Does Coffee Make You Poop

Does coffee make you poop?

Coffee is a big thing these days.  Believe us, we spend our lives writing about it.  Every day in the UK, we drink roughly 95 million cups of coffee.  Daaanngg, that’s a lot!  That’s nearly four million cups an hour.  Or 66,000 cups per minute.  Yep, we worked it out, it’s 1,099 cups per second. And so the burning question: Does coffee make you poop?

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Now for the interesting thing.  If you google “does coffee make you poop” you get 12 million results!  It doesn’t take an Einstein with fecal urgency to realise that there is a correlation between coffee and c**ps.

(We’re also putting money on the fact a large percentage of you are perched on the porcelain throne while you’re reading this)

What are the benefits of drinking coffee?

Apart from waking you up and making you more energetic, caffeine offers you these benefits:

1. It improves your mood and boosts your mental function

Caffeine increases dopamine production, dopamine being one of your “happiness hormones”.  Low dopamine levels are linked with depression.  In addition to this, studies have also shown that caffeine consumption can help improve long-term memory.

2. It boosts your physical performance

A study on athletes found that taking caffeine generally allowed athletes to train harder and longer, with less fatigue compared with those who didn’t take caffeine.  Try a double espresso before your next workout and feel the difference!

It can also reduce post-workout recovery times, with less aches and pains in the following days.

Looking for a coffee specifically formulated to improve your physical performance? Try our coffee for runners. Word of caution – if you’re new to the world of coffee, don’t let the first time you try it be right before a race! Use it in a training run. You don’t want to attribute your new PB to the fact that you were running for the toilet.

high caffeine coffee for runners
Our Boostr Coffee comes in a high caffeine blend designed to give you a performance boost.

3. Caffeine may help protect against Alzheimer’s and other diseases

A few studies have demonstrated that caffeine can reduce inflammation in the brain, and prevents the build-up of the “tau” protein which have been linked with Alzheimer’s.

So, why does coffee make you poop?

One study found that 29% of people needed a trip to the crapper after a cup of coffee.

No one seems to know exactly what causes this, but there are a few factors that might boost the urge to poop.

  1. Your gender makes a difference
  2. Caffeine content gives you a boost
  3. Decaf coffee also makes you poop
  4. Drinking makes you want a dump
  5. Your body clock
  6. Pavlovian conditioning
  7. Hormones
  8. Dairy and sweeteners

1: Are men and women affected equally?

No, not everyone gets the same post-coffee bog-rush.

One study found that 29% of poop-participants got an increase urge to sh*t within a short 20 minutes of drinking a coffee.

Strangely, women were more affected, with a whopping 53% heading to the crapper post-coffee.

This was only a small study though, but the numbers were big enough to have some serious significance.

There also aren’t enough studies to know whether this symptom fades away over time with regular coffee drinkers.

2: Does caffeine in coffee make you poop?

Caffeine is a natural stimulant that’s found in in the fruit, leaves or beans of coffee, tea, cacao and guarana plants, amongst other things.  It’s a mild stimulant that boosts your alertness and energy levels, and is absorbed roughly 45 minutes after consuming. It peaks in your bloodstream anywhere between 15 minutes to 2 hours.  In its raw form it’s a bitter white powder, and if you want the full technical term for it, it’s called 1,3,7 trimethylxanthine. 

There’s approximately 95mg in a standard cup of black coffee.

If you’re still on the toilet and looking for something to do, check out this article about how much caffeine there is in a cup of coffee.

Several studies have shown that caffeine can activate contractions in your colon and intestinal muscles.  You can see them here and here. Read at your risk, the articles mentions “sphincter contractions” and “voluntary squeezes”.  Eww.

When your colon contracts, it pushes yesterday’s meal towards the rectum which is the final departure lounge before it heads out.

Caffeine also makes your colon 60% more active than water, and 23% more active than decaf coffee.  Check it out here.

