Don’t Just Sit There!  How bathroom posture affects your health.

Shortly before Christmas in 1978, the leader of the free world came down with a severe case of hemorrhoids. The pain was so bad that President Carter had to take a day off from work. A few weeks later, Time Magazine asked a proctologist named Michael Freilich to explain the president’s ailment. “We were not meant to sit on toilets,” he said, “we were meant to squat in the field.” He’s probably right.

Michael Freilich isn’t the first doctor to suggest that sitting on toilets—a recent phenomenon, stemming from the invention of the flush toilet in 1591—might be unhealthy. By the 1960s and ‘70s, the idea was relatively commonplace. Architect Alexander Kira argued in his 1966 book The Bathroom that human physiology is better suited to the squat. According to Bockus’s Gastroenterology, a standard medical text from 1964, “the ideal posture for defecation is the squatting position, with the thighs fixed upon the abdomen.”

Modern-day squat evangelists make money off the claim that a “more natural” posture wards off all sorts of health problems, from Crohn’s disease to colon cancer. Inventor Jonathon Isbit runs a modest online business selling Nature’s Platform—a homemade, $150 device that fits over toilets to make them more like holes in the ground. (He also posted the Bockus quote above to the Wikipedia entry on defecation.) Other entrepreneurs peddle similar products, like the In-Lieu, the Lillipad, the Evaco toilet converter, and, for those who don’t like explaining their squat platform to house guests, a $688 Japanese toilet that lets users switch among different squatting and sitting postures, from the “East Asian squat” to the “aft sit.” (Confused? Watch the video.)

That may sound like a bunch of Internet quackery, but there’s now some empirical evidence for the claim that defecation posture affects your body. The more extreme assertions about squatting—that it prevents cancer, for example—remain untested. But when it comes to hemorrhoids—a painful swelling of the veins in the anal canal that affects half of all Americans—new research suggests that you may want to get your butt off the toilet.  Read Article

By Daniel Lametti