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