How often do you fart? New research suggests the answer is probably more often than you think, and knowing that number actually has scientific value.
How often do you fart? New research suggests the answer is probably more often than you think, and knowing that number actually has scientific value.
The common belief has long been that people might flatulate around 14 times per day, plus or minus six times.
“In our study, we found 32 was the average number of flatus per day,” said Brantley Hall, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland. “But we saw some people much higher. One person had 59 a day, and in data we’ve not published yet, we’ve seen well over 100 flatus per day.”
But knowing the true number isn’t just about being able to assign blame or make jokes.
“It tells you how active your microbes are, how much of the food you eat is being metabolized by your gut microbes,” Hall said. “So someone who farts more is either eating a lot of high fiber food, which is reaching the microbes, which turn into flatus, or maybe they have a condition like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. … So it tells us a lot about how your digestion is working.”
Hall noted that about one in five patients who visit a gastroenterologist report concerns about excessive gas. But how often really is “too often?”
To do that, Hall has developed a sensor that measures how often people pass gas. It’s small and round, about the diameter of a quarter and the thickness of three quarters stacked together. People place it in their underwear and then it detects whenever they release hydrogen from their back side — which is a main gas within flatulence.
He said it’s so unobtrusive that people sometimes end up tossing it in the wash because they don’t even remember they’re wearing it.
“The biggest goal is establishing the baseline. Because it’s what you build on before we can tell what’s abnormal,” Hall said. “Patients have extremely different perceptions of the same amount of gas. … So it’s really important to have an objective measure, rather than a subjective measure, to establish the baseline.”
He hopes that in the future, the data will help physicians make better clinical decisions about a patient’s problems, “so we can steer them towards the right treatment option.”
This week, Hall announced he was expanding the size of his study and was hoping to find 800 willing volunteers. Within two days, he had about 1,400 volunteers and had to stop enrolling people.
“We want to see if our average of 32 holds up in a bigger sample size,” he said. “So we want to look all across the U.S. and get all types of people, all ages, all races, and try to figure out what the average number of farts actually is, so we can better understand what normal is and what abnormal is.”
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