
Foods with high levels of insoluble fiber may cause the stool to float because this type of dietary fiber traps a lot of gas which, like air sacs in the stool, induce floating.
In people with lactose intolerance or gluten sensitivity challenges, dietary high fiber may cause this challenge as well. Lactose intolerance is the inability to tolerate or digest lactose, a sugar found in milk. While children may have the enzyme to deal with lactose, many adults cannot handle it.
As they cannot digest lactose, the sugar ferments with the bowels, releasing gas. The situation is compounded when germs fall upon fermenting lactose, adding to the intestinal insults the poisons from the wastes products of their own metabolism.
Gluten intolerance arises when the digestive tract cannot easily handle gluten, a protein found in some grains and in wheat. Gluten damages the lining of the intestine of such people. The damage is worse with the consumption of genetically modified wheat, which is grown and sold world wide today.
Scientists in the United States modified wheat from about the 1980s to make it more resistant to pests and increase yield per acre. The damage wheat does to the intestinal lining may lead to malabsorbtion problems. In this case, the intestine does not process food well, and the stool may be filled with fat or gas or both.
As stated earlier, stool colour, shape, size, texture and smell may help to determine what is going on in the intestine. They may be informing us that something has been added to the diet, or that the body has added something new to the stool, or that there have been changes in chemical substances normally present in the stool.
For example, when I first began to drink liquid chlorophyll, my stool was all green. That wasn’t a question of too much bile salts released by the liver as though a dam had broken. Whenever I slowed down on liquid chlorophyll, the green stool abated.
A high vegetable diet sometimes causes the stool to green up as does very Transit time which prevents proper mixing of bile salts with food.
A black smooth may be frightening. But it may be no more than the result of the intake of a large amount of iron or a medicine such as bismuth. In this case, the body may be trying to cream off excess iron to prevent organ damage,especially to the liver.
A high iron load, which may be picked up in a Feratin blood level test, is a likely cause for body pains which may refuse to yield to common pain killers. With iron, menstruating women are luckier than men who may need to make blood donations once or twice a year to keep their blood and tissue iron levels within normal range.
Sometimes, the appearance of black stool may signify bleeding high up in the digestive tract. Black stool caused by iron pills must be distinguished from black stools which arise from bleeding , say in the stomach or upper sections of the small intestine. The former are not sticky and smelly.
The latter may be. These are sometimes called black tarry stools or melena. Many people do not check the toilet paper after they clean up, to see what their stool is telling them. Luckily, they may catch one or two messages if they find the stool sticking to the water closet plate or floating.
The black tarry stool smells, besides. This is because, as the blood travels down the intestine to the rectum for evacuation through the anus, digestive enzymes react with the blood.
When blood in the stool presents a maroon or red colour, this is very likely because the bleeding which produced it occured downstream in the digestive tract, and digestive enzymes did not have the opportunity of a field day to digest it.
As with green drinks and green stool, the red factors in food may also give rise to red or dark red stool. Some of the foods to watch out for in this regard are beetroot and beet tops and the antioxidant red berries. In the 1990s, I enjoyed a proprietary blend of green, red and blue herbs.
About 45 green plants were milled to powder and named ALKALIVE GREENS, and targeted at the alkaline food market. Alkalive red we’re all sorts of berries targeted at the antioxidant market in particular for good vision. As for alkalive blue, it was a magnesium- dense recipe for the nerves, restful sleep and to calm hyperactivity.
The red easily made the stool red. I guess this was because the body required some time to adjust itself for maximum uptake of these plant chemicals. For the stool colours often disappeared with time
What about the gray stool? The presentation suggests that there is little or no bile in the stool. This may be because of an obstruction of the bile flow from the gall bladder in the liver.
It requires prompt investigation, lest it be a sign of gall bladder stone or a tumour barricade. Gall bladder stones are easier to deal with . What it takes to dissolve the stones may be chanka piedra, lecithin, Jerusalem artichoke etc.
