The Status of Flatus

about gas, the toutes parts, you name it. If you promised, it was like a blood oath to our listeners that we would do a fart episode for everyone. But no one asked for by the way, no well no one ever asked for it, but it happens, and so here it is an entire episode devoted to the interesting science of of cutting one as it were. You say that with a question mark. I think it's you know, it's

definitely interesting science. I think it comes down to the individual a listener, I mean, what what is your individual relationship with gas? And are you the type of person who is repelled enough to where no amount of interesting science is really going to make you respect flateus in any way or do you or do you? Are you already totally on board? And in science the coding of science can only make flateus all the more exciting. My feeling is that everybody does it, so everybody should have

an interest in it. Well, everybody does it, but people do it to different degrees, and people do it with with varying degrees of pride or or or disgrace. Well. As as I've shared before, I come from a various schatological family, so this is a topic that has been plumbed in the family. I'm not scared to talk about it. And uh, I feel like there's lots of really great information here. Uh, in particular this idea of this fire breathing dragon. And this is fascinating to me. This was

in Mary Richard's Gulp. She spoke with herpetologist, Steven s cor who became infixated on the question of why a python or a boa um has an unusually large see some Okay, so I see someone like this little digestive pouch. It's near the colon and normally you see implant eating animals, and so he became obsessed with why, why which is a python have this? So he tried to figure out the role of the season, whether or not it was just there to break down the plant material in the

animal that the python had just ingested. Um, And he began to actually measure the amount of hydrogen coming out of a python, ex like what it was exhaling after it was given a bunch of rats to eat. Okay, So he did that with something called a chromatograph, and that measured the amount of hydrogen alright. What he actually found out, though, was that the amount of hydrogen that was being exhaled by these creatures was enormous. I think

about this hydrogen concentration is flammable. These guys and gals were exhaling something about Okay, so what does any of us have to do with belching or gas or inflate us. Well, it turns out Square has this really great theory that early man would stumble across, say a python that had just or it was in the middle of digesting a gazelle, and so, as you know, the python would be useless and trying to defend itself. Correct, you just eating this

huge meal, bloated. It's not gonna amediately run off. I never room for another one, right, So early man says, a easy food. I've got dinner tonight. I have two things for dinner tonight. Right. I think that Mary rich had described it as Neanderthal for duncan. Okay, so early man or woman hauls us off to a campsite. There's a fire, someone is being you know, joyful, and they begin to say, step on this python's head or they

kick it, and what happens. A huge flood of this hydrogen just rolls out of the mouth, meets the fire, and then and then you have a fire breathing reptile. Yeah, so s course says, think about the thousands and thousands of years of these tales of bringing down a fire breathing giant to your campsite. Because I could see, on one hand, someone could be like, whoa, that thing can

can breathe fire? I was really I was. I was really lucky that I didn't get toasted back there, or they'd see what happened and they realized, well, this thing doesn't actually breathe fire, but it sure did look like it. And I'm going to claim that it does because I look all the more awesome for having killed it. Slated right, and I fast forward, you know, fifty thou years to modern humans in eight year olds all around camp fires trying to light their farts. Right there. We have a

long tradition of this relationship with gas and man. Yeah, anybody who's read Mary Roaches Packing from Mars book about the space program and human space exploration, now, so there's a there's a lot of scatological content in here, because you're talking about sending humans and their digestive systems into a strange environment that doesn't necessarily play by the rules, and at the very least is contained within a very small space, and inevitably you have astronauts that are going

to pass gas and uh. I believe it was measured out to be like three coke cans worth of worth of gas is coming out. So there were a couple of interesting bits there involving NASA research. One was a quest of by um Edwin Murphy UH in an attempt to find though what what the ideal fart profile for an astronaut would be um and basically they wanted a little or no methane or hydrogen, because, as we just touched on, hydrogen is explosive and methane is not desirable either.

