Dr. Trisha Pasricha

I don't think we have to go back to squatting.

But the other thing that I think modern life has really ruined for us is our smartphones.

Like you must remember this.

I remember this in my childhood.

People used to have those nice little bathroom like bookshelves, you know, like there'd be this like stack of like two month old magazines or yesterday's newspaper.

No one sees that anymore.

That type of reading material that's like a couple of days old.

It's like, you know, like the sports section from a game that you've already like watched.

You're not going to get that engrossed.

Like it's just going to distract you.

You're going to relax and then you'd go about doing your business.

In our smartphone era, and this is something that my lab studied, we are bringing in these devices that we know from decades of other areas of science will hijack our brains and distract us for much longer than we think we have control over.

Like we know this is the case for sleeping, but we're all bringing our smartphones to the bathroom.

So we did this study at Beth Israel where we looked at people who were coming in for their screening colonoscopies.

So these are people 45 and older.

And we asked them a bunch of questions about their smartphone use.

Do you bring your smartphone to the bathroom?

What do you do on the smartphone when you're in there?

And then we also asked them about diet and other habits that we know are part of their bowel habits.

And then we did their colonoscopies.