To sit or not to sit? That’s the question driving the debate about how men should urinate when they go to the bathroom.
Although there is no conclusive medical evidence that peeing sitting down has the most health benefits, there seems to be a consensus that this is the most hygienic way to urinate.
“There is no right or wrong way to pee, it depends on the person“, says Mary Garthwaite, president of the UK Urology Foundation. “But urinating sitting down is more hygienicas long as the bathrooms are clean.”
Garthwaite adds that it may also be the safest way to urinate for people with balance and mobility difficulties, or for those times when we wake up in the middle of the night and need to get to the bathroom quickly.
A much cited investigation is one from 2014 from Leiden University, in the Netherlands. A group of doctors analyzed how body position influenced, among other things, urinary flow rate and urination time — the speed at which the bladder is emptied.
They concluded that urinating while sitting allowed the bladder to be emptied faster and more completely in men suffering from an enlarged prostatebut “no difference” was found in healthy men.
In fact, urinating standing up is extremely practical for most men — just look at how quickly the lines move for men and women at public bathrooms. But peeing standing up also increases the likelihood of splashwhich can be unpleasant for other people. And we’re not just talking about bad aim, which hits the toilet seat or the floor.
A team of North American mechanical engineers discovered, in 2013, that microscopic droplets “were projected at very large angles and distances”that is, nearby objects, toothbrushes, ended up being hit by urine.
It’s true that some cultures encourage men to sit down to urinate. In Islam, for example, this is even recommended as part of the Sunnah, a set of practices and traditions that date back to the time of the prophet Muhammad. But for most men, old habits are hard to change, and urinating standing up remains the number 1 way to pee.
In 2013, YouGov carried out a study in 13 countries on men’s preferred way to urinate. The results showed that there is a division even within continents: while 40% of Germans declared that they always sat down to pee and only 10% did it standing up, in the United Kingdom the percentages were 9% and 33%, respectively. It is curious that the practice of urinating while sitting seems to be more prevalent in Germanya country where calling someone (a man who sits down to urinate) implies unmanly behavior.
In Brazil, an old saying says that peeing while sitting is “a thing for women and frogs”. Do men need to fight some evolutionary trait to change the way they urinate?
No, according to one of the greatest authorities on evolutionary psychology, Professor Robert Dunbar, from the University of Oxford. “There is no evidence [evolutiva] that explains why men urinate standing up,” he says. There goes a possible excuse for men who don’t like the idea of sitting down.
“The truth is that some men will feel more comfortable peeing standing up and others sitting down,” adds Garthwaite.
Without a definitive medical recommendation, how to urinate will continue to be a choice for men around the world, unless they are encouraged to sit down to urinate by factors such as pressure from women or notices on bathroom walls (another German peculiarity).
But, if you’re going to urinate standing up, try to at least aim well.