But in his work. This guy Murphy had apparently encountered one ideal astronaut candidate, and then this is the quote. A special interest for further research was the subject who produced essentially no flatus on one grounds dry weight of beans, as opposed to the average gut, which will during a peak of flash ones period five or six hours post being consider umption, pass anywhere from one to almost three cups of latest per hour. So, uh, that is particularly interesting.

Interesting not only because NASA you know, wants that ideal fart profile for an astronaut, or or that you know you would given the chance, but that there are individuals

that are almost non farters, which is interesting. It is amazing to me because I mean, presumably again everybody does this, and I do think it's very kind of NASA, by the way, to try to recruit people who don't do it so much, because, as we discussed in our Emotions in Space episode, can get dicey up there, and if you're next to someone who keeps putt putting, you know, for six months straight, that that can make things very tense.

So let's talk about fart. What is it? Well, basically, the act of farting, of course, is the means by which the body rids the colon of unwanted gas, and by virtue of that unwanted pressure, you have this gas that builds up and the average person releases between five two thousand million liters of this per day. But but yeah,

what does it consist of? Well, about its carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and methane and go again, varying degrees of that depending on the particular part part because some people don't produce methane. I think it's like only one third of us produce methane yep. And most of these gases are either swallowed inadvertently when you're eating your food or release from the food as it is digested. And uh, it's amazing because when it's in your body, it is odorless, and we

don't think of it as being odorless. Right. And the other key thing that of the ingredients that are just listed that is odorless, all the hydrogen, the methane, oxygen, all of it, that is not the odor producing content. It is that one percent that is responsible for the smell. Yeah, we'll get to that one percent and a bit. Yeah, spend such a political term day as one percent. That's kind of funny thing one peron that stinking up the whole system exactly. Um, So, as you had mentioned, we

do expel quite a bit of it. But the man who inspired really thoughtful study of how much we expel and even excessive gas is a man who in nineteen six complained of a five year epic bout of the twos he UM. He contacted gas from entrologist Michael Levitt, and in order to study the man, Lovett had to create a baseline of normal flattist output so or flatists, I should say. He recruited volunteers to keep flat too, graphic lags flogs of gas activity, recording every stirring in

every output. He prefers that actually, but he did, and others have relied on um studies that use a rectal tube in collection syringes to determine average output. That is year old way of trying to figure out how much people are expelling. So basically the farting jar scenario, Yeah, but a little bit more foolproof and a lot more going on. And the syringes there just to extract the molecules and then to to figure out what sort of

molecules are in there. Um, these days. Hydrogen output is measured in the breath because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and when it reaches the lungs, it's exhaled. Now, what he found was that this man was passing gas thirty four to forty two times a day. Okay, the baseline average here of the humans who doesn't have any lactose intolerance problems is about fourteen to twenty times a day in

case you're wondering. So the problem that they finally figured out is that he was lactose intolerant, and as we learned before, lactose does not get broken down for some people in the digestive excuse me, in the small intestines hangs out in the colon, and then you have other bacteria which we're breaking that down, and then you've got the waste p act of that bacteria, and you've got

a bunch of bunch of bunch of hydrogen being produced there. Yes, of course, we're talking about humans as a whole in regards to UH to flate us. But you can't help but get into gender scenarios when you start thinking about In fact, one of the articles that we were looking at um. Uh they are. The author made a point of of saying that men as as a whole, and she's really generalizing here and painting with a very broad brush,

and I skilled her for it. U that all men are just enthusiastic about their gas and just love it and crave it and laugh at it all the time, yeah, and model it. Really, I am not one of those men. Like maybe that is the more baseline m relationship between men and fart, but I, for my own self, I don't engage that style of humor. For the most part, I will laugh at a fart joke if it is

well crafted um or in some way, you know, insightful. Um. There have been occasionally they'll get me, like the instance, there was a Sarah Silverman Show episode that was very far heavy. She's she likes the farts. Yeah, and occasionally that will work. I mean, it's it's the right fartship. But as a whole, I do not. I'm more of a stereotypical if you're gonna go with these stereotypes, I'm more of a stereotypical woman when it comes to fart