But other studies have shown that decaf coffee can also make you need to poop.

Let’s explore this a bit more.

3: Does decaf coffee make you poop?

So, it’s not just the caffeine in coffee that makes you empty your guts.

There are a couple of things in coffee that both stimulate your bowels.  These compounds are Chlorogenic Acids and N-alkanoyl-5-hydroxytryptamides.

Both these compounds stimulate the production of stomach acid.  The stomach acid helps to churn food and move it quickly through your gut.

Just FYI, decaf coffee does contain caffeine.

4: Drinking (anything) can make you need a #2

The very act of having a drink can trigger a handy function you never knew your body had, called the gastrocolic reflex. This activates your colon (the large intestine) which makes you need the toilet.  This is the same reflex that occurs after you eat a meal.

Obviously a coffee isn’t always a meal (although there are enough times where it’s been a good substitute) but it has the same effect.

5: Your body clock can make you poop

This one might not be too popular, but there’s a chance that it’s just a coincidence that you need to answer nature’s call.

Your bowels are regular kind of things, and when you first wake up, they can be twice as active compared to when you’re asleep, so they’re ready to spring into action. Get the biological scoop here.

Your “body clock” or circadian rhythm, helps to regulate a lot of what your body does, including when it decides it needs to poo.  There’s a wonderfully prudishly titled article called “The timing of defecation within the sleep-wake cycle” which covers this in detail.  Read it for a laugh, or read it because it’s actually interesting.

6: It might be all in your head (Pavlovian conditioning)

Say for example you’ve woken up at the same time for the last couple of decades, had a coffee, and then gone to do a #2, the very act of drinking coffee can elicit a physical response in anticipation of what’s going to happen next.  Some people even start needing to poop as soon as they smell coffee, or even hear the sound of their coffee machine.

This response is similar to the famous Pavlov’s Dogs experiment, where dogs were conditioned to salivate as soon as they heard a bell because they thought they were about to get some food.

7: Hormones might be helping

Coffee can increase levels of the hormone gastrin, which does the same thing to your gut as caffeine and helps push food through your bowels.

This is another reason why decaf coffee can also make you poop.  One study found that drinking regular or decaffeinated coffee raised gastrin by 2.3 and 1.7 times respectively when compared to drinking water.

Another study found that drinking coffee also raised levels of the digestive hormone cholecystokinin. This hormone can increase activity of food heading through your colon, and can also help trigger the gastrocolic reflex. (see above)

8: Does milk in coffee make you poop?

Coffee in its natural freshly-brewed state is free of additives and preservatives, but roughly two-thirds of people add milk, cream, sweeteners, milk powder, sugar, or other additives to their coffee.

Milk or dairy might be one of the main culprits because it contains lactose, and according this this study nearly 65% of the world’s population can’t digest lactose properly.

People with a lactose intolerance can experience bloating, tummy cramps or diarrhoea shortly after consuming dairy.  Poop alert!

These things probably aren’t a factor in making you poop post-coffee

1: The warmth of coffee

Some people say that it’s the warmth of coffee that makes you need a dump.  But there is no known correspondence between drinking tea or soup, for example, and an increased urge to crap.

2: The acidity of coffee

One of the factors that gets a lot of discussion is the acidity of coffee.

Coffee beans naturally contain a lot of chlorogenic acid which is well known as a laxative.  But scientists are still researching what the real effects of this acid are.

And drinking a glass of orange juice, which is very acidic, doesn’t give you a sudden urge.

The Bottom Line – Does coffee make you poop?

Yes, coffee can make you poop, but it doesn’t affect everyone, and not everyone is affected the same way.

We suggest using it to your advantage, nothing like being a regular kind of guy!

If it’s a real problem, and you are literally running to the crapper after every cup, try playing around with the variables and see what’s causing it.

You’ll thank us later. Now, if you’re still on the toilet, get off and go do something useful.

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