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Are you pooping wrong?

TruthMay 28, 2015, 6:08:59 PM
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Photo credit: Irina Mir via Shutterstock

There’s truth in the saying “everybody poops,” and according to my toxicology professor Joseph Dietz, it’s totally healthy as long as you aren’t pooping more than >3 or 250g per day. An interesting fact though, is that how you poop also has an impact on your health, and even how many times per day and how much strain you need to exert to do it.

Not everybody uses a toilet. Asian countries are famous for their squat toilets, and outside of hotels only a minority of cultures have come to use the toilet as we know it. Could there be a good reason for this?

squattoilet

When we stand up or sit down, a kink forms in our lower gut that stops us from pooping at random. But when we squat, our guts elegantly straighten out, leaving us free to eject waste in comfort.

Sitting down to poop means that the muscles in the gut have to strain to push poop around the bend in the bowels.

“Just like a car on the highway, turning a corner means our feces have to put on the brakes,” Giulia Enders, writer of ‘Darm mit charme’ (Charming Bowels in German), told the Guardian’’s Annalisa Barbieri.

This isn’t just a harmless observation; our life prior to evolution entailed an evolution where we squatted when we poop. When we try to force our way around that, we’re at greater risk of damaging our bodies.

““1.2 billion people around the world who squat have almost no incidence of diverticulosis and fewer problems with piles. We in the west, on the other hand, squeeze our gut tissue until it comes out of our bottoms,”” says Enders. A conditioned called diverticulosis occurs when excessive strain and pressure push out weak areas of the muscle wall and form little pouches in the colon. Piles are swollen blood vessels around the anus, also caused by straining.

This revelation isn’t new; in fact, a study by Israeli doctor Dov Sikirov published in 2003  concluded that squatting to poop was the ‘most satisfactory.’ The study compared subjective evaluations of defecating in 3 different positions: sitting on a toilet 42cm high, 31 cm high, and squatting. The study showed that that pooping while squatting took an average of 50 seconds, whereas pooping while sitting took an arduous 130 seconds.

The paper also noted that sitting necessitated “excessive expulsive effort” to excrete biowaste, whereas squatting was a comparatively carefree exercise.

So, if you’re a toilet user, how can you adjust your pooping habits to protect your bowels? Well, Enders suggests that climbing on top of the toilet seat and perching while you poop “might be fun,”. Sitting straight up is definitely the least comfortable option, and hocking a little, bending forwards, or having a little stool in front of the toilet to elevate your feet are probably improvements.

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