gags and self gas production than a stereotypical man. Okay, So what I'm hearing is that you don't have a cellar full of arrears. No I do not. Okay, all right, this is good, um. And it's interesting that you bring out the stereotypes because you know, if it's were the Victorian age, we would say, oh, well, women just don't produce gas at all, right, it wouldn't even be a question. But we do have data on it, and it turns out that women have are seemed to be expelling more

gas than men, as measured by the hydrogen exhaled. But Mary Roach questions this and says in her book, could it be that the suppression of gas could lead to a higher input of hydrogen exhalation? So maybe if you're going with the stereotypical um I almos don't want to say stereotypical female, but let's say, let's go with you. If you're going with a fart avoidant person like myself, then they are going to be less inclined to just

let it rip whenever the mood hits them. Right, So if you suppress it, then you're going to absorb more of it through your bloodstream and then you're going to exhale mark. Oh, so the way, you're kind of reversing it and farting into your body, into your blood. You're just breath farting, okay, right, and that makes it really a lovely thought, doesn't it. Do I think about that next time you give your significant other nice little kiss? Yeah, you know, I I do. I should. At one point

about about ladies and farting. I did work in a newspaper once and an individual in the front office was terminated for engaging in a farting contest with a with a with a customer. It was it was quite it. It It seems like it was mutual farting, so I guess it was just like, hey, this is we're going to

make an example of you. We just fart with the customer. Maybe, you know, there could have been some other politics involved, or maybe it was just kind of this unwritten rule where if your customer comes in and celebrates his or her farts, that's fine, but then you are not supposed to then engage with them in a contest of farts or you know, it's it's kind of like it's it's okay, the customer uses foul language to a point, but you're in then not supposed to engage them in that kind

of behavior, I guess. Or maybe maybe she showed him up, maybe she shamed him and they lost the customer because it was this a gastrontrology office. No, this was a newspaper with we didn't even have a flatest section, you know, just business and sports. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that I can recover from that store. I feel like I need time to think about that and chuckle. But we must go on, so I'm just gonna chuckle about that later. Um. All right, so let's talk about this one. Yes, or

should we take a break? Oh? Yeah, let's take a break. Why not? When we come back, we will discuss the one percent of the fart it is responsible for the smell. We'll talk about extraordinary cases of flateust. We'll talk about people who have elevated um passing gas to an art form. And also the big question, if you're in microgravity, can you propel yourself across a spaceship just by virtue of

your own uh slatest? All right, we're back. So as we've discussed of flateut is, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and methane, and uh these are coming from stuff that either gases that are inadvertently swallowed or it is released from the food is we're digesting it. But none of it produces the signature odors and it varies certainly, as we can all attest to. Uh. None of these elements

contribute to the odor. Is just of tiny one that makes the gas so foul, that's right, that creates that singular a bouquet of smell. Micro Has really live for the most part in the colon where they attack and consume undigested food and in turn generate their own waste products. So in the case of microorganisms, waste usually means gas, and in the case of these microorganism organisms, that gas can be the really ripe stuff, usually molecules containing sulfur

like dimethyl sulfide and method methyl um. These are waste products that ferment and they build up to a sufficient level and then they're released with the rest of the gas in the bowels. And by the way, we talked about this before, the birth of the fart happens when uh, you're stretch receptors um in your colon send a signal to your brain, Hey, I'm having some discomfort, and then this finkter is loosened up, and and then the message maybe when you get a chance, please do something about this,

or maybe this is really important. So the next time you even have like a heavy thought in the back of your head, um, we're going to just go ahead and let it go even have you Yeah, yeah, that's right. The brain will sit there and respond and say, okay, now you gotta tampa down, sorry, swincter, or yep, we're overloaded here alright. So what brave soul figured out the scent profile of late us. Well, the same Michael Levitt who helped to determine the output of late US also

studies the qualities of of gas. These smell profiles, he recruited volunteers to detect the three main elements of a fart so hydrogen sulfide which is described as the scent of rotten eggs uh metha nephiel that is described as rotting vegetation, and dimethyl sulfide, which is oddly described as sweet m Yes. So he didn't do this as a cruel joke. I mean, he wasn't just trying to you know,

terrorize people with smells. He wanted to see if the noxiousness of the scent would correlate with the combined concentrations of these three types of sulfur gases, and it did. So. The best part of this, all this information is he took the data and he reversed engineer to fart so he could use the combined concentrations in other scenarios. Would would it be safe to call this a frank and fart, Yes, it would be absolutely Um it's a frank and part.

