Going through the motions: the rise and rise of stool-gazing
Iwas minding my own business on a lockdown walk when I saw the advert on the side of a bus shelter. It featured seven shiny pink shapes. Were those sex toys, I wondered, interspersed with puddles of Angel Delight? Only when I read the captions (“The smooth criminal, the smashed avo, the poonami; London, how do you poo?”) did I realise what I was looking at.
These, it turned out, were visual metaphors for assorted types of stool. And of course, in the Instagram era, they were millennial pink. Literally polished turds, they were part of a campaign by The Gut Stuff, a startup that has the strapline: “Empowering gut health in everyone”.
My interest was piqued. So I went online and found that poo just kept popping up. A fascination with faeces – or stool-gazing as it is sometimes known – is burgeoning on the internet.
Another company, Seed, which sells high-end probiotics in sleek frosted glass containers, often posts illustrations of number twos on Instagram. Like The Gut Stuff, it frequently refers to the Bristol stool chart, a clinical assessment tool designed in 1997 to classify human waste, which it describes as “a decoder for your toilet bowl – and for your digestive health”.
In 2020, Seed created a citizen poopic database with which to train artificial intelligence to categorise excrement. The CEO and co-founder Ara Katz hopes that “more reliable and consistent data collection” via AI could “power important and actionable in
sights for gastrointestinal health and the correlation between specific inputs (diet, alcohol etc) and outputs (stool type, regularity etc)”. Another new app, Moxie Poop Scanner, claims it can categorise stools already, with the aim of helping you “learn more about whether your digestive health is on track”. Its website warns it “still has its training wheels on”, however, and in a Wired review last July it could not always differentiate between the writer’s face and her faeces.
Poo is frequently addressed in wellness and spiritually quizzes, many of which are inspired by the Indian alternative therapy ayurveda, which has used faecal matter as a health indicator for thousands of years, as has Chinese medicine. Gwyneth Paltrow is, inevitably, involved. A recent blogpost on her Goop website – headlined “all your poop questions, answered” – offered advice on posture and technique alongside “Goop your Poop” products. These included $60 Debloat+ supplements, a $220 blond wood “essential bathroom” foot rest – so you can mimic squatting on your loo, for more ergonomic excretion – and a $649 “luxury” seat that converts your toilet into a bidet and blowdries your bottom.
Much of this content is inspired by recent research into the gut microbiome, linking it with an array of diseases and conditions from anxiety to diabetes to autism, and the explosion of gut-friendly products – from kombucha to probiotics – launched by the $4tn wellness industry.
Stool-gazing has history in the west, as well as India and China. It was only at the end of the middle ages that our current squeamishness started to develop, according to Prof David Inglis, author of the winningly named A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defacatory Manners and Toiletry Technology. Previously, he says, “human waste was all over the place – we were much more relaxed about it”.
While some level of poo aversion has always existed, and may even have an evolutionary purpose, to avoid the spread of germs, it took hundreds of years to develop our current level of repulsion. “Gradually, people got more uptight about smelling and seeing it, and started to find it more repulsive. It started in aristocratic circles – in the 19th century, the upper classes really were disgusted – then it trickled down.” This aversion fuelled city planning and housing design, Inglis says. Though there are modern exceptions, such as the “viewing platforms” that briefly display your output in German toilets, these days most European and US lavatories are an exercise in denial. “Just flush and it’s gone. You don’t have to face the fact that your body produces nasty stuff.”
But while busting taboos is generally considered a good thing in 2021, a burgeoning interest in excrement was not necessarily welcomed by the clinicians I spoke to. To be clear, there are times when monitoring one’s waste can be lifesaving. “If you have a change in the nature of your stool for three weeks, particularly if it gets looser, that is a reason to go and see your doctor. It can be associated with cancer, though most of the time isn’t,” says Prof Laurence Lovat, director of the London Gastroenterology Centre and professor of gastroenterology at University College London.
