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When you think about it, it’s amazing how many things go down your drains—razor stubble, toilet paper, soap scum, onion skin, dinner crumbs, spiders, sand from a beach trip, toothpaste, an occasional wedding ring…A house’s plumbing system can handle a lot (thank goodness, or we’d all be living in HazMat suits). It takes away what we don’t want, shuttles it to some processing facility, and we never have to think about it again—unless some kink prevents our waste from being drained. Whatever plugs your pipes, you know you have to clear a clog with Drano® or some piece of heavy artillery. Without clean pipes, life stinks.
That’s why you take steps to keep all your pipes clear. Before winter, you may shut off the outside water supply to keep pipes from freezing, and though your toddler may have a different agenda, House Rule Number 26 is: No Tonka trucks down the toilet. Really, it’s much easier to keep your pipes working than to call a belt-phobic plumber to fix them.
It’s the same thing with your body’s pipes—your digestive system. We all put an extraordinary variety (and amount) of things down our anatomical drains, and we expect our plumbing system to shuttle everything away. Because our pipes don’t always appreciate the jalapeño-laden burritos or fraternity-prank goldfish we slide down them, we can experience digestive problems like clogs, spills, leaks, breaks, and spouse-scaring explosions. A key element in this factory of consumption and elimination is your intestinal tract. Most people don’t realize that your intestines are living things; they’re organs just like your heart’s an organ. They’re not inert tubes; instead, they actively absorb, secrete, send signals, and metabolize. In some ways, your intestines are the democratic government of your body. They give us the freedom to eat whatever we want, which means our intestines allow us to be omnivores instead of carnivores or herbivores. Depending on what we crave, we have the intestinal freedom to eat plants, animals, or a dozen Krispy Kremes at one sitting. That’s because our intestines let us micromanage what we allow within the borders of our body. But with that freedom comes responsibility. As young people, we think that our bodies are like machines, that they’ll convert whatever we want to eat into something our cells can convert to energy. That’s not entirely true, especially as we get older or don’t exercise as much. That’s because your body—as you can attest from your gastrointestinal reaction to your mom’s eight-bean casserole—responds differently to various types of food.

For a lot of people, talking about digestive sewage sounds as appealing as playing in it. It’s just not something that we talk about much (“How about that rain today? Did you see Shaq’s dunk last night? Your bowels chugging along regularly these days, Frank?”). Maybe so, but foul shouldn’t mean taboo. Look at the story of Sharon Osbourne, talk-show host and wife of rocker Ozzy Osbourne. When she was diagnosed with colon cancer, she candidly talked about it, explaining that colon cancer is a silent and deadly disease. After she received treatment and got better, she even told the story about how her kids
joked with her, asking her why she had to get cancer there. With that, she made an important point: that colon cancer is silent because there aren’t many outward symptoms, but also because people would rather talk about the kind of colon that appears earlier in this sentence rather than the anatomical pipe that launches your enchilada submarine into the great porcelain ocean.
Of course, we all know that your digestive system is as dirty as George Carlin’s jokes, especially when you start throwing around words like colon, rectum, and feces. But it’s crucial to talk openly about these things, because a well-lubed digestive system helps you live younger and better. When you consider how many different kinds of foods are out there, and how differently all of our bodies respond to them, you’ll want to understand how your pipes work and what can cause them to break. Look, we’re not trying to be a pain in the butt (but more on hemorrhoids later); we just want your sewer system to get your food from one end of your body to the other as efficiently as it can.

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