And he wanted to figure out the absorptive properties of charcoal underpants or seat pads, which, by the way, is of interest to the airline industry. Which makes sense, right, I think that I said, go airline industry, put charcoal in the seat pads. Any degree to which you can cut down on the on the amount of flatus in that enclosed space on a long flight, the better, Yeah, exactly.

In speaking of a long flight or a spacewalk, NASA actually has used filters in the air circulation in space suits with charcoal to help bind sulfur and then prevent the astronauts from getting drive by farted every time the air is recirculated. Yeah, because if they build up enough along enough space walk, then fart madness ensues. I've heard

about madness. It isn't earth. There are a lot of I was looking on snopes to see if there were any particular urban legends related to the farting of note, and one of them was this bit that occasionally circulates and emails about a man who who died because he farted under the covers and uh and had the covers up over his head. But that's just complete malarkey. That's just a Dutch Oven. Yeah, so so yeah, so death

by by death by by Dutch Oven not really a thing. Yeah, And you can't try to, I mean, just for fun Dutch Oven astronauts, right, No, No, I mean they'd go through enough in the training. I'm sure they were, like, you know, after you've been in that spinny thing long enough, and I mean we've all seen the right stuff. They went through a lot of horrible things to prove themselves and and to you know, to get their bodies in shape and prepare themselves for this this experience in orbit.

So and keep in mind that the air in their space suits is actually recirculated three times a minute. So now another interesting bit from Mary Roch's book, Packing for Mars. She talked to an astronaut by the name of Roger Crouch, and he was particularly interested in the idea of propelling yourself through a microgravity environment like a board the space station via your own farts. And he said that the math and velocity of the expelled gas is very small

compared to the mass of the human body. So he tested it out found that it produced no real effect, though he did, uh, he did have this theory that the underpants and the pants might be prohibiting the expulsion of gas, and so he but he did not get to test this naked, but he apparently has lingering thoughts that that nude farting in microgravity would potentially give you

at least a little push across the cabin. Yeah, that really is not going to win the hearts and minds of your fellow astronauts and face if you just drop trial and then try to propel yourself with your own parts. Can you imagine the dude's doing like the crying in space videos and all the different viral videos of Colonel Hatfield. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if he's on board for this. That's going to be a big shock when that when that YouTube video rolls out that might be the one

that never really makes it too right. So though, if you were going to do that experiment without underpants and really truly test it, you would want to eat the gasest inducing foods that you could. And it turns out that the most eruptive edibles are beans, carrots, raisins, bananas,

which is odd to me. Onions not odd milk and milk products for the very reasons that we talked before about milk being hard to digest and break down as opposed to something like um, let's say meat, fish, grapes, berries, these are these have the least amount of complex carbohydrates.

It's it's this, uh, this really damning conundrum that that I that I have encountered, and then I think a number of people encountered that the healthier that you try to eat, you know, you're trying, you're trying to eat all these vegetables and these whole grains and lintels and beans, and it's just it's making you're gassier, and you feel like you're being punished for this diet. Uh. Dr Robert Lustig even put it this way. He said, in life,

you have two choices. It's either fat or fart. So yeah, it's true, like if you were to radically change your diet from say a meat and very little um vegetable diet to grains and vegetables, you would really need to set aside a couple of days to transition into that. Kid you not, Well, there's that great Portlandia sketch where they go to the restaurant that has the raw food. It's like an all raw food places may actually have

