Food Mass Transit

How long it takes food to get from one end to the other depends on gender and eating style. If you’re a vegetarian male, it should just be a day or two, though if you eat meat, it could end up being five days. Female vegetarians, also mostly one or two days, but those who eat meat are most likely looking at four days.

If it’s just 24, 36 hours, your daily stool weight, which is what’s flushing out all that excess estrogen and cholesterol, is probably going to hit that half-pound target—though if it’s a couple days, you’ll likely never make it.

Now, if you have a really good bathroom scale, you can measure stool weight directly, to see if you hit that half pound minimum—by, of course, weighing yourself before and after.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Dianne Moore.

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• Gear JS, Brodribb AJ, Ware A, Mann JI. Fibre and bowel transit times. Br J Nutr. 1981 Jan;45(1):77-82.
• Burkitt DP, Walker AR, Painter NS. Effect of dietary fibre on stools and the transit-times, and its role in the causation of disease. Lancet. 1972 Dec 30;2(7792):1408-12.

Image thanks to Fuzzy Gerdes via Flickr

• bowel movements
• cholesterol
• colon health
• constipation
• estrogen
• fiber
• hormones
• Plant-Based Diets
• stool size