You probably don't want to yell "I have blood in my poop!" when you're standing in a crowd. However, if you turn around one day and see bloody stools in the toilet, it's certainly something you might be screaming inside your head. Seeing blood is bad enough, seeing your own blood is worse. When you start seeing blood in your poop, that's gone too far. If you've just exclaimed to yourself, "I have blood in my poop!", what could be the problem? What should you do?

There are actually quite a few reasons why you might have blood in your poop. Some of them could be serious. Most of them are not. The first thing you need to ask yourself is, "How do I know it's blood?" You may not have realized this before, but there are actually several foods that can make your poop look bloody. Tomatoes and beets can turn your stools red. That makes sense now that you think about it, doesn't it? Other possibilities include blueberries, licorice, iron supplements, Pepto-Bismol--all of these can turn your stools black, which looks a lot like blood in your poop. So the first thing you need to eliminate as a cause is your diet. Have you eaten any of these foods or taken any of these substances in the last 18 hours?

If food is not the cause of your strange-looking stools, then you probably should accept the likelihood that you actually do have blood in your poop. By itself,