a a flateist patio with fans the fat patio. That is just one of my favorite things, one of those that that clip is just great because it's not hearty horror laugh laugh, but it kind of speaks to that whole experience when you do go to a rough foods restaurant or a vegan restaurant and the result of that afterwards, they just kind of brought it more to the forefront. Yeah, it's it's a clever it's a clever bit of of

parody there and uh and and commentary. So that's that is a fart gag that I at least chuckle that sure, because really, when you get down to it, every restaurant should have a fart patio. Now, as we mentioned before, you you have a very rare individual like the individual that NASA uncovered who barely farted at all. Just the one person in the world, the one person that's a mutant that that barely produces any flatus. But then there

is there's another side of that coin as well. There this the super fartre's the the extraordinary flat went individuals that that make life so interesting. They just thought that some people have types of bacteria that produce more sulfur than other people, so that could be part of it. Diet is certainly part of it. And then of course, as we mentioned earlier, some people are gonna have different coins of ptations of hydrogen methane, so some people are

going to be more explosive, which is UH. And I feel like we've discussed this before, but it's it's more of a serious issue when there's some sort of surgical recedure going on, you know, with the colon UH in which you're going to have to cauterize wounds with a heat element. That heat element plus hydrogen methane that's built up that can have literally an explosive reaction, which is

not good for anybody involved in that procedure. Now, I believe there's an Ignoble prize that was given out this right, that's where we discussed it before. But we normally we say it's just it's really very funny stuff, but this one um study was very serious because it was like, you know, what if if you are doing this procedure on someone, if someone has a pole up and you're

moving it, Uh, you don't want them to explode and die. Right, So that's that's one of the things that doctors have been really cognizant of, and these days they actually pipe in a little air um and air that doesn't have flammable carbon dioxide as well to try to dilute any

methane or hydrogen that might be left over. Although for anybody who's going to the guests for entrologists and and had one of these procedures like a colonoscopy, then you know that there's a lot of prep work ahead of time to try to remove anything that might antagonize or create a spark in your rectum. Another aspect of flate us in in the medical community is that it can actually be used as a disease fighter sort of. I mean it's more like a canary in the coal mine.

So doctors can actually identify tough to spot viral or bacterial infections of the gut in someone's gas. So what they do is they just perform this test where they collect a stool sample and then they try to take the gases um and they extract those gases from a smart needle and then they figure out the plate us molecules and the machine then will analyze these molecules and tell you what the infection. Is. Pretty cool. That is

pretty cool. Discussing the various smell profiles of human flateust UH and ultimately human waste, I keep coming back to horse excrement because really, if you've smelled horse excrement, it's really the best excrement out there. You know, like if you had to be around a bunch of poop all day,

it's really hard to go wrong with horse. Yeah, Or you used to used to work at a zoo, so you know that there are various odors related to different different animals leavings, and some of them were more pleasant than others. Well, yeah, it was funny because I worked in the administrative building, but the keepers would come in and they had all sorts of smell molecules stuck to their bodies. So they might have been working with the zeebers that day, who knows, but they passed by the

elephants and that took it all down. Yeah. So the elephants not a good smell profile, okay, but the horse, I the horse, I think is a good good smell profile. So what do you think about the latest artist? Ah? Yes, do you think they're even concerned with a center profile? Well, it's it's interesting because first of all, I should I should back up and say that I was not aware

of this until about a year ago. I was recovering from Wisdom Tooth Removal, and I was I was on pain pills and I was taking I was reading the book Madeline is Sweeping by Sarah Shoon Leen Binnum, which is a very dreamy book. Anyway, it's like a dream within a dream with all this surreal stuff happening. And then on top of that, I was a little loopy um from everything else that was going on. But one of the characters that shows up is a fart artist or a fartist if you will, or a flatist or

a flatuist, but not a flattist, not a flautist. That's uh,

that's something that's something different entirely. But it turns out there's one individual that was a particular note, and it was This was a Frenchman whose real name was Joseph pugel Uh lived eighteen fifty seven to five, but his stage name was Lipped Up the Maine Uh, and he was known for having remarkable control over his abdominal muscles, and he seemed to be able to just fart at will, just NonStop, just well beyond the three coke cans of

