Take part in the Blue Poo challenge, as seen on episode 2 of Channel 4’s Secrets of Your Big Shop!

Developed by researchers at Zoe, eating these blue muffins with concentrated blue dye in them can give us an indication on how healthy your gut is.

How it works:

• Eat 2 blue muffins for breakfast and record the date and time in a notebook. Eat normally for the rest of the day

• At some point, you should have a blue / greeny-blue bowel movement. When this happens, record the date and time. Note how many hours were between you eating the muffins and having the coloured bowel movement. This is your gut transit time

Your gut transit time gives us good clues as to how healthy your gut is. The average transit time is around 29 hours, but transit time can vary wildly. A short transit time (normally associated with diarrhoea, c.<14hours) can be an issue as it means you may not be absorbing nutrients effectively from your diet. Meanwhile, a long transit time (c. >58 hours, associated with constipation, but you may have a long transit time even if stools feel “easy to pass”) means that things that should be leaving the body are sticking around for too long and may therefore be causing digestive issues. Both a short and long transit time are associated with disruptions in the gut microbiome, which has far reaching impacts on our health. Want to dive into the science? Read some of the research here.

Ready to make some blue muffins? Recipe below (credit to Zoe).

Ingredients

This recipe makes 12 muffins

• 245 grams plain flour

• 15g baking powder:

• 200g granulated sugar

• 100g vegetable oil

• 230g water

• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

• 1 tsp. royal blue food dye

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 170°C

• Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl

• In a separate bowl, combine the wet ingredients

• Form a well in the center of the dry mixture and pour in wet ingredients

• Add the blue food dye to the mixture

• Whisk until the wet and dry ingredients are well combined and the blue dye is evenly distributed

• Pour equal amounts of batter into each muffin case (or silicon muffin moulds)

• Bake for c.20-25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean

• Set aside to cool for 20–30 minutes