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.
#Black baby poop 5 months professional#
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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