How bathroom posture affects your health. - By Daniel Lametti - Slate Magazine

Don't Just Sit There!

How bathroom posture affects your health.

By Daniel LamettiPosted Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010, at 10:17 AM ET

Shortly before Christmas in 1978, the leader of the free world came down with a severe case of hemorrhoids. The pain was so bad that President Carter had to take a day off from work. A few weeks later, Time Magazine asked a proctologist named Michael Freilich to explain the president's ailment. "We were not meant to sit on toilets," he said, "we were meant to squat in the field." He's probably right.

Michael Freilich isn't the first doctor to suggest that sitting on toilets—a recent phenomenon, stemming from the invention of the flush toilet in 1591—might be unhealthy. By the 1960s and '70s, the idea was relatively commonplace. Architect Alexander Kira argued in his 1966 book The Bathroom that human physiology is better suited to the squat. According to Bockus's Gastroenterology, a standard medical text from 1964, "the ideal posture for defecation is the squatting position, with the thighs fixed upon the abdomen."

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