Should we use a ’Squatty Potty’ instead of a normal toilet?

Maybe, just maybe, the modern bathroom is bad for our health, says Michael Moynihan.

LET’S talk crap. In the age of nude selfies and relentless self-disclosure, it seems there are no taboos, but when was the last time you had a mature conversation about your stool?

I ask because of the Squatty Potty, which is designed to make you more efficient on the toilet. At first sight this looks like a particularly troublesome attachment left over after a couple of hours of wrestling with a bed delivery from Ikea, a kind of miniature headboard-milking stool, but the idea is pretty simple.

You affix it to the toilet, and, by perching on top, you are forced to squat, rather than sit, above the toilet bowl. As a result, you defecate more naturally, because clearly our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors used holes in the ground rather than anything labelled Armitage Shanks.

Robert Edwards, who created the Squatty Potty, says the science is straightforward — by opening the colon, the natural, squatting position eliminates poo more quickly, and more completely, and reduces straining.

There’s more good news: Squatty Potty advocates say it could prevent constipation, hemorrhoids, colon cancer, appendicitis, IBS, hernias, diverticulosis, and sundry pelvic/organ problems. This is not even to get into something that’s more difficult to measure: that squatting to do your business just feels better. As they say on their website (squattypotty.co.uk): ‘Learn howto poop like a pro’! That’s the good news.

The bad news is that medical experts are a little sceptical about the extent of the potto’s magical powers: they only say that it’s not harmful, rather than actively say it helps with digestive/elimination issues.

Whether the Squatty Potty can revolutionise your eliminations or not, it will certainly have provided a valuable service if it creates a responsible conversation.

Aside from the reticence about discussing your poo, take the disinformation. There are plenty of urban myths about the amount of food we carry, impacted in a dense chunk, in our intestines, and, occasionally, one hears horror stories about the huge quantities of undigested meat removed from the stomachs of overweight Americans during post-mortems.

One by-product of the Squatty Potty discussions is that medical experts have quashed the myth that we have several pounds of undigested food in a lump in our stomach at all times.

Discussing the Squatty Potty, and its pros and cons, may strip away the layers of euphemism and embarrassment from discussions about one’s waste.

For instance, opening your mind to the world of poo will take you to some strange places, such as the Meyers scale, or the Bristol stool chart. If you are not familiar with this medical gem, it’s a chart listing the seven categories of human faeces (example: “Type 4: Like a sausage or a snake, smooth and soft”.)

If you want to go further, a good starting point is Rose George’s terrific book, The Big Necessity, which deals with human waste in all its forms and which will halt you in its tracks with some of its findings.

George’s research established that four in ten people in the world lack a toilet, while a child dies every 10 seconds from the diarrhoea brought on by water contaminated by human waste.

As for the Squatty Potty, it’s available for €35 (“Ecco”) or €67 (“Tao Bamboo”) online.

If you purchase, do drop us a line with your findings.

Exploring the toilet of the future

Squatting toilets are often a big conversation point among young backpackers as they head off on their early travels. The majority of the world squats but in the West, we deigned it more civilised to sit atop a ‘throne’.

But not so three students from the University of the Arts London who came up with the concept of the “wellbeing toilet’, winning a Dyno-Rod competition last year to find the toilet of the future. Designers were asked to create a loo that ‘benefits our health and the environment’. Like the ‘Squatty Potty’ they reverted to the posture instinctively adopted by toddlers going to the toilet. Designers, Sam Sheard, Pierre Papet, and Victor Johansson, say placing your knees closer to your chest was healthier and may help prevent problems such as constipation and colon cancer. They hailed it as the world’s first ergonomically-correct toilet.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to students who could design a toilet for the developing world that operated without running water, electricity or a septic tank system. California Institute of Technology won with a solar-powered hydrogen gas unit which costs less than 5c a day to run. The UN says unsafe sanitation is responsible for half of hospital visits in the developing world. About 1.5 million children die each year from diarrhoeal disease.

And as we are now being charged for flushing water down the toilet, it’s worth noting that the average 6.5 litre toilet flush, accounts for nearly a third of water use in the home. The toilet of the future may have to address this wastage.