Among the essential luggage to spend a day outdoors, there is a good number of garbage bags in which to deposit the waste that, in the end, will end up in a container. However, the idea regarding excrement is not the same: in the field, many times there is no choice but to alleviate on the ground. Although human feces are made up of organic matter, its presence is not positive for the environment , especially in very crowded areas where there are many visitors who are forced to defecate in the open air, as this material can take up to a year to degrade. .
In the first place, such “gifts” litter the roads for the following visitors; Furthermore, if they are near streams or on aquifers, they can become a source of contamination. On the other hand, they sometimes contain disease-causing viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Although excreta of animal origin can also present these biological agents, their presence is not usually so concentrated nor do they come from foreign places. Due to its effects, many campsites and natural parks prohibit this practice or indicate that the excrement must be collected.
In fact, the fact that feces are a source of infections is what has caused, after centuries of evolution, that the human brain ends up detesting the smell of poop , a visceral reaction, which is shared by all cultures, and forms part of our behavioral immune system.
That is why the toilet is one of the inventions that has most improved the quality of life of the population and the health of human societies. The first toilet was designed in 1556 by the English poet and inventor John Harington. However, this invention, although it revolutionized cities and homes, has some drawback: the angle of placement of the body when defecating in the toilet, 90º, is not optimal, as it can cause constipation problems. In this sense, defecating in the field with the crouched posture would be worse for the environment, but better for our health. As a consequence of the way Western toilets defecate, obesity rates are much higher in these countries than in Asians , where the tradition of crouching is more widespread, with which in the East more feces are expelled per day than in the West.