The NHS advice is to visit your GP if there is blood in your stool for three weeks (which Lovat describes as the “magic time … Less than that and it might simply be a burst haemorrhoid or, if you have diarrhoea, you may still be getting over gastroenteritis”). Changes to the shape of your stool, he says, are “usually completely meaningless”. And, while producing a poo that sits in the middle of the Bristol stool chart is often said to be a good sign of overall health, says Lovat, “that may not be true for everyone. Generalising is not a good idea because it ingrains health-related anxiety, which brings its own problems.”
“The Bristol stool chart wasn’t designed for this,” agrees Dr Duane Mellor, a British Dietetic Association spokesman and registered dietitian, referring to what he terms “lifestyle stoolgazing”. Clinically, the Bristol scale is used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments, or to help doctors diagnose irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), among other things. But Mellor has concerns about consumers using it, and focusing on poo too much, which may cause other symptoms and conditions to be overlooked.
The ins and outs of gut health are dizzyingly complex. There have been some astonishing recent scientific advances, says Lovat, “but we are at a very early stage of understanding it. The problem is that people then jump on top of that and issue pseudoscience, which is very confusing for the public.” In other words, there is a lot of poo woo on the internet, and with four in 10 people reporting digestive symptoms and two in 10 reporting that they have IBS, there is a huge audience seeking answers.
Alana and Lisa Macfarlane, the cofounders of The Gut Stuff, point out that poo woo is not what they are selling. The pink stools in their advert were not designed to be diagnostic, they say, but to raise awareness about gut health in general.
The pair – who are identical twins and former BBC 1Xtra and Love Island: Aftersun DJs – got an inside track on gut microbiome research during many years volunteering in twin research. Coming from a working-class Scottish family, says Lisa, “we didn’t know what wellbeing was – we certainly didn’t know what gut health was”. When they found out, they were keen that this knowledge should “never be a middleclass luxury”. So they launched a company and website – thegutstuff.com – on the side of their broadcasting careers, collating some of their findings.
After finding themselves “in SEO heaven” (Google searches for gut health rose by 400% between 2015 and 2020), they built a considerable community, including more than 96,000 Instagram followers. They now sell high-fibre snack bars, fermenting kits and handbag-sized gut diaries, with space to make notes on food, stress, sleep, exercise, symptoms and, of course, poo. They are not offering a “Queer Eye makeover”, says Lisa. “It’s more about tuning in” and giving customers the tools and language to report symptoms to their doctors, says Alana.
They unpick the latest research in digestible chunks in their book, The Gut Stuff: An Empowering Guide to Your Gut and Its Microbes (Tim Spector, who heads the department of twin research at King’s College London, wrote the foreword), and acknowledge that gut research is incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Their practical advice is not radical – lots of fruit and veg, avoid processed foods, drink water, do exercise and maybe try a bit of fermented cabbage. They readily admit that, while poo is a great marketing tool, it might not be much of a divining rod. “It’s difficult,” says Alana, because “your normal might not be someone else’s normal.”
With all that in mind, without a very specific medical reason to do so, stool-gazing starts to feel a bit like reading tea leaves. That it would catch the imagination in lockdown makes sense, when so many of us are confined at home, cooking more, never more aware of health, seeking self-improvement where we can find it. I, for one, suspect I would have barely noticed The Gut Stuff’s advert in the beforetime, when I was running around between appointments.
That the experts say stool-gazing isn’t a habit I need to take up is a relief – and not just because, with a toddler at home, it would be something of a busman’s holiday. Instead, current gut health advice remains similar to the kind my gran used to give me. Mellor advises thinking about “those sad, boring things, like plenty of vegetables, fluid, fibre and exercise”. And also asking: “Have you got a regular habit? Is it comfortable to pass the stool?” and deploying good pot position. “People used to lean forward, holding a newspaper. Now they sit back with a phone or device,” he says, which causes problems. But a $200 Goop footstool is not necessary. “Just sit forward,” he says.
right things – the left and liberal things.”
It’s debatable whether the landlord whose giant Duchy of Cornwall real estate portfolio has prevented residents from buying their homes is much of a lefty, but Lacey is on to something when he suggests that Charles could face a much larger challenge than domestic unpopularity. A consultant on the Netflix drama The Crown, Lacey says there is growing dissatisfaction with the heir apparent in a number of Commonwealth countries.
