There are so many products on the market that report they help with pooping. Miralax, suppositories, prunes, apple juice, Senna, Pedialax. I’ve had families try many different options. One things I hear repeatedly is a desire to avoid medications if possible. I consider myself a more naturally-minded person, both in my professional and personal life, and I love the idea of finding an alternative option to pharmaceuticals. So this past year, I’ve been on the hunt for a different option. Through trial and error with baby J (he has had several bouts of constipation since he was about 3 months old), I’ve found an option I love and feel good about using in our own family, and speaking with other families about.

I give you, the Poop Chocolate.

Two ingredients, one outcome: increase the “slipperiness” of poop within the intestine to allow for easier transit within the colon, and softer poop that is easier to evacuate. If a child is struggling with slow transit – meaning their intestine needs help moving poop through the intestine faster and more efficiently – Poop Chocolates have a great potential to help speed up that transit! If a child has less than efficient mechanics to evacuate poop out, Poop Chocolates have a great potential to help, by making the poop softer, and require less effort/mechanics to evacuate! Just like anything, there is no guarantee, but I’ve seen great (repeated) results using Poop Chocolates.

So what are these Poop Chocolates made out of?

• First ingredient: chocolate. Here’s the thing about food and the bowels. It’s really hard to identify if there are reactions in the body due to certain foods, especially if there is a lot of chaos in the gut, or there are a lot of potential foods that could be contributing to that chaos. I am not a nutritionist, so I don’t give formal diet advice. But I do believe that food can likely play a huge role in a child’s constipation or slow transit of poop through their bowels. So in thinking about chocolate, I wanted to find the cleanest option to avoid any compounding factor to gut irritation. There is exactly one brand of chocolate that I have found. No cane sugar, no additives, no dairy, nothing on the label you can’t understand.I found this chocolate at my local Sprouts, but it is also available on Amazon (with quite a bit of a price jump). Chocolate is simply a part of the Poop Chocolate recipe to be the vehicle for the star of the show.
• Second ingredient (the star of the show!): MCT oil. MCT oil is derived from coconut. Coconut oil is sometimes recommended to help with softening stool and increasing fluidity in the intestine (though there isn’t clear evidence to support this possibly anecdotal hypothesis). My thoughts are this: there likely isn’t a huge difference between coconut and MCT oil, however small differences can make big changes in the body. MCTs are medium chain triglycerides, and are small chains of fat, easy to be used as energy, and not likely to be stored as fat in the body. Coconut oil contains about 50% or more of MCTs, while the rest are larger fat chains. This means, coconut oil is more likely to be absorbed and stored by your body instead of staying in the intestine. If the goal is to feed your body more fats – great! Coconut oil it is! But in our case of wanting to increase intestine fluidity and soften stool, we want the supplement we choose to take to stay in our intestine! There is an additional thought that coconut oil and MCT oil can increase the metabolism in the digestive tract; again – possibly anecdotal, with not much research clarifying this mechanism.

The best thing about Poop Chocolates, is that they are SO EASY to make, so why not try them?! Besides the two ingredients, you’ll just need a silicone mold to make them in, and that’s it! I have some afflinks on my site for the products you can use – check them out, or just use them as examples!

How to make the Poop Chocolates:

Step One: Measure and melt the chocolate. For my chocolates, I made 4 squares in my mold, with each square about 1 inch. I used 1/4 cup of melted chocolate. I tend to melt things using a double boiler method (melted in thepyrex glass in a pot of hot water), but you can easily use a microwave for this step! If you want to make more than 4 chocolates, just multiply the recipe for the number of chocolates you want! The key is 50:50 chocolate to MCT oil.

Step Two: Measure and add the MCT oil. The amount of chocolate you decide to use will determine how much MCT oil to use. I used 1/4 cup of chocolate, so I measured out 1/4 cup of MCT oil.

Step Three: Mix the MCT oil and chocolate together thoroughly, and pour into your silicone mold; no need to prep the mold!

Step Four: Freeze. Let sit in the silicone mold in the freezer for a minimum of three hours. Depending on the size of your chocolates, and the temperature of your freezer, you may need more or less.

Step Five: Eat and store! Eat them (yum!). Add caution when your kiddo eats these, as they are VERY melty due to the high oil content. Mine melted in my fingers fairly quickly as I was eating it. Putting the chocolate down between bites, cutting into smaller pieces, or eating in one bite (dependent on the size) may be good techniques to decrease the messiness of the chocolates! Store in an air tight container in the freezer.

I’d love to see your prep process, any other fun molds you use, or how much your kids like or dislike them! Please share your photos!

Dr. Keller hopes that through this site, conversation, and community, kids and their families can experience positive progress towards improved health. See the 'about me' section for more about Dr. Keller!