Edit: To clarify, I’m asking about human babies drinking human breast milk.
In: Biology
Because most of your [poop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces#Average_chemical_characteristics) isn’t what you ate or drank. A lot of it is the shed dead intestinal cells that line the intestines, dead blood cells (this gives poop its brown colour), and bacterial biomass that is used to break down your food.
A significant percentage of feces is dead gut bacteria. On the order of about 30%. That’s not the full answer, but it is part of the answer.
Milk-fed babies produce a loose, seedy, mustard-colored and kinda sweet-smelling poop. It’s definitely not the poop you’re used to.
Source: I have kids.
Babies fed only breastmilk don’t really have solid waste. It’s Not a solid consistency until you start them on solid food and even then it doesn’t get solid for a while. Milk itself has solids. Solids consist of fats and proteins. Some are digested some are not. You will also get volume from bacteria that live in the gut.
First off solid adult waste is still 75% water.
Babies not yet on solids have notoriously squishy doo doo’s. Milk still contains plenty of solids in the form or protein and fats, the baby will add more in organic biomass in the form of bacteria and archaea.
Solid parts of baby dumps are undigested fats, proteins, bacteria but there is still an awful lot of liquid in that “solid” waste.
Babies whose diet is only milk produce a very different kind of poop than those who have started to eat solid food. It’s definitely less gross than solid food poops.
There’s a misconception here, which is that stuff you drink becomes pee and stuff you eat becomes poop. Actually, pee and poop are created through very different processes.
Pee is generally filtered out from your blood. Water gets absorbed and excess water gets excreted, and with it, all the stuff your kidneys filtered out of your blood. Poop, on the other hand, is what’s left after you digest your food (as well as other stuff in your digestive system). Stuff gets absorbed and the stuff that *doesn’t* get absorbed gets pushed out the butt.
Well, when a baby drinks milk, some of that milk is absorbed and some isn’t, and the part that isn’t becomes diaper filler. Part of it is milk solids; part of it is not actually solid at all; part of it is stuff excreted from the digestive system itself.
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NASA once made a diet that they assumed would result in no poop. They gave pure amino acids assuming that the gut would absorb and nothing left over. It smelled bad. The guys with the right stuff said this is the wrong stuff and the idea was tossed. The product is now sold as Vivonex, a tube feeding for patients with digestive problems. BTW everyone poops, no matter what diet.
In short: they don’t.
Kids who are solely breastfed have a yellow liquid poop that, for my children, has a faint… good smell? Like buttered popcorn. Lol
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