“It’s a fragile and anomalous situation to have as their actual head of state this relic of British history,” he says. “It will be relatively safe and easy to discard the monarchy but remain within the Commonwealth, and adopt something like the Irish system of an elected head of state. I can see a lot of Commonwealth countries opting for that system when the Queen’s gone.”
It’s often overlooked, at least in Britain, that many Commonwealth countries retain the British monarch as their head of state, among them Australia, Canada, Jamaica and New Zealand. While republicanism is the dog that refuses to bark at home, the standing of the monarchy would be conspicuously diminished should those countries dispense with King Charles III’s services.
That might be a progressive step in the grand scheme of things, ending a colonial legacy and marking a new and less grandiloquent era of monarchy. The problem is the British monarchy prides itself on its history and reach, which in turn informs its pomp and pageantry. Charles likes to talk about human scale and localism but he probably doesn’t want to be known as the king on whom Australia and Canada turned their backs.
Whenever the future of the royal family becomes a topic of public discourse, the first recommendation is usually that it could do with downscaling. And indeed some of the royals themselves, most obviously Prince Andrew, appear to have been unconsciously engaged in the campaign to reduce the size of the royal household by acting in such a way that necessitates their removal from public duties.
From downscaling, it’s a short hop and skip to mentioning the “Scandinavian model”, the radical practice of royals living as semi-normal citizens. Paranque is far from convinced. “The British monarchy is the biggest monarchy in Europe,” she says. “The Tudors still sell books and are the subjects of films. It’s a big business. You don’t have that with Scandinavia.”
Lacey agrees. “The British monarchy is far, far more expensive than the Scandinavian monarchies, but when you do a calculation for value for money, Britain does better. Whatever you say about them, they play an enormous role in British charitable life. The promise of getting a knighthood from the Queen is a massive boost to philanthropy.”
And also to political corruption, but that’s another matter. The point is, for many centuries royalty could cite divine right as justification for its existence. When that began to fade, deference remained strong. Nowadays its authority derives, and suffers, from a host of functions, from the mundanely ceremonial to the arcanely constitutional.
But perhaps its most vital, or engaging, role is the one it least likes or wants: that of a live-action soap opera. You only have to look atthe viewing figures for the Oprah interview to recognise the appeal of familial discord as a communal event.
The irony of Harry speaking about a desire for privacy in an interview watched by an estimated 50 million people around the world was lost on few observers, but he was at his most sympathetic when he spoke of having felt “trapped”. And nor was he wrong about the co-dependent but stifling embrace in which the royal family and the tabloid press are locked. It is, after all, the death grip to which he attributes his mother’s tragically curtailed life.
Where Harry loses perspective is in his conviction, widely shared among his family, that they should be left alone to get on with doing good works. That might be a job description for future royals – extremely well-paid charity workers and public handshakers. But it’s an unrealistic ambition while the family are presented (let’s not forget the fawning tone adopted by many in the media) as the pinnacle of British society. As long as we maintain that we’re a meritocracy, the gap between the royals’ behaviour and position will remain under critical scrutiny.
As the hold of duty grows weaker with each succeeding generation, that contract becomes increasingly unattractive to the royals, even as the privileges retain their allure – perhaps the most troubling aspect of Meghan and Harry’s attack on the royal family was the couple’s complaint that their son Archie wasn’t allowed a princely part within it.
The great hope for monarchists, of course, is Harry’s brother. They secretly wish for a brief interregnum of Charles
III, followed by the rejuvenating promise of William V. His apparent ease with the burden of his birthright stands in marked contrast to his father, who has said that the gradual realisation that he would one day be king was a “ghastly, inexorable” experience.
Although William may have what it takes to handle life within the gilded cage, that doesn’t make the institution any less psychologically punishing. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, but it might be the rest of us who will ultimately deem the weight of this anachronistic spectacle as unsupportable.
The British monarchy is the biggest in Europe. The Tudors sell books and are the subjects of films. It’s a big business
Estelle Paranque, historian