We commented recently that there is a golden mean with regards to our attitude towards poop. To handle our business properly, we must both acknowledge that poop is natural and nothing to be ashamed of but also make sure that we restrain and manage our poop so as to avoid negative externalities for ourselves and others. To the extent that we find people either seeking to attack the naturalness of poop and show a gnostic hostility to the way that we have been created and formed as physical beings, we can tell that someone has an issue with the physicality and materiality of our existence. On the other hand, those people who do not believe that what comes out of us needs to be restrained demonstrate a selfish lack of concern for the well-being of those around us or for the need to live in harmony with others and with standards of proper conduct and decorum. This too indicates a genuine moral failing that we might figure as antinomian, and likely demonstrates a sloppy attitude towards standards of righteousness in general. Just as their is a golden mean in terms of our attitude towards poop, there is also a golden mean in terms of the operation of the digestive system itself, and this is worthy of at least a brief discussion here.

When we look at a well-functioning digestive system, we find that a being consumes food that is nutritious and provides for both the energy needs as well as the chemical needs of the being. These nutrients are taken into the body and the remainder of the material that has been consumed passes through the system and is eliminated in a timely fashion. Ideally, enough energy is taken into the body to keep the body operating at a steady state, without gaining or losing weight, assuming that the person in question is at a healthy body weight already. It is easy for all of these conditions to go awry, it should be noted, but we are speaking here of philosophical ideals. To the extent that one’s digestive system departs from this ideal, there are various problems that need to be identified and resolved for the person in question to attain good health, and most of these problems are beyond the scope of this work at present, though some of the implications will be worth discussing at a later time when we enter the second section of this work. For the present discussion, we will focus on the elimination aspect of the digestive system and ponder what it is that the healthy digestive system eliminates. Put simply, the body eliminates what it cannot consume and what is not nourishing to it. A healthy diet will include a certain amount of fiber, much of it which is not meant for the body to take in, but is rather meant to help the body to rid itself of that which it is keeping but cannot use, in the hope that the body as a whole may be healthier by eliminating what is not beneficial to the body but is present within it. Alternatively, there are parts of our diet that some people can take in better than others, and so understanding the proper balance between what is taken in and what is eliminated depends in large part on the ability of the body to properly receive and recognize what is beneficial and be able to take it in properly.

There are at least two sorts of problems that can demonstrate that one’s digestive system has gone awry. The first of these problems is that the body does not properly eliminate what it has taken in. This indicates that the digestive system has gotten stuck and is unable to properly process the foods it has eaten. This can be the result of many conditions, all of which tend to create a certain set of problems for people. Twice in a very recent time, close friends of mine (a father and daughter, interestingly enough) have found themselves spending time in the hospital due to the condition known as diverticulitis, where perforations within the intestinal wall allowed waste to seep out of the intestines and into the body cavity, resulting in serious dangers to health with regards to infection and also the massive decline of appetite until the digestive system was able to heal, along with a greatly restricted diet afterwards due to the weakness of the intestinal wall. For the health of the body to be preserved, waste must be gotten rid of, and removed to a place outside of the body. Where waste is deposited within the body, it causes a great deal of harm and potential destruction to the life of the individual and is a matter of great seriousness. Even less serious conditions demonstrate serious problems, though. Constipation, which similarly shows the problem of the digestive system getting stuck, often results from problems like dehydration and the failure of gut bacteria to properly process foods, which demonstrates serious problems in one’s well-being. The inability of the body to let food waste pass through and be eliminated greatly (and understandably) limits the ability of the body to take in new food and is a serious threat to nutrition as well as energy needs.

As might be expected, given that there are problems that result from a lack of elimination in its proper manner, there are also problems from too much elimination. At times, the body may take in products in one’s food that irritate and bother the digestive system, leading to rapid and painful and sometimes unpleasant eliminations. Sometimes, these eliminations may cause the body to enter a state of dehydration given the way that the body has to eliminate large amounts of water in the process of getting rid of waste. Speaking personally, for example, I tend to have food allergies that sometimes result in the body seeking to eliminate what is viewed as a toxin and a poison by any and all means necessary, including simultaneous nausea, diarrhea, and sweating until the body has been cleared of what it has viewed as a potential threat. Additionally, there are other foods that tend to cause a great deal of irritation to my digestive system, like pepper and peppers, with the end result that I tend to make sure as much as possible that these things are kept to a minimum within my diet. Some of the most poignant cases of this sort of problem come from children who suffer terrible digestive problems as a result of the drug and/or alcohol habits of parents, who pass on their inability to take in nutrients adopted as a defensive measure to avoid toxicity to those who are innocent of such habits.

When we see how pooping can go wrong, we are left with the understanding that the systems of our own lives are like every other system and cannot be taken for granted. To be sure, we could multiply our discussion of problems if we examined the problems of nutrition as well as that of elimination, but there is no need to expand our scope beyond the present one to indicate that there are indeed a great many issues that hinder the body’s digestive system from working as well as possible. Some of these problems relate to the state of our body, some of them to genetic reasons (including inabilities to metabolize what is meant to be food), and some of them the result of epigenetic reasons (the expression of genes that are hindered in those whose bodies are affected by substance abuse whose effects are passed down to later generations). Preserving our digestive health requires a great degree of self-knowledge, and when our bodies tell us that something is going on, a willingness to change our habits to reflect the way that our body can handle what we consume.