If you’d like to do something easy to improve your health and help the planet, buy a bidet. Whether you purchase a low-cost, no-frills bidet or go all out and buy a high-end, luxury bidet with all the bells and whistles, either way, you will achieve the same results: better health and less reliance on toilet paper, which ultimately saves trees and helps our earth.
Bidets help your health
Let’s face it: wiping our butts and privates with dry paper is a workable option, but then again, so are leaves. There is a reason why most of the world already uses bidet toilet seats, and that is because bidets similar to the Brondel Swash 1400 give you a superior clean down below.
Italians think bidets are so important to hygiene that they passed a law way back in 1975 requiring one bidet per household. The Italian law makes sense.
Think of it like this: when your car is dirty, do you wipe it with a paper towel, or give it a wash? Similarly, humans clean themselves every day by showering, as opposed to wiping off dirt and grime with a napkin.
So why would you wipe your soiled anus with dry paper and then stuff it back into your sweaty underpants? That’s just gross. You’re practically asking for bacteria to accumulate.
Plus, using a bidet has an added perk: it guarantees your hand will never accidentally come in contact with your waste while wiping. Many health problems are caused because people don’t do a good enough job washing their hands post-wash. If you use a bidet, that won’t be a problem for you because you’re eliminating that hand/waste point of contact.
To recap: bidets help you avoid inadvertently touching your waste, and they give you a better clean than dry paper. People who use bidets find they have less colorectal issues, which means fewer trips to the G.I. doctor.
Women who use bidets find they have less urinary tract infections caused by residual E.coli bacteria building up, and men who use bidets find they have fewer instances of bacterial prostatitis, again caused by leftover bacteria down below.
So, when you think about it, using a bidet leads to less doctor’s visits, which leads to a healthier you. Imagine improving your health just by upgrading your toilet seat!
Bidets help the Earth
Bidets also help cut down on toilet paper use. If all humans cut their toilet paper use in half or more, we’d save millions of trees per year. If you buy a fancy bidet, you could stop using toilet paper completely because high-end bidets, like the TOTO S550e Washlet, offer warm-air dryers that dry your rear post-wash.
The low-cost bidet models don’t have air dryers, so you may need to use a few squares of toilet paper to dab yourself dry post-wash. But either way, you’d have done a huge part to stop using so much toilet paper.
Keep in mind, we chop down millions of trees to make toilet paper, and toilet paper is a product we quite literally flush away. It seems incredibly wasteful when you give it some thought.
Some people worry the water used in a bidet wash could also be wasteful, but it turns out the water required to turn millions of trees into toilet paper every year is vastly larger than the water used if everyone converted to bidet cleanings.
It’s small things like changing our bathroom behavior that can actually add up and make a big difference in our lives. So, help your planet and improve your health by investing in a bidet today!
Author Bio: Jensen Lee is the Founder and Managing Member of bidetsPLUS, an online retail store specializing in bidet toilet seats. Prior to bidetsPLUS, Jensen held management positions in technology-related fields, in both the U.S. and Europe. He has held the position of Product Manager of Global Network Services for British Telecom. Most recently, he held the position of Executive Director of Product Marketing at AT&T Interactive, AT&T’s internet advertising division.