Are you pooping all wrong?

Short Wave

NPR

News, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Daily News, Nature, Science

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Talking about poop can be taboo, and this social norm may be hurting our health. Dr. Trisha Pasricha says around 40% of people in the U.S. have bathroom issues so bad it affects their daily lives. Pasricha, a gastroenterologist, says her patients' bathroom and bowel education ends during potty training and doesn’t continue into adulthood. This is why she wrote the book You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong. In this episode, Pasricha speaks with host Regina G. Barber about the three P’s of pooping: pliability, propulsion and pelvic floor. They address whether to squat and whether certain fiber is the answer to better bathroom breaks.

If you liked this episode, check out our episodes on urine myths and recurring UTIs.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.3	Are you regular?
0:07.2	That's a question that I remember hearing from older movies or sitcoms when I was a kid,
0:11.9	and it took me a while to understand what it meant.
0:15.7	That it was a delicate question to ask if your bathroom schedule was regular or disrupting your life.
0:21.4	40% of Americans report that their bowel habits disrupt their daily lives.
0:26.2	Wow.
0:26.9	Isn't that a huge number? That's like almost half of us.
0:30.2	That's gastroenterologist and medical journalist Dr. Trisha Paswicha, who's taken it upon herself to help this 40% of people who need help.
0:39.3	There's a lot that we just don't talk about, don't know, and if we could just all of us
0:43.4	lean in a little bit more to our physiology and know how our body is supposed to work,
0:48.1	then I think we could solve a lot of this problem on our own.
0:51.3	Trisha's latest push to solve this problem is a new book called You've Been Pooping
0:55.6	All Wrong.
0:57.0	And she's never been shy when it comes to talking about, well, poop.
1:03.0	I grew up in a poop positive family, and I hope I am currently raising a poop positive
1:07.8	family, but my dad was and is also a neuro gastroenterologist, so we talked
1:12.6	about poop all the time. I was the same. Growing up in my family, we talked about going number
1:17.0	two all the time. But for a lot of people, the education we get when it comes to going to the
1:22.8	bathroom, it stops once we're out of our potty training phase, around two and a half or three years old.
1:28.9	It's a huge issue. I mean, for example, a lot of people can't poop at work.
1:32.8	Well, a lot of us who don't have the luxury of working from home, the urge to go is going to strike.
	...

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