‘Blue poop challenge’ aims to help people better understand their gut health
Something this silly maybe shouldn’t irritate me so much, but here we are.
It’s not the concept I have a problem with. You eat a couple of muffins with blue food colouring baked into them for breakfast, then wait and see how long it takes for your dump to be blue looking. When it does, you’re invited to go to a website and take a quiz about the health of your guts and learn a few things. Not a bad idea, honestly. If it happens too soon or takes a really long time, maybe you’ve started down the road to detecting a serious problem or at least found that perhaps there are some things about your lifestyle you may want to consider changing.
But if all of that is fine, then what’s your problem?
Well, let’s see if we can spot the moment when the blind kid loses his mind.
Berry says the #bluepoopchallenge is a culmination of the research, calling for people to eat muffins containing blue food colouring to monitor their own gut transit times.
“It’s meant to be fun, to raise the awareness to the importance of gut health and our microbiome, and to get people thinking about how we can eat the right foods for our own unique biology to maximize our health,” Berry said.
The challenge is simple and can be done by anyone, Berry says.
And…stop!
Can be done by anyone? I hope that when I get banned from TapTapSee, Aira and Be My Eyes in the same day that this nice lady is going to go to bat for me with all of them. Or maybe she’s offering to fly to my house and inspect it personally. I don’t know. But what I do know is that neither the eyes in my head nor the toilet in my head are equipped with the accessibility features to pull this off, so if I’m really concerned, I guess I’m screwed.
To be fair to her and these Blue Poop people, they’re not alone here. So much of the monitor yourself business relies on sight and nobody ever thinks about it. If you ever want to turn your smart, articulate doctor into a deer in the headlights with a speech impediment, point out the obvious fact that you are a blind person when they ask you if you’ve noticed odd colours or blood in your urine or stool. The subject can’t be dropped quickly enough, and it winds up leaving what can potentially be a huge hole in the quality of the care you’re given.
I don’t know how you fix this, but it absolutely needs fixing. We may not want all of the same people on the case necessarily, but we certainly need all of the wasted energy that’s gone into trying to reinvent or replace the white cane over the decades to be thrown at this. Lives may depend on it.
