Claire Ainsworth
Appearances
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
And this is why gases are so cool, because they kind of let us eavesdrop on the conversations that are going on within this ecosystem and how that relates to our health.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
You know, most of the gut is this big black box. What we really would like to do is look at what's going on in real time and how it responds to changes in diet.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
It's a twisting landscape through which our intestinal gases move. Some of the gas that comes in is you swallow it. Your mom probably told you off for eating too fast. You swallow gases like oxygen and nitrogen. Most of that comes from swallowed air.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
You know, you feed yourself, but you also feed your gut bacteria, your gut microbes, with your diet. And it's this fermentation, then producing these gases...
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Yeah, so these are the things like hydrogen sulfide or methane. They are gases. that can act as signals. They tell our cells to do things. They can affect how our immune cells respond. They can affect the blood vessels in the gut. They can affect the function of the gut and affect other parts of our bodies as well. They could promote gut and liver health, for example, that sort of thing.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
So they're not just waste effluent. You're not thinking like a factory chimney set that belches out smoke. They have a function.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Well, I guess it's much more complicated than what goes in at the top. In many ways, we kind of fart when we breathe as well because I've only just met you and I'm insulting you. I do apologize. The problem, of course, with measuring breath is it doesn't tell you where the gas is being produced. Which builds the gut, and that's key, really.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
You know, when you say come out at the other end, it's composed of gases, you know, like carbon dioxide, depending on what else you've been eating, hydrogen, methane, perhaps that sort of thing, but also a whole load of other stuff, these tiny trace amounts of things like hydrogen sulfide, these volatile organic compounds I mentioned that probably lend a certain bouquet to the whole proceedings.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
The smell, should we put it. Right. So yeah, so what actually comes out, farts are actually really complex. They're very dynamic. And they, like I said, they give us a rather, you know, slightly smelly window into what's been going on on our insides, at least towards the end of our gut. Right.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Okay, so the Spanish team was led by Santiago Marco at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia and Antonio Pardo at the University of Barcelona. Okay. And one of the ways they've been trying is not to put too fine a point of it, a catheter up the rectum. Ah, okay. So a tube up the butt to gather the fart, to gather the gas.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
One of the problems with this is, A, it's a little bit invasive, but also you can contaminate the sample with atmospheric air. It can leak in. And also there's, how do you measure it? How do you measure it accurately? How do you get, you know, reproducible findings from it? So this was the challenge. this team took on.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
So they designed a fart-catching device, which is a tube up the rectum with a special plug in it to keep the atmospheric gas out and a special bag for collecting gas. And then they got five volunteers, set them up and said, don't move. Stay very still for the next four hours and we'll collect some gas.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
If you've got a tube up there, I don't know how much voluntary control you have over it, to be honest.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
They then took them over to the scientists who used a technique called gas chromatography on the farts. And this is a very sensitive, very precise way of measuring what molecules are in a sample, right? What did they find? Well, they found, actually, they could detect with good accuracy the five main gases in farts, so oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
methane and they gave the subjects a meal that either didn't make them fart much or was predicted to make them fart a lot and then did the experiment again and then they were able to show in their gas chromatography measurements they could tell the difference between the samples.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
There are some scientists who are trying to collect them, physically collect farts.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
But the idea was that actually you can use this to get a really nice, accurate, reproducible way of detecting what's those gases in farts.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
How does that all work? Yeah, so this is the Atmo capsule, and it builds on work from a number of scientific groups around the world. And obviously, we can't swallow a gas chromatograph, but we can send something else in that doesn't have that same sort of analytical power, but still, you know, as a trade-off, tells us stuff that we couldn't find out any other way.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Yeah, a little bit like that. So they've got this little capsule and it's about half the size of a sort of AA battery and you swallow it. It's like a big pill. And it makes its way through your gut over a couple of days and it can detect hydrogen, carbon dioxide and it can also work out through various means if there's a low oxygen in the area.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
And it's got a temperature sensor so it knows when it's come out the other end. You know, Atmo has left the building. And the great thing about it is it transmits its results telemetrically to a receiver outside the body. You just send the data off for analysis. One of the useful things it can tell you is whether fermentation is taking place at a particular point in the gut.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
So the cool thing is you know where it is and you know, for example, if there's hydrogen there. If there's hydrogen there, there's got to be fermentation.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Yeah. Wow. One of the theories in IBS is that it's the location of fermentation that might be an issue. And they showed, for example, that by changing diet and measuring it with these capsules, they were able to show that changing the diet shifted the location of fermentation in the colon.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
I thought, what on earth is motivating these people to go to such lengths and such care to collect farts? How did they get funding for that? Why would you do that? And it took me on this really fascinating journey into just how important and fascinating farts really are.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
I almost say it gives me a whole new appreciation of farts. It's a classic Cinderella story, isn't it? It's rags to riches. We thought they were rubbish. We tried to get rid of them or hide them. But you can take pride in your farts. They are a miracle of biology. But maybe keep that miracle to yourself in the bathroom for now. Farts are hilarious, right?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
I mean, I had a lot of fun reporting this story, but there's a very serious side to it because these gases can help us understand some diseases that cause a huge amount of suffering worldwide. If you're affected by any of these issues, what I suggest is to seek out good quality information. Don't try and treat yourself with a diet because there's so much rubbish.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
You know, try this fad diet or buy that overpriced supplement to fix your problem. What you want is good evidence-led treatment from a physician. It's very early days, but, you know, people are working on it.