Morning Till Evening (Part III): Circadian Rhythm

Read Morning Till Evening part I and part II here.

In this post I would like to write about the circadian rhythm. Incidentally, this year’s Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to genetic research on circadian rhythm. 

Other than modern humans in urban areas, every other diurnal living being wakes up and gets exposed to sunlight soon after they are up. According to modern research, our internal biological clocks get its cues from the Sun. Not surprisingly so. 

Ever since we moved to Athimanjeri, we don’t have a clock at home. We chose to not have one that is mounted on the walls or set up on a flat surface. We do have our cell phones and laptop computer. Aligning my routine to the Sun’s cycle and increasing my physical activity outdoor has fine tuned my body clock. My internal clock gives me the time with a 5 or 10 minute margin of error. This clock seems to work even when I am asleep. This clock in each one of us could be retrained, even if there has been disruption. There are actually health camps that help people retrain their body clocks.

There is enough research that links our (sun)light exposure to Vitamin-D. It is an irony that in a place like India (between ~10 and 40 degrees North) there is a growing epidemic of Vitamin-D deficiency syndrome. I understand that there is controversy about exposing oneself to sunlight. “Survival of the sickest” by Dr. Moalem is a good resource to understand this issue.

I would like to revisit evolution here, because that clears the confusions in my head. Before these big mansions that we live in came into existence, humans lived in small dwellings and got plenty of light exposure because of their lifestyles.  Their small houses wouldn’t have allowed them to do many chores indoors.  Thus human kind, like other diurnal, would have aligned itself to the Sun’s daily cycle. I know that my ancestors lived in South India and they had lived a big part of their days outdoors – working in the fields or doing chores; they finished chores by sunset and went to bed early.  It is only since the advent of electricity that things have changed upside down. 

Making the needed changes, for increasing our light exposure, have not been difficult for our family because of the rural context that we are in. I walk in the morning to get our milk, work at the farm till mid-morning, wash clothes outdoor. We don’t wear sun-glasses and sunscreen. We wear wide-brimmed hats while we are out in the Sun. Sure enough we are more tanned than five years ago. We have gradually decreased our exposure to artificial lights in the evening – dinner before sunset, minimally lighting the place after sunset and dimming the indoor lighting around 8 p.m. 

-- Hema

 

Morning Till Evening (Part II): First Things First

Read Morning Till Evening (Part I) here.

Here,  I had written about my observations of life in the village and contrasted it with life in the city. These observations lead me to thinking about how we had diverged from our ancestral ways of living. That lead to reading and research. Based on the understanding that ensued from this effort,  we have changed some aspects of our day to day lives. I share this process here.

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Starting with the most important morning chore – excretion. 

Our rental house is the only one that has a western-style commode in our neighbourhood. Some houses have the squatting-style toilet. But mostly people go out in the fields, hills or dried-up creeks. So, except for our family pretty much everyone else in the neighbourhood squats to do their job. I have wondered a lot about this aspect of modern lives in the context of health and rural living. 

When in doubt, I have resorted to evolution to understand things better. When bipeds came about, the earlier ones would have figured out squatting, since standing while pooping is anatomically impossible. So, in a sense squatting could be said to be almost as old as the evolution of bipeds. I seriously question if any medical/anatomical understanding was involved when a fundamental change, like squatting to sitting, was adopted by modern humans.

According to Wikipedia:

“In 1976, squatting toilets were said to be used by the majority of the world's population. However, there is a general trend in many countries to move from squatting toilets to sitting toilets (particularly in urban areas) as the latter are often regarded as more modern.”

 So, in less than forty years in many parts of the world, the human race has fundamentally changed one of the key aspects of their lives. 

Growing up in the small town of Trichy in South India, in the 80’s, I had seen only squatting toilets then (they were called “Indian” toilets). By 2000, in big cities and in affluent households of smaller towns, the sitting style toilets were becoming more common. These modern toilets were called “Western” toilets. Indian toilets were considered to be inferior to their Western cousins. All new constructions started using the Western commodes and now Indian toilets have become rare. Along with the Indian toilet, the squatting habit is gone. The generation of people that migrated from Indian to Western have lost their ability to squat. The next generations will grow up to not know the existence of Indian toilet.

Human body has the innate evolutionary intelligence to breathe, walk, run, poop and sleep among a million other things. Our inventions such as the sitting-style toilet seem to override the age-old knowledge and know-how that evolution has bestowed us with.

Scientific research now links chronic constipation, hemorrhoids and colon cancer to the sitting-style defecation. Research states that there is strain while sitting at the toilet; also, toxins don’t get eliminated completely when we sit. There is plenty of information on the internet if one wants to understand the issue. This is one informative website:

https://www.squattypotty.com/blog/5-problems-with-sitting-on-your-toilet/

I am not for any product to correct our bathroom posture. All we started doing is, we squat on the western commode. In our new house at the farm, we have a toilet that can function as both squatting and sitting.

-- Hema