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How Big Is A Fart? Science Has The Answer
Trending News: Here's How Much Room A Fart Occupies In Your Body
Why Is This Important?
Because, like beautiful snowflakes, all farts are unique.
Long Story Short
As part of the series "Science Question From A Toddler," science journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker has revealed that a fart in the human body can range in size from around the equivalent of a bottle of nail polish to a can of soda.
You can always trust kids to ask the best questions about the things that really matter in the world, such as: “How much space does a fart take in your body?”
As part of the "Science Question From A Toddler" series for FiveThirtyEight, science journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker addressed this epic question head on and shed some light into the world of fart studies (which, incredibly, is a real thing).
The article reveals that every fart is special, although (strangely) there hasn’t been enough study to say whether every fart is unique, so it is hard to say how much space an average fart takes up in the human body.
Amazingly though there have been experiments on this crucial topic.
In 1997 a study of 16 Americans found a volume-per-fart range from 17 millilitres to 375 millilitres, which is the rough equivalent of the difference between a bottle of nail polish and a can of soda. We can only hope the latter fart was in a controlled, smell-proof environment.
The respected expert on fart science is Dr. Michael Levitt, a researcher at Minneapolis Veterans Affairs, and he has been conducting his valuable work since 1968.
Interestingly he believes that while we associate gas with being bloated, that isn’t actually the case. Levitt is quoted as stating that only a small minority of people with bowel disorders can blame gas for bloating and that farting doesn’t actually relieve bloating.
It is in fact the position of the diaphragm that causes the feeling of bloating. When your diaphragm, which is the muscle underneath the lungs, drops down lower, it pushes the stomach out and causes the uncomfortable bloated sensation.
Fernando Azpiroz, head of the department of digestive diseases at the University Hospital Vall d’Hebron in Spain believes that bloating is a learned behavior as a result of hypersensitive abdominal nerves, and so a patient could be trained to prevent it by holding their diaphragms up, in theory.
Finally, one more piece of crucial knowledge from a paper titled: “Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot" backs up the commonly held belief that beans make us fart more. It was found that eating beans for breakfast more than doubled the volume of gas farted over the next six hours from an average of 260 millilitres to 660+.
And so that’s pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted to know about farts, and probably a lot more. Good luck not thinking about farts the next time you pick up a can of Coke….
Own The Conversation
Ask The Big Question
Should humanity put more time and funding into fart science?
Disrupt Your Feed
You’ll never see (or smell) farts the same way when you start thinking about how big they are in the body.
Drop This Fact
The earliest recorded fart joke dates back to 1900 BCE and was an ancient Sumerian remark about a woman farting in her husband’s lap.