Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to all your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what does a fire breathing dragon have to do with
Speaker 1: the human digestion system? A lot, it turns out, and
Speaker 1: in fact, it has a lot to do with gas
Speaker 1: and belching. And you guys know that we we promised
Speaker 1: that we would roll out an episode about inflate us,
Speaker 1: about gas, the toutes parts, you name it. If you promised,
Speaker 1: it was like a blood oath to our listeners that
Speaker 1: we would do a fart episode for everyone. But no
Speaker 1: one asked for by the way, no well no one
Speaker 1: ever asked for it, but it happens, and so here
Speaker 1: it is an entire episode devoted to the interesting science
Speaker 1: of of cutting one as it were. You say that
Speaker 1: with a question mark. I think it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: definitely interesting science. I think it comes down to the
Speaker 1: individual a listener, I mean, what what is your individual
Speaker 1: relationship with gas? And are you the type of person
Speaker 1: who is repelled enough to where no amount of interesting
Speaker 1: science is really going to make you respect flateus in
Speaker 1: any way or do you or do you? Are you
Speaker 1: already totally on board? And in science the coding of
Speaker 1: science can only make flateus all the more exciting. My
Speaker 1: feeling is that everybody does it, so everybody should have
Speaker 1: an interest in it. Well, everybody does it, but people
Speaker 1: do it to different degrees, and people do it with
Speaker 1: with varying degrees of pride or or or disgrace. Well.
Speaker 1: As as I've shared before, I come from a various
Speaker 1: schatological family, so this is a topic that has been
Speaker 1: plumbed in the family. I'm not scared to talk about it.
Speaker 1: And uh, I feel like there's lots of really great
Speaker 1: information here. Uh, in particular this idea of this fire
Speaker 1: breathing dragon. And this is fascinating to me. This was
Speaker 1: in Mary Richard's Gulp. She spoke with herpetologist, Steven s
Speaker 1: cor who became infixated on the question of why a
Speaker 1: python or a boa um has an unusually large see
Speaker 1: some Okay, so I see someone like this little digestive pouch.
Speaker 1: It's near the colon and normally you see implant eating animals,
Speaker 1: and so he became obsessed with why, why which is
Speaker 1: a python have this? So he tried to figure out
Speaker 1: the role of the season, whether or not it was
Speaker 1: just there to break down the plant material in the
Speaker 1: animal that the python had just ingested. Um, And he
Speaker 1: began to actually measure the amount of hydrogen coming out
Speaker 1: of a python, ex like what it was exhaling after
Speaker 1: it was given a bunch of rats to eat. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he did that with something called a chromatograph, and
Speaker 1: that measured the amount of hydrogen alright. What he actually
Speaker 1: found out, though, was that the amount of hydrogen that
Speaker 1: was being exhaled by these creatures was enormous. I think
Speaker 1: about this hydrogen concentration is flammable. These guys and gals
Speaker 1: were exhaling something about Okay, so what does any of
Speaker 1: us have to do with belching or gas or inflate us. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out Square has this really great theory that
Speaker 1: early man would stumble across, say a python that had
Speaker 1: just or it was in the middle of digesting a gazelle,
Speaker 1: and so, as you know, the python would be useless
Speaker 1: and trying to defend itself. Correct, you just eating this
Speaker 1: huge meal, bloated. It's not gonna amediately run off. I
Speaker 1: never room for another one, right, So early man says,
Speaker 1: a easy food. I've got dinner tonight. I have two
Speaker 1: things for dinner tonight. Right. I think that Mary rich
Speaker 1: had described it as Neanderthal for duncan. Okay, so early
Speaker 1: man or woman hauls us off to a campsite. There's
Speaker 1: a fire, someone is being you know, joyful, and they
Speaker 1: begin to say, step on this python's head or they
Speaker 1: kick it, and what happens. A huge flood of this
Speaker 1: hydrogen just rolls out of the mouth, meets the fire,
Speaker 1: and then and then you have a fire breathing reptile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so s course says, think about the thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of years of these tales of bringing down a fire
Speaker 1: breathing giant to your campsite. Because I could see, on
Speaker 1: one hand, someone could be like, whoa, that thing can
