3Comments
It’s Halloween season, so be prepared for some of your favorite foods to change from their traditional colors to black and orange. What nobody has prepared you for, however, is to have your poop change color as well.
Burger King’s scary black cherry slushies are having an unexpected effect on the color of people’s bowel movements. Many have commented on social media that their poop has turned black (not too unexpected), as well as bright blue and neon green. That’s definitely more startling.
So what’s making a rainbow appear inside your gut? One culprit is the coloring agents used in the icy drinks. Another is that to digest food our body secretes a lot of different products – bile, in particular, has a distinctive yellow-green hue. When the blue dyes in the slushie mix with the bile, voilà, your poop is tinted in some extreme colors.
While such an effect might seem “unnatural”, there are many different plants and fruit that produce a similar effect. Dark leafy greens – such as kale, berries, and beetroot – can all mess with your poop coloring. It’s like learning about primary colors in schools, but it’s your intestine and not your fingers that’s doing all the mixing.
We can’t believe we are writing this, but this is not the first time that Burger King has messed with its customers' poop. In October 2015, the fast food chain released a black burger that made those who ate it have green poop. Interestingly, when the burger was released in the US, the black burger had been available in Japan for almost a year without any report of green poop in the Asian nation. The main difference was that the Japanese bun was colored with squid ink, while the Western counterpart used artificial dye. Clearly, they are broken down differently by our digestive system.
Burger King is now selling a nightmare-inducing burger, which according to a sponsored study (and very little else) makes you more likely to have nightmares. That’s unlikely to work, but now they know that if the burger fails at shocking people, there’s always the slushie!
[H/T: Miami Herald]
