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THE
POWER OF POOP
Whether cultivating their muscles or minds, people have always sought to be faster, stronger, smarter. To achieve peak excellence, athletes and great thinkers have both resorted to various performance boosters.
However, you do not need to take anything to do better, whether in sports or academia. In fact, you need to give up something.
According to a new study, the key to enhanced brain and muscle power is pooping.
Emptying your large intestine has a significant effect on how well your body performs. Research has revealed that, not only does pooping help your muscle performance, but it also sharpens your mind.
Researchers are not exactly sure about why this effect happens, but it is most likely because your body allocates its limited resources to where they are most needed. In any case, the discovery could affect both athletic training and treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
This result should not really surprise anybody. To put it as politely as possible—just recall the powerful feeling of accomplishment after a particularly successful bathroom visit.
The poop research was published recently in the journal Sports Medicine and Health Science. It has long been known that having healthy bowel movements significantly benefits body health.
Being constipated, for instance, has been shown to reduce brain function; it can make you forgetful and slow thinking. Clearly, there is some basic connection between your brain and your butt.
Could the opposite be true as well, then? If not being able to poop makes you dull and sluggish, could healthy bowel function make you smarter and faster?
To find out, the research team — led by biochemist Chen-chan Wei of the University of Taipei hired 13 triathletes for their tests because these athletes are required to compete in three completely different sports, an immense physical and mental challenge.
They measured the triathletes’ physical performance three times. Initially, they checked how the athletes did without having pooped recently.
Then, they waited for the athletes to have a normal bowel movement before doing the performance test.
Finally, the researchers gave the athletes a laxative and measured their performance after they had completely emptied their plumbing, so to speak.
The results were pretty astonishing. More than two-thirds of the athletes experienced a measurable increase in their physical results after a normal poop.
After the laxative, they all did better.
But what about brain function?
For this test, the triathletes underwent the same “no poop, regular poop, laxative” regimen as before. But instead of a physical test, they had to do a Stroop test. It is the one where you might be asked to choose the word “red,” but the word is colored green.
In the end, the triathletes pretty much repeated the results of the physical test. Nine of them did much better after just a regular poop, and all of them were more mentally sharp after the laxative treatment.
So, what does all this mean? According to the researchers, it reveals a couple of things about our brains and digestive tracts.
First of all, it demonstrates that doing well in sports or physical labor is not just about your strength. It has just as much to do with your brain.
Chia-hua Kuo of the University of Taipei explains, “When you exercise, especially long-distance exercise, your brain sends large numbers of commands to your muscles. Whether or not you can continue muscle contractions does not really just depend on whether your muscles have used all their energy; it is whether your brain is able to keep challenging your muscles.”
Perhaps more importantly, it shows that the current condition of your digestion may directly affect your brain’s and therefore your muscles’ performance.
Why that happens is not yet completely clear, but the researchers believe it is a fairly simple matter of resource allocation.
Digesting food and moving the resulting waste through your digestive tract requires a lot of energy.
After you visit the bathroom before a physical or mental task, your body can reassign all that gut effort elsewhere. All of a sudden, you may find yourself doing better at whatever you try.
These results may help athletes in their training and could also advance the treatment of conditions like Parkinson’s.
However, the research team warns that you should not take laxatives before a competition or a college exam, for obvious reasons, but you just might want to visit the bathroom beforehand.
Says Professor Kuo, “Our spirit is not only inside the skull but also in other parts. And the rectum is also part of the brain’s domain.”
SOURCE: oddee.com
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