A Brief Medical History Of Farting [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11876444/pubmed-farts-gas-flatulence-argon-study

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A PubMed search returns 14 results with "excessive flatulence" in the headline and abstract. A lot of these are about treating constipation, which is admittedly no fun. But there are some standouts, like this gem from 1975: "As yet," writes MD Levitt, "there are no data available that prove excessive flatulence is actually caused by the presence of excessive intestinal gas." Blow my mind, why don't you? As of 1975, there was no proof that farting was caused by too much intestinal gas? I gotta see more work by this Levitt character. As it turned out, he was the superstar of the fart literature.

Sure, enough, also in 1975, Levitt published another paper, this time in The New England Journal of Medicine, where he pumped people full of argon. See, these 18 patients had a lot of GI symptoms — gas, bloating, and flatulence. But they had a normal volume of gas in their guts, which had normal composition. Perhaps, though, the scientists reasoned, they reacted badly to any excess gas! And that is how 18 people wound up getting argon pumped into their butts. (Argon was chosen because it wouldn't react to their own intestinal gasses, I guess??????) The gas that they then ejected was "quantitatively collected in a series of 100-ml syringes and analyzed by gas chromatography." Can you even imagine.

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This is so funny to me! They farted at about the same rate you filled them up with gas, who would have guessed! No less surprising, it hurts to have gas pumped up your tuckus: fully a third of patients had to stop because the pain was so bad. Anyway, this improbable study found that the feeling of being bloated or gassy wasn't necessarily correlated to the amount of gas in one's gut.

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The other study worth noting found that beans' bad reputation may be undeserved: fewer than half of people noticed an increase in flatulence from eating pinto or baked beans; only 19 percent had more gas with black-eyed peas. Amusingly, people on control diets also reported a 3 percent to 11 percent increase in farting. "People's concerns about excessive flatulence from eating beans may be exaggerated," the authors write helpfully. "It is important to recognize there is individual variation in response to different bean types."

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Alas, yes, all too brief.