It pooping while sitting bad for you?

Call it a weakness but I, for whatever reason, am somewhat drawn to well-written stories about poop. It's not a fetish or anything it's just the simple fact that the technology surrounding how we do the deed has gone unchanged for centuries. When everything else has evolved so much in the past centuries, why is it that we are still sitting down on an elongated bowl (most times) and dropping the kids off? I'm assuming that our distant ancestors began this trend many millennia ago by doing their business over some sort of earthen hole, all we've done in semi-modern times is add some pipes below the hole, sit on some porcelain as opposed to wood and filled to thing with some water.

When it's broken down like that, it's pretty damn primitive. That's why the Slate story (linked in the title) caught my attention. Simply squatting was apparently their answer. And why not? It's how primitive hunter/gatherers took care of their pooping. They didn't have time to dig a hole when they were out chasing Wooly Mammoths. Hell no. They literally popped a squat and did the deed. Then they moved on. Of course with the exploding population today, doing that would cause all sort of disease-related problems and would be plain unsightly. So back to some invention.

The geniuses (who apparently put a lot of time in to thinking about poop) at Slate theorize that the human body is designed to squat while pooping so why not design the toilet to function like that? It's really quite genius but what about the over 50% of the population who pee sitting down? What sort of miracle toilet works for both purposes while allowing you to poop while squatting (as the writer suggest with your knees close to your chest)?

So, without proper facilities we'll just have to improvise for the time being. Will you hover, perch or do some sort of modified squat to test out the comfort level of this new stance? Maybe I'll actually follow up on this one because I can see the health benefits to it. Do yourself a favor and at least try it.

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