Health and Medicine
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Scientists want your farts, and now they’ve invented a way to get them. By placing a miniature device inside "smart" underwear, researchers have managed to successfully monitor users’ wind-breaking patterns round-the-clock, providing the first-ever objective data on our daily expulsions.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.As it turns out, the average individual releases 32 bum ghosts per day, although the researchers noted a wild degree of variation between the most and least active farters. At the bottom end, some people passed gas as little as four times a day, while those with the busiest booties performed 59 guffs in the same period – a 15-fold difference.
Previously, it was thought that most people farted about 14 times a day, although this figure is based on self-reported data, which can be notoriously inaccurate. For this reason, the researchers behind the new “Smart Underwear” decided to track the cracks of 19 people over the course of a week, measuring the amount of hydrogen released by their rear ends.
“We don't actually know what normal flatus production looks like," explained study author Brantley Hall in a statement. "Without that baseline, it's hard to know when someone's gas production is truly excessive."
What was once an underexplored area, then, has now been thoroughly probed, revealing that the average butthole is far leakier than we thought. More importantly, though, by continuously tracking the release of hydrogen, the researchers were able to gain new insights into the activity of participants’ gut bacteria at different times of the day.
To test the sensitivity of their device to these changes, the study authors instructed volunteers to consume a prebiotic fiber called inulin. Around three to four hours later, the Smart Underwear detected an increase in metabolic activity – signalled by a fart spree – with an accuracy of 97.4 percent.
Building on this roaring success, the researchers are now seeking to create a Human Flatus Atlas by compiling fart data from hundreds of people across the US. And it seems that Americans are more than happy to donate their farts to science, as enrollment in the project is currently paused due to “overwhelming demand” to take part.
By sending their device to each participant, the researchers hope to identify three types of farters: Zen Digesters, who eat a high-fiber diet yet rarely toot; Hydrogen Hyperproducers, who just can’t stop farting; and Normal People, whose flatulence is about average.
"The Human Flatus Atlas will establish objective baselines for gut microbial fermentation, which is essential groundwork for evaluating how dietary, probiotic or prebiotic interventions change microbiome activity,” says Hall.
The study has been published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
