We Poop Wrong
Part 3 in: A Trifecta of Poor Biomechanics
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is an exploration of poor biomechanics and probes the way we poop. I know, this is not what most consider polite conversation but bear with me. We already covered how we breathe wrong and how we walk wrong. This wrongness suffers the same first-world problems of technological convenience. Yet it actually has some serious implications as we grow older. This essay plumbs the nuance of the problem so that we can improve one more aspect of our health.
Before we start, this is a three-part series and were originally for paid subscribers as an extra thank you for their support. I’ve opened them up for everyone but your support is still critical. Please sign up for 20% off for an annual subscription making it just $24.
Part 1: We Breathe Wrong:
Part 2: We Walk Wrong:
We Poop Wrong
Introduction
Biomechanics are an interesting topic especially when analyzed against our evolutionary development and their collision with modern technology. What we find as we peel back our generally accepted lifestyles are that there are three things we do every day in life that are, by and large, wrong.
Not just wrong but actually quite damaging to our ability to be active, healthy, and well-aged. By now, if you’ve been reading these, it shouldn’t surprise you, but we breathe wrong, we walk wrong, and we even poop wrong all mostly thanks to technology.
Pooping wrong cracks me up because it’s so obvious when you poke into it, but we are so prudish about even talking about it. Regardless, pooping is the last of our trifecta of poor biomechanics that we’ll look at in this series. This is probably the oddest for most people to get their minds around, but our bodies evolved to squat while pooing, not to sit.
When I first went to Korea I was introduced to a new type of toilet. A type that baffled my American sensibilities and created no small amount of consternation about how it worked. Simply put, if you’ve ever had to poop in the woods, that’s the mechanics, yet surrounded by all the other modern conveniences of a bathroom.
To be honest, I’m still not sure which way you face, but logic indicates that I’d face the toilet paper and squat myself down. It’s just so foreign to our experience it causes us to discount it as some prehistoric throwback from an era we’d like to forget.
Yet the Asians, and much of the world outside of WEIRD countries, that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic poop this way all the time. And they’re right! It is how we should poop!
It boils down to simple biomechanics just like breathing and walking. When we sit, our colon is not aligned with our sphincter and the Puborectalis Muscle actually resists the action meaning we have to push harder to eliminate our stools.
The Benefits of Squatting
Squatting on the other hand, aligns the colon, sphincter, and muscles and makes pooping easier and faster in the following six ways:
In the squatting position, gravity does most of the work.
Squatting relaxes the puborectalis muscle, allowing the anorectal angle to straighten and the bowel to empty completely. Researchers also found, the more hip flexion you achieve while squatting the better.
Squatting lifts the sigmoid colon to unlock the “kink” at the entrance to the rectum.
The colon is equipped with an inlet valve (the ileocecal valve) and an outlet valve (the puborectalis muscle). Squatting helps to relax both of these valves.
It prevents hernias and pelvic organ prolapse.
It helps prevent and treat hemorrhoids by reducing the pressure and friction. In fact, hemorrhoids are very uncommon in countries where people squat.
It helps prevent incontinence in later life since your sphincter muscles haven’t been stretched out pushing incorrectly.
An interesting consequence of learning to poop while squatting is that it makes it much harder to poop while sitting. At several places I’ve worked in corporate America, you’d be guaranteed to hear odd stories about some Asian man who went into the stall, closed the door, and then the feet would disappear as they squatted on the seat.
How heathen! But this is actually the more natural way to do things and the poor fellow just couldn’t sit at ninety degrees and get anywhere because that’s actually terrible biomechanics.
This is made worse by the constant increasing height of toilets over the years. I’m six and a half feet tall and I’m sitting with my legs at 90 degrees. When experts say more flexion is better to form an acute angle, we’re literally being obtuse, both logically and angularly with our posture. We poop wrong.
Pooping Better
There is a remedy to this beyond ripping out your toilets. First is a simple tool called a Squatty Potty. It works simply by elevating your feet about six inches into a better squatting position. I have these at my house and I can attest, it helps a lot.
A second method is to buy shorter toilets when you go to replace them. This isn’t terribly logical for many, but it will be something I explore when the time comes because the squatty potty still isn’t high enough as they continue to raise the heights of seats.
Lastly, just pushing your toes up and leaning forward over your thighs achieves a large amount of the benefit. I do this while at public toilets or places that don’t have a squatty potty. It’s also the best way to give it a test before committing to the other two solutions.
Summary
When I was in Iraq I’d often see a toilet like this and would be baffled at how ‘backwards’ those people were.
What should also be observed in this bathroom is there is no toilet paper. You use water to wash your derriere. To be honest, it offended my young sensibilities and I won’t deny I judged them as inferior.
Yet a year ago I coupled my squatty potty with a bidet, and I tell you what, it’s incredible. Heated seats, warm water, gentle air drying, and none of the risks of inflammation or mess with toilet paper.
If I could go back and tell 26-year-old me what I know now… I’d have realized that they were smarter than us by having the proper biomechanics for something as silly as pooping.
We breathe wrong, we walk wrong, and we poop wrong. But thankfully each has simple solutions that can be taken immediately to align our bodies back to nature and quickly improve our health.
BONUS STORY!
So, this is about my first experience with a Bidet. I had just gotten to Korea, and we were on a tour introducing us to Korean culture. At a tourist center, a new fellow I’d met and I had to poop. While in the bathroom we noticed this sophisticated apparatus on the side of the toilet with buttons that looked a lot like this:
As you can see, it’s all in Korean and so we had to guess which button did what. So, we had a quick conversation and decided each of us would pick a different button.
He pressed the yellow one and reported back on a lovely warm air flow caressing his nether region.
I pressed a button similar to the blue one but…. I was greeted with a high-pressure blast of cold water right in the sphincter. And I couldn’t get it to stop. I panicked and stood up causing the water to arch over my head and out of the stall, I quickly sat back down to absorb the jet blast and frantically pushed buttons until it finally stopped.
I didn’t trust trying to find the air dryer setting at that point and so I mopped myself up as best as I could all while the two of us young lieutenants were laughing hysterically. I found out later that I hadn’t pushed the bidet wash, but a setting that was to help with constipation. It was a high-pressure enema.
And that’s how I learned the wonders of a bidet.
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Morocco had these. Women from the tour group and I would wait for the "Western" toilets while old Moroccan ladies would squat. If I squatted, I wouldn't be able to get back up. Perhaps if my culture used those I would be in better shape in more than one way. In hotel bathrooms and public bathrooms, there was a hose with a sprayer by the toilet. "Moroccan Bidet"
I converted my Incinolet to a dry toilet in which I place an anglecut plastic tub that I line by hand pressing old ad paper into a liner then dumbed for composting. I use a separate urinal.