Chapter 1: What common bathroom practices should we avoid for better bowel health?
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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle. I had this friend who was visiting me, must have been 10 years ago now, but I still remember something she said. We were sitting at my kitchen table. I got up to go to the bathroom. And when I came back, she goes, did you poop? I was like, girl, what did you just say to me? For a moment, I was embarrassed.
I actually hadn't pooped, but just the idea that she knew that I do that sometimes was distressing. It also made me laugh and feel a lot more comfortable with her. Like, if we could talk about pooping, we could talk about anything.
Yeah, I think that's a really keep that friend.
Don't lose that one. She's a keeper. This is Dr. Trisha Pesricha. She's a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She also teaches at Harvard Medical School and has a column in the Washington Post called Ask a Doctor. Trisha says many of us are pooping wrong. In fact, that's the title of her new book. You've Been Pooping All Wrong. How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy.
There's a statistic that has been floating around for a few years now, which is that 40% of Americans, their daily lives are disrupted by their bowel movements.
But you probably wouldn't know that because pooping is not considered polite conversation.
After we potty train, for the most part, everyone just shuts the door, locks it, and nobody really knows what anyone else is doing there behind closed doors. And nobody's checking in from time to time. Not really your doctor, not your parents, certainly not your friends. Nobody's asking like, hey, do you like squat down when you go?
Like nobody's checking in on these kinds of like very fundamental questions.
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Chapter 2: Why is it important to go when you have the urge to poop?
And you can do that using a poop stool. You can do that just by angling yourself in the right way. Can you talk about this?
Yes. So most people go to their toilet and they sit down at this 90 degree angle, which is pretty much exactly how we sit when we're sitting at our desk chair, sitting on our couch. And that's not conducive to a healthy bowel movement. Like our modern toilets are not designed for our actual anatomy. Now, remember, you think about the colon, which is this long tube,
And at the end, I mentioned there's this part of the colon called the rectum, which is this reservoir. Well, we all have this thing called the pelvic floor, which is this set of muscles that are right there at the finish line, and they have to coordinate and contract and relax in this right sequence in order for everything to exit. Well, actually, there is this muscle in the pelvic floor.
It's called the puborectalis muscle, which when we are sitting like we are at our desk chairs, it
chokes the colon shut it acts like a sling around it almost like your body stepping on its own hose and that's a good thing when we're at work and we're like just trying to type this email but you really don't want that tube to be kinked when you're trying to poop and that's exactly what happens now the way that you can open that tube and relax that muscle is to squat and
Keep something around the toilet that will help you elevate your knees above your waist when you go. And that could be a stool. It could be a box. It could be a pair of stilettos. Whatever it takes, just elevate your knees as much as you can above your waist. And they've done these studies that...
Obviously, not only is this very helpful to people who know that they have constipation, who experience constipation, but actually even healthy people, like that group of people who think they're doing it just fine, who are just living their lives. When they start to lift their knees above their waist, they say, oh my goodness, I was doing it all wrong. This is way better.
And that just goes to show how much you don't know how much you're missing until you try something new.
I think in the book you say if you don't have something to prop your feet up on that you can lean forward and do basically the thinker pose, like that statue of the thinker where you're putting your chin in your hand and your elbow on your knee.
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