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IBS Expert: 7 Types of Diarrhea and What They Mean · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you've had chronic diarrhea for months or years and nobody can tell you why, one of the biggest clues may be sitting in the toilet every day.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because IBS lumps a lot of very different looking bowel movements into the same bucket, even though watery, green, yellow, greasy, very mucusy, pale, or bloody stool can all point in completely different directions.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if nobody's paying attention to those differences, you can keep treating diarrhea while missing the thing that tells you what actually needs to be investigated.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Brooke Kane.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a registered nurse and functional medicine practitioner specializing in IBS relief.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to walk you through seven types of diarrhea, what each one can mean, and what I would look at next based on what you're actually seeing.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And stay with me through number seven because that one moves out of the gut health category completely.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the type most of my clients know very well.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is the diarrhea that is basically water.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It comes on fast, sometimes gives you almost no warning before you need a bathroom.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: If it happens once with a stomach bug or after something clearly didn't agree with you, that's one thing.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's watery explosive diarrhea that is happening chronically long term, that tells me something important right away.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: A colonoscopy is probably not going to give you the answer.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: A colonoscopy is good at looking for structural problems, things that you can actually see, like polyps, tumors, ulcers, bleeding, sores, or obvious inflammation.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: But chronic watery diarrhea can come from problems a camera cannot see.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And most standard lab work is not going to tell you which bacteria have overgrown, which protective bacteria are depleted, whether bile is irritating your colon, whether digestion is functioning properly, or what is happening in the intestinal environment.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you already had the colonoscopy and all the labs and everything came back normal, that doesn't surprise me.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Watery explosive diarrhea tells me that we need to look at the function, not structure.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That means more comprehensive testing that actually looks at what is happening inside of your gut.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Green diarrhea usually tells me that bile is moving through the digestive tract too quickly to be fully changed before it comes out.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Bile starts out very yellow green, and under normal circumstances, it gets modified as stool moves through the intestines until the stool becomes brown.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if things are moving too quickly, that process does not have enough time to finish.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it stays green.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: One green bowel movement can happen from food coloring, iron, or maybe something you ate.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're repeatedly having green diarrhea with urgency, especially after meals, I'm thinking about bile handling.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is bile reaching the colon too quickly?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is it irritating the colon and triggering urgency?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Did this start after having your gallbladder removed?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is bile not being reabsorbed properly higher up in the digestive tract?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because if green diarrhea keeps happening, I do not just want to know that your gut is moving fast.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know whether bile is one of the reasons it's moving fast.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yellow diarrhea takes the bile question a step further.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it still means that things are moving too quickly for bile to be fully processed.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But when yellow stool keeps showing up after meals, especially if you have a history of gallbladder problems or if your gallbladder's been removed, I start thinking much more seriously about how bile is being released and handled.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if that yellow stool is greasy, floating, foul smelling, or hard to flush, now fat digestion becomes part of the picture too.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if somebody tells me my stool's yellow every single day, I'm not interested in another generic IBS label.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Consistently yellow diarrhea points me toward bile and fat digestion.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is a much more useful direction than treating the color as random and handing you another anti-diarrhea pill.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I've had one of these patterns for months or years and nobody's ever explained why, there's a link below to learn more about what I do.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the women I work with have already done the colonoscopy, blood work, medications, diets, supplements.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they've worked with a functional medicine practitioner or a naturopath and they're still planning their lives around bathrooms.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we stop repeating the same basic workup and the same mistakes, and we actually look at what is happening inside the gut.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: If that sounds like you, check the link below because the next few stool patterns point us in very different directions.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: If your stool regularly looks greasy or oily, floats, smells terrible, and seems impossible to flush, this is no longer primarily a transit speed problem.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: This points me toward fat malabsorption.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The fat you eat is supposed to be broken down and absorbed.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: If it keeps ending up in the toilet instead, something in that process is failing.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That could mean there's not enough bile getting where it needs to go, the pancreas is not producing enough digestive enzymes, or the small intestine is not absorbing fat properly.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now the stakes get bigger because if you're not absorbing fat well, you may also be struggling to absorb fat-soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, E, and K.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Greasy floating stool tells me that I need to investigate digestion and absorption, not just diarrhea.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your intestines naturally make some mucus.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So seeing a little once in a while is not automatically a problem.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're repeatedly seeing strings, globs, or a lot of mucus mixed in loose stool, that tells me the intestinal lining is being irritated.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That can happen with infections, bacterial overgrowth, inflammatory conditions, or things that keep irritating the intestinal wall.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So if you keep seeing mucus, the useful question is not how do I get rid of the mucus?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: It is what keeps irritating my gut lining enough that my body keeps producing so much of this mucus.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: That means I want inflammation and the intestinal environment looked at, not just how many times a day are you going to the bathroom.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: This one moves us out of the usual IBS conversation.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Normal stool gets much of its brown color from bile.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if your stool repeatedly becomes very pale, gray, white, or clay colored, I start thinking about whether bile is actually reaching the intestine the way that it should.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And now the possible problem can involve the liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, or your pancreas.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So this is one of those patterns where more advanced microbiome testing is not the first thing that I care about.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Repeated pale or clay-colored stool can mean that bile is not getting where it needs to go.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that deserves a medical workup, especially if it is happening with dark urine, yellowing of the skin or eyes, significant abdominal pain, or feeling really unwell.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And number seven is where the priority completely changes.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: If your stool is truly black and tar-like, or you're seeing obvious blood mixed into diarrhea, this is not a let's work on your gut microbiome problem first.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now the question is, where is this bleeding come from?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Bright red blood can come from lower in the digestive tract.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Black tary stool means that blood has been digested before it came out, which can point toward bleeding higher up in the system.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, this is not where I want you buying another probiotic, changing your diet, waiting two weeks to see what happens.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Blood or truly black tarry stool needs medical evaluation.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's one more clue I want you to pay attention to, and it has nothing to do with what the stool looks like.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is when it's happening.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: If diarrhea repeatedly wakes you up out of a deep sleep, I do not treat that like ordinary IBS.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: If your bowels are dragging you out of bed at two or three in the morning over and over, especially if you're also losing weight, you're seeing blood, you're having significant pain, running a fever, or noticing in a major change from your usual pattern, that deserves a proper workup.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: The timing itself can tell us the investigation needs to go somewhere different.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Chronic diarrhea is not just one thing: watery, green, yellow, greasy, very mucusy, pale, bloody stool.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: These are giving you different clues, and those clues should change what gets investigated next.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: That is why I don't like throwing every woman with diarrhea into the same IBS bucket and giving her the same plan.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you've had chronic diarrhea for months or years in your colonoscopy and all the lab work keep coming back normal, don't assume that the investigation is over.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the pattern.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: If the stool pattern points towards something functional that the colonoscopy and standard labs were never designed to find, repeating the same basic workup is probably not going to suddenly give you the answer.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is where more comprehensive gut testing can become very useful.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know what organisms are present, which protective bacteria are missing, what digestion looks like.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: I want to look at your short chain fatty acids, what inflammation looks like, what does the intestinal environment look like, and whether the gut is actually functioning the way that it's supposed to, because the stool tells us where to look.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then the right testing tells us what is actually going wrong.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that is how you finally get somewhere more useful than everything looks normal, you just have IBS.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: If one of these patterns has become your normal and nobody has ever explained why, there's a link below to learn more about working with me.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have already done stool testing and all the lab work, CT scans, colonoscopies, and somebody told you that everything looked normal, watch this video next.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'll walk you through some of the truths about chronic diarrhea that your doctors aren't telling you.