Apparently, a little brown book by two researchers called “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” is making a bit of a splash. Not a plop, plop, constipated splash, but an elegant high-fiber “swoosh” splash that Olympic divers practice for years to attain:

Poo and your health | Salon Life

The moment is ripe to come clean about our inner workings, say coauthors Sheth and Richman, who met when they were undergraduates at Brown University (where else?). Sheth, along with other collegiate pastimes, developed what he calls the PQI, or Poo Quality Index, that he and fellow students would use to compare the superiority of their bowel movements. Years later, the pair reconnected when Richman, who works in Silicon Valley to develop clean-energy technology, got back in touch with Sheth, who’d since become a gastroenterologist fellow at Yale University School of Medicine. “Poo has been in a societal sewer,” says Richman. “It’s something people didn’t feel comfortable talking about outside a small circle of friends. What we’re seeing is a cultural evolution where it’s no longer a taboo subject.”

Hat tip, a favorite book, and some quiet time to Eileen for this interesting read.