Gatorade making my poop green?

Factual Questions
1

I drink quite a bit of Gatorade on the weekends while doing yard work, etc. I’ve noticed that every Monday morning visit to the toilet yields green poop. Any connection? (BTW, It’s not the dye in the Gatorade, I never touch the lemon-lime (green colored) flavor)

2

I’m going to guess that you drink purple colered Gatoraid.

Oddly there is something in purple colored drink, that turns one’s poo into a cool color of green. (OK maybe not cool, but it’s odd) I sent a question into Cecil a few weeks ago, asking why grape kool-aid turned your poo green.

Dan

3

I’ve had this happen to me as well. I think it’s a function of drinking so much of (any kind of) food dye. I drank an entire jug of “grape beverage” one hot summer day and had forest-green “kids” (which I then “dropped off at the pool”). Anyone who says food dye is 100% absorbed by the body neglects to tell you that megadoses will result in a rainbow latrine effect. Try eating just the red ones out of a bag of Skittles if you don’t agree.
This could also be the isotonic effect of losing and replacing electrolytes through sweat. Try regular water with .5 tsp of salt and a tablespoon of sugar rather than Gatorade. Same basic composition and it’s cheaper.

4

FD&C blue dye #1. You’ll find it in artificially colored blue, green, purple, and sometimes red (yes, red) drinks. Also in frostings, jello, etc. in that range of colors. In large quantities it can cause that disturbing green shade when it comes out the other end …

5

[slight hijack]
This may be TMI but…

I had the same problem with it turning up red instead of green. It was on and off for a few weeks. After worrying about it for a while, I almost got up the nerve to go to the doctor but then I realized what it was. I had been buying those huge vats of red licorice from COSTCO. Whenever I would run out, it would go away. Whenever I went to the store agian it would come back. Good thing I caught it before I saw the Doc!

6

On a partial side note my chemistry teacher this last year told us that if you were to ingest Bromo Blue, your urine would be blue. Also, if you ingested phenothalein then your urine would be black.

I wonder if anyone has ever compiled a list of how certain chemicals affect one’s bodily excretions. That would make for an interesting time in the chem lab. :wink:

7

Then there’s the B vitamin (I forget which one, B-12?) that makes your urine a bright, almost flourescent, orange.

9

Rabbi,

If I may be so bold as to suggest downloading and trying Netscape Navigator as your browser. I’m sure you’ll be pleased.

10

I get that from grape flavored beverages too (except grape juice, I mean ones that have a dye agent added to make them purple).

other flavors like fruit punch, orange, etc do not cause stool color changes.

11

But just as you mix blue paint and yellow paint to make green paint,
you can describe one colour as a mix of two others … well there are two types of colours

  1. spectral. Those that can be found in the rainbow or other spectrum. you can describe the colour as one frequency, or one wavelength, or the sum of a minimum of two other colours.

  2. nonspectral. eg brown. Those that cannot be found in the rainbow, and they cannot be described as a single frequency, and depending on your primary colours and choice of +ive (light, such as from lamps or pixels on a screen ) and -ve (eg paint and dye) system, may require three or more primary colours to describe reasonably accurately. These colours are white, with notches of the spectrum chopped out.