Been pooping today and my poop was black which had me worried. Normally it’s never black unless I’m drinking. So in a panic I googled it and of course you get all the same looking medical sites that alert you that you have severe stomach bleeding and are going to die at any second.
So I do what everyone is forced to do, add “reddit” to the end of my search term, and what do you know? It’s the same shit on reddit. Someone has black stool and some redditor called “fartboxpuncher” tells them they’re dying.
You have to dig through like 60 something same replies until you find someone who actually did have black stool and who’s partner is a nurse. They said wait it out 24 hours and see if it doesn’t go away, or it might be something you’re eating.
Sucks that people are forced to put up with the highest upvoted “answers” being copy pasted from medline2line247.online.biz and not from someone with like actual first-hand advice.
And that’s not to even mention the AI results which probably would tell me I’m turning into a lizard and I should drink gasoline.
It fucking sucks how unusable the internet has become for that sort of thing. Reddit swept up all the old forums, monopolized that kind of community discussion-based information and then completely enshittified it. Maybe I shouldn’t say “completely” because they’re still in the process of making it worse.
I hope you were able to eventually find information that satisfied you, but in case you didn’t already see this elsewhere, it’s not color alone that should necessarily be cause for concern, it’s also consistency (and by that I mean texture, not regularity). If it’s black but normal shape and texture for you, like many others here have said, it’s reasonably likely just a matter of something you ate (like the chips you mentioned). However, if the consistency is also abnormal for you, especially if it’s really tarry (black tar) then that may warrant telling a med professional irl about it.