That’s probably the most common.”īut the take home message, Gilger said, is that most colors, though possibly startling, are perfectly normal.Īllergies can also cause some bleeding, Lightdale said: “It could be that the baby’s immune system isn’t handling proteins in the diet very well, and they’re having an improper reaction. “The classic cause would be an ulcer,” Gilger said. And blood from injury occurring farther down in the small intestine or colon might come out looking bright red. If the injury comes from higher in the gastrointestinal tract - the stomach for example - the blood may have turned black by the time it reaches the diaper. Red or black stool can also be cause for concern. Known as “acholic stool,” this can indicate certain kinds of liver disease, in which the bile is not getting secreted effectively into the small intestine, or a narrowing of the system that carries bile down that path. A pale, clay or ivory-colored stool can mean a lack of bile. Of concern to doctors is the poop without color. “Some of that may be this somewhat undefinable thing.” It’s normal for formula-fed infants to have light brown, pasty poop, according to the Mayo Clinic, with a consistency that’s been compared to peanut butter.Īnd orange? “It probably is a combination of that particular baby’s bile, plus the bacteria, plus the milk,” Lightdale said. And it’s the bile that gives the poop the yellow or green color, along with bacteria that lives in the baby’s gut. One of its main functions is to neutralize acid in the stomach, Lightdale said. Bile is a substance that’s made in the liver, stored in the gallbladder and then secreted into the small intestine. “Then whatever nutrients are not needed are passed on into the large intestine or the colon.”Įnter bile. “That’s where all the absorption - the nutrients - are taken in,” explained Mark Gilger, pediatrician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital San Antonio. The smaller, digested pieces then migrate to the small intestine. Milk, once swallowed, travels to the sink of the stomach, where digestive juices begin the process of breaking it down. The gastrointestinal tract runs from the baby’s mouth to the anus. Healthy newborn poop colors can range between yellow, yellow-orange, yellow-green, green and various shades of brown. Often this will prompt doctors to make efforts to speed up the delivery using medication or surgery.Ī few days after birth, the poop starts to change. When this happens, the baby is in danger of inhaling the substance, which can result in damage to the lungs. In some cases, babies excrete meconium during labor. Its thickness and sticky consistency are believed to help seal fluids inside the baby until birth. “It’s a distinct stool that one never has again,” Lightdale said. This includes swallowed amniotic fluid, cellular debris and some blood. Meconium is a combination of the many secretions that have been building up inside the infant’s intestines while in utero. No parent will ever forget meconium - the black, tarry sludge - that just pours out like liquid asphalt during the first few days of life. “We call it stool-gazing instead of stargazing,” she said. As such, she spends a lot of professional time talking to parents about poop. Jenifer Lightdale is a pediatric gastroenterologist at UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center - a glorified plumber, she jokes. So I turned to the experts for some answers. No, something much more mysterious was going in our baby’s bowels. And to be clear, it’s not as if mom eats carrots, and the poop turns orange, or mom eats spinach, and it goes green. How is it, I wondered, while googling “baby poop green is it normal,” for the third time that day, that something as pure and unsullied as milk goes in, and this wild feast of color comes out. Yellow in one diaper, bright orange in another, and then… bright green? The glorious prism of colors existing in a single day’s worth of newborn poop. What we couldn’t have prepared for were the colors. “We call it stool-gazing instead of stargazing.”
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