Is farting a sign your gut microbiome is happy?
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So you know how I love my musical apparatus for our chats, Norman?
Yes.
I've got my med diet bell here on the desk with me today. I forgot to bring my harmonica and my xylophone because I'm an idiot, but I did bring an extra new friend. Would you like to hear it?
Yes, I think I do. You're a rooty girl.
It's a whoopee cushion. We bought it especially for this particular episode of What's That? Rash.
where we answer the health questions everybody's got. And this time we were farting in front of a live audience.
That's right. This chat comes from our recent live show at World Science Festival Brisbane. So this question came from John, who the question itself was read out by a lovely audience member at our live show.
I am moved to ask a question of my own. We are urged to eat lots of fibre to nourish the gut microbiome. Is flatulence a sign that the gut biome is well fed and happy? And will a happy gut biome really improve one's cognitive function?
John, you've asked that question so well. I'm going to give you a round of applause.
But can we have the microphone back for a second? Why don't you just call flatulence for what it really is?
Okay. A fart.
Very good. Thank you. Because I wasn't sure what you were talking about, to be honest.
So on that, do you know it's a little bit like, you know how we call cow meat beef and pig meat pork and that sort of thing? And I don't know if anyone's heard this story before. It's the reason we would do this is because after the Norman Conquest, it was sort of fancier to speak in French. So around the table, you would say the French word for cow, which was like boeuf. which became beef, or you would say the fancy word for pig, which was like porcine. And so in a similar way, the word fart comes from Old English and Old German. The word was fjorten, which meant to, like, fart. It was probably an onomatopoeia. Right. Whereas flatulent comes from the Latin flatulentus, which comes from a root meaning to blow.
Right. And we're going to blow hard today, Norman.
We are. We're going to . What is a fart? A fart is the expulsion of gas from your anus. And it's basically the excess gas from the bugs in your bowel. So you eat all this food, it gets absorbed in the small intestine, and then it goes into the large bowel, into the colon, and the bacteria in your bowel chew it up, and the bacteria produce gas. They produce hydrogen, they produce methane, they produce carbon dioxide.
Okay. And hydrogen. And hydrogen, which we'll come to later. There's actually quite a lot of research into farting. We'll get into some of it soon. But I did really enjoy this particular study that was done in 1998, where there was a US scientist called Michael Levitt, and he used rectal tubes for a detailed study of fart compositions in six healthy women and ten healthy men.
Big study.
Big study.
Uncomfortable study.
Would you like to know a rough volume of gas that was emitted from these people's, between 106 mils on the lower end up to 1600 mils?
Is flatulence a sign that the gut biome is well fed and happy?
A litre and a half of air. The biggest farts are produced over half a litre of hydrogen, which I think could be some sort of renewable energy source. The thing that really caught my attention, though, is that the smelly components of the fart were quite small. So together, hydrogen sulphide, methane ethyol, which smells like rotten cabbage, and the garlic-like dimethyl sulphide, on average, were just 50 parts per million of each fart.
And only a third of them were really stenchy farters, weren't they?
Stenchy farters. I think that you are foreshadowing research that we will get to. But before we get to legitimate research, I have to introduce you to the Invisible College of Experimental Flatology, which is a website that exists. When I first saw flatology, I was like, oh, is this some sort of flat earth society? No, it's the ology, the study of flatulence. And they've done some... Well, look, I don't know if the research is real. I don't really care. The charts are... The FART charts are amazing. Let's look at one, please. This... If you have very quickly decoded this chart, I'm very, very impressed.
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