If insufficiency of bile flow causes gray stool, which may float because of the large presence of fat, yellow stool may be the outcome of pancreatic insufficiency. Normally, the pancreas which is in the left chamber of the upper abdomen(the liver is on the right) produces digestive enzymes which are sent to the intestine, to continue the digestion of days, carbohydrates and proteins.
The pancreas may be inflamed for a number of reasons, including infections and alcohol abuse, for example. A blockage of the supply route of the pancreas may also not be ruled out. An outcome of these scenarios may be CELIAC DISEASE, in which undigested fat appears in the stool as a yellow, greasy and smelly substance.
How long, how soon
The health of the intestine, small and big, determines how long we would live or how soon we shall die. I agree with the British Royal College of Surgeons that…”death begins slowly but surely in the colon”. There are more germs in every stool length of the middle finger than the 100 trillion cells in an average adult human body.
It is, therefore, not surprising that mother nature stations about 75 percent of the body’s immune capacity in the digestive system. I find, also intriguing, that large percentage of the receptors of the Endocannabinol system for CBD oil or Endocannabidiol is stationed in the intestine.
The Endocannabinol system, recently discovered , has been described as the master system of the human body. This suggests that CBD oil is a crucial remedy for intestinal disturbances. To normalise stool configurations, it should go well with herbs and food supplements which have kept the digestive system going on for hundreds of years among all races, according to their folklores.
They are too many to list here. Always, as the need arises, they are mentioned in www.olufemikusa.com. Nevertheless, I will happily mention a new recipe IAM trying out. The foundation supplement is Maria Treben bitters, a formula of herb combinations from a gentleman who died aged 104, following a horse riding fall.
To one tablespoonful of it in a glass of warm water, I add one or two tablespoonfuls of liquid chlorophyll, one tablespoonful of lime juice and one of apple cider vinegar. Then I add the contents of one capsule of cayenne pepper.
I sip one third of the glass before breakfast, one third over breakfast and the remainder after breakfast. Over lunch, when I have the time for one, I add a pinch of prayer leaf powder (good also for the liver and kidneys) to the meal alongside turmeric and marigold flower powder. Dinner goes to fenugreek, pawpaw leaf powder and spirulina.
It is natural to want to know which other herbs can address some of the problems mentioned above. Carqueja is good for the congested, subnormal liver. Chanka piedra is good for breaking gall bladder stones. Milk thistle is reputable for protecting the liver. Lecithin helps combat fatty liver.
Anti viral herbs, such as red marine algae, go for hepatitis. Organic coffee enema cleans up from the liver to the colon.Burdock root, purdaco are in the liver arsenal. Among well known proprietary blends are Amazon digestion support, shake off, thomatococus DANIELLI or prayer leaf are choice herbs as well.
When it comes to protein indigestion, which creates a sludge that may cause food sensitivities, pawpaw leaf can come to the rescue. So does papain tablets. Papain is an extract of pawpaw leaf which chemically resembles pepsin, the body’s natural protein digesting enzyme.
Occult blood, evidence of ulceration and bleeding in the colon or elsewhere seen sometimes only with the aid of a microscope, response to pay ‘d Arco and NIMOSA pudica. Pawpaw leaf juice which stops massive haemorraging of dengue fever, a semblance of Ebola fever by stimulating the production of more platelet cells, has also helped to stop intestinal bleeding.
Where the patient is anaemic, jobelyn has been shown even among. jehovah witnesses to significantly improve all parameters of blood hematocrit within 24 hours.
I always give the task of converting inflammation to curcumin 2000x, healing to vitamin c, vitamin A, vitamin E, zinc, essential fatty acids and bioflavonoids. Bromelain, cayenne and chanka piedra are anti pain.Nowadays, I always crown them all up with CBD oil. The yorubas say The big masquerade, the general Simo is the last to leave the shrine