flatists that any normal individual could could muster. But there was a secret to what he could actually do. Um. He he had again phenomenal control over the muscles down there, particularly the anal sphincter muscles, and he could actually inhale air through the sphincter and then release it. So he wasn't that he was releasing gas that was built up as part of this natural farting process that we've discussed in this episode. Rather he was inhaling air into the

rectum and then releasing it again. Wow. So we talked about reverse feeding in our last podcast. Yeah, yeah, right, Yeah. It's kind of like if you've ever been generally occasionally counter a kid who's doing in this where they'll burp over and over again because they're inhaling the air, and then they're burping in haling the air and then burping. He was doing the same thing but with his bottom. I would love to tell some stories about my family,

but I don't think that would be correct. All I can say is that I think maybe in past generations we've had some artists excellent. So anyway, on that note, we should probably bring closure to this. Yes, let's let's call over the robot. Well, that was a robotic fart, I know, but really, I mean, I thought this was a really classy episode on farts, and here Arnie had to come and stink up the joint. It doesn't really smell. I mean it just it smells like a train passing

in a subway or something, you know. Kind of nothing really, but don't do it again. Okay, here's some mail from our robot. This one is from Adam. Adam writes, and he's for solving to responding to our episode Eating Alive, where we talked about the prospect of being swallowed whole by a sperm whale. And he says, Okay, let's say I was swallowed whole by a whale. I'm alive and uninjured in the pre stomach. The situation looks grim, but alas all hope is not lost, because how did I

get there? I was inspecting a gaping maw of a giant whale while scuba diving. I have a full tank of air and a very sharp dive knife, as does any diver worth the salt, and a healthy desire to live. What are my chances of jabbing and slicing my way

to freedom? Slim to none. Well, uh, yeah, it's a tough one because certainly, those the squid that are being swallowed by the sperm whale, they have rather tough beaks, so they don't have any bones otherwise, so they can kind of they're sort of loot in this in the way that they can contort their bodies. Yeah, but they could they have the ability to to use that beak on on the predator. They're able to to use their

their their little suction cups with the sharp things. And then you see the scars and the sides of sperm whales where they've suckered and and and picked at them, and well that's creates the ambergies right there. Yeah. Yeah, And then yeah. Then of course, once they passed the beaks on, they they we discussed in that episode, end

up scarring the side of the intestinal wall. So I don't I feel like if you were too to try to use that knife and fight your way out, that you're just that's gonna cause the perm whale to really gnash its teeth even more. Yeah, and and chaos wouldn't sue. Yeah, it hasn't already. Yeah, I'm thinking that. I mean, certainly you're not going to cut your way out. I guess the only the only possibility here was if you somehow create enough of the disturbance to where it vomits you.

Oh right, if you could just stick your finger down its throat. Yeah, or I think I think Pinocchio escaped by started They started a little fire, right, and the smoke builds up, and then then the creature sneezes everyone free. So this is kind of you. Obviously you're not going to start a fire in there, um, But if you were to stab away and start stabbing the size, would you possibly be able to get those firm let us

put you up? Well, I tend to doubt it if you had a little pocket of poison, But then you're going to expose yourself to that poison as well. Right, I'm trying to think of ways that you could regurgitate. We don't know. I bet butt you guys out there

might have some ideas. Think it over. I would like to to hear some people's thoughts on that, and hey, may you know we get a spare moment here and there, maybe I'll try and contact an expert on this, and someone who has survived thinks well, by the way, all guess alright, So there you have it. Um, if you have some thoughts who would like to share with us, particularly about this episode, which I'm sure lots of people will have something to share about this episode, about the

science of late us, about the way culturally we understand farting. Um, I know we have listeners from all over the world. We haven't listeners who are trying, who have traveled and are traveling all over the world. So i'm i'm I'm definitely interested in various cultural responses to flate us and uh passing gas in public or in private or across uh you know, gender profiles. Uh, let us know about all this stuff. We would love to hear from you. There are a number of ways to get in touch

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