Zoe challenges consumers to track personal gut transit times via blue food dye

19 May 2021 --- Personalized nutrition company Zoe is launching the Blue Poop Challenge to help consumers understand their individual gut transit times while normalizing the conversation around defecation.

By consuming muffins with blue food dye that turns feces blue-green, participants can track how quickly they process food, which is an indicator of overall gut health.

“Pooping isn’t exactly a normal dinner conversation, but maybe it should be. After all, mealtimes are where it begins. What we put into our mouths is an important indicator of what our overall health outcomes will look like,” Fiana Tulip, head of Zoe communications, tells NutritionInsight.

The educational campaign provides a low-cost, non-invasive alternative to usual methods of tracking gut transit times, such as swallowing special capsules or a small wireless device.

“We believe that people are generally curious about their bodies and interested in learning more. Eating blue muffins is an easy and straightforward way to get insights into your gut microbiome – and it’s fun,” adds Shannon Feder, vice president of brand marketing.  

Zoe’s campaign is based on its findings published in the British Medical Journal, revealing shorter transit times were generally associated with better health, less abdominal fat and healthier responses to food. 

Zoe’s study measured the gut transit time – the time it takes for food to travel through the gut – using blue-dyed muffins.Into the blue
The Blue Poop Challenge website provides muffin baking instructions and also offers purchasable pre-dyed muffins. Participants start a timer after eating two blue-dyed muffins and then stop the clock once they see a blue discoloration in their stool. 

Besides being a vegetarian option, blue dye was selected over other colors to limit participants misreporting stool coloring. Beetroot, for example, can also change the color of stool, but the muffins’ passing the digestive tract should be distinct.

The Zoe spokesperson maintains blue dye is safe to consume in small quantities and passes through the digestive tract unchanged, resulting in blue stool.

“This initiative sets out to get people more comfortable with talking about a topic that’s at times uncomfortable to talk about. When we turn that uncomfortable topic blue, it might be a bit easier,” notes Tulip.

After participants enter their gut transit times on bluepoopchallenge.com and answer a health questionnaire, Zoe reveals gut health insights by comparing them to thousands of participants in Zoe’s research studies.

Reading the receipts
The BMJ-published findings showed differences in diet and gut microbiome composition between people with shorter and longer transit times.

Participants can opt out of baking their own muffins and purchase Zoe’s blue muffin kits instead.Gut transit time was categorized as: 

• Fast: Up to 14 hours.
• Normal: Between 14 and 58 hours.
• Slow: More than 59 hours. 

Shorter transit times were generally associated with better health. “In general, a very long transit time may indicate there are bothersome, underlying conditions, such as constipation,” adds study co-author Dr Eirini Dimidi, lecturer in nutritional sciences at King’s College London, UK. 

“A longer transit time is also linked with the production of specific compounds in the gut that may be associated with unfavorable health effects.”

Slower passing was specifically linked to Akkermansia muciniphila, Bacteroides spp, Alistipes spp and Ruthenibacterium lactatiformans, the latter previously associated with markers of poorer cardiometabolic health.

To ensure speedy transit times, Zoe’s general advice is to increase fiber and fluid intake. Consumers should also eat more foods in their original matrix, for example apples as apples and not apple juice, or whole large oats and not finely ground oats. 

However, people whose transit times are too fast (suggesting they had diarrhea) tend to have a less healthy gut microbiome.

Pantry ingredients advance precision medicine
The blue dye method can potentially provide “another piece of the puzzle” in advancing precision medicine. The study encourages its use in large-scale epidemiological studies to assess gut transit time and function.

Notably, gut transit time explained more variation in the gut microbiome, in terms of both relative abundance and alpha diversity, than stool consistency and stool frequency. 

Boxes represent manifest nodes and arrows indicate regression coefficients pointing toward an outcome of regression.“This indicates that gut transit time, measured via the blue dye method, may be a more informative marker of gut function in large cohorts of healthy people than stool consistency and frequency,” write the study authors.

The method also does not require specialized staff and clinic visits. Subjects can undertake the assessment remotely using ingredients commonly found in supermarkets.

Zoe’s previous consumer-based research has focused on assessing COVID-19 symptoms through an app and measuring dietary inflammation via blood samples.

“For a company that analyzes your gut microbiome based on a blood sample and poop sample, we’ll be the first to admit just how special your poop is,” concludes Tulip.

By Anni Schleicher