Humans Are Built to Squat to Poop

At the lower end of your bowel there is a muscle, called the puborectalis, that wraps around the bowel, cinching it shut to keep the contents of the bowel contained. The puborectalis is engaged whether you're sitting, standing, or holding just about any position, except for when you're squatting. Squatting releases the puborectalis, allowing the bowel to fully extend so that waste can pass more easily.

Having been accepted as a mundane, albeit necessary, artifact, the toilet is paid no particular attention beyond our need to find one when we need one. One curious doctor, however, devised an experiment that put the toilet to the test. Dr. Rad Saeed, a radiologist at the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran, conducted clinical trials to compare sitting and squatting in their effectiveness for emptying the bowel.1

Stoolie’s small footprint keeps your bathroom tidy, and its stylish design keeps your bathroom beautiful.

Around the world, more than one million plastic bags and plastic bottles are bought every minute. That’s 20,000 of each item sold per second. At this rate, we can expect plastic production to reach a staggering 1600 billion metric tons per year by 2050.

As you read these lines, 330 billion pounds of plastic are contained in our oceans and every year, 17 billion pounds are added to that number.

Our ancestors squatted because there were no toilets, but mostly because the human body is designed to poop in a squatting position.