Speaker 1: can breathe fire? I was really I was. I was
Speaker 1: really lucky that I didn't get toasted back there, or
Speaker 1: they'd see what happened and they realized, well, this thing
Speaker 1: doesn't actually breathe fire, but it sure did look like it.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to claim that it does because I
Speaker 1: look all the more awesome for having killed it. Slated right,
Speaker 1: and I fast forward, you know, fifty thou years to
Speaker 1: modern humans in eight year olds all around camp fires
Speaker 1: trying to light their farts. Right there. We have a
Speaker 1: long tradition of this relationship with gas and man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anybody who's read Mary Roaches Packing from Mars book about
Speaker 1: the space program and human space exploration, now, so there's
Speaker 1: a there's a lot of scatological content in here, because
Speaker 1: you're talking about sending humans and their digestive systems into
Speaker 1: a strange environment that doesn't necessarily play by the rules,
Speaker 1: and at the very least is contained within a very
Speaker 1: small space, and inevitably you have astronauts that are going
Speaker 1: to pass gas and uh. I believe it was measured
Speaker 1: out to be like three coke cans worth of worth
Speaker 1: of gas is coming out. So there were a couple
Speaker 1: of interesting bits there involving NASA research. One was a
Speaker 1: quest of by um Edwin Murphy UH in an attempt
Speaker 1: to find though what what the ideal fart profile for
Speaker 1: an astronaut would be um and basically they wanted a
Speaker 1: little or no methane or hydrogen, because, as we just
Speaker 1: touched on, hydrogen is explosive and methane is not desirable either.
Speaker 1: But in his work. This guy Murphy had apparently encountered
Speaker 1: one ideal astronaut candidate, and then this is the quote.
Speaker 1: A special interest for further research was the subject who
Speaker 1: produced essentially no flatus on one grounds dry weight of beans,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the average gut, which will during a
Speaker 1: peak of flash ones period five or six hours post
Speaker 1: being consider umption, pass anywhere from one to almost three
Speaker 1: cups of latest per hour. So, uh, that is particularly interesting.
Speaker 1: Interesting not only because NASA you know, wants that ideal
Speaker 1: fart profile for an astronaut, or or that you know
Speaker 1: you would given the chance, but that there are individuals
Speaker 1: that are almost non farters, which is interesting. It is
Speaker 1: amazing to me because I mean, presumably again everybody does this,
Speaker 1: and I do think it's very kind of NASA, by
Speaker 1: the way, to try to recruit people who don't do
Speaker 1: it so much, because, as we discussed in our Emotions
Speaker 1: in Space episode, can get dicey up there, and if
Speaker 1: you're next to someone who keeps putt putting, you know,
Speaker 1: for six months straight, that that can make things very tense.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about fart. What is it? Well, basically,
Speaker 1: the act of farting, of course, is the means by
Speaker 1: which the body rids the colon of unwanted gas, and
Speaker 1: by virtue of that unwanted pressure, you have this gas
Speaker 1: that builds up and the average person releases between five
Speaker 1: two thousand million liters of this per day. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: what does it consist of? Well, about its carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
Speaker 1: and methane and go again, varying degrees of that depending
Speaker 1: on the particular part part because some people don't produce methane.
Speaker 1: I think it's like only one third of us produce
Speaker 1: methane yep. And most of these gases are either swallowed
Speaker 1: inadvertently when you're eating your food or release from the
Speaker 1: food as it is digested. And uh, it's amazing because
Speaker 1: when it's in your body, it is odorless, and we
Speaker 1: don't think of it as being odorless. Right. And the
Speaker 1: other key thing that of the ingredients that are just
Speaker 1: listed that is odorless, all the hydrogen, the methane, oxygen,
Speaker 1: all of it, that is not the odor producing content.
Speaker 1: It is that one percent that is responsible for the smell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get to that one percent and a bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: spend such a political term day as one percent. That's
Speaker 1: kind of funny thing one peron that stinking up the
Speaker 1: whole system exactly. Um, So, as you had mentioned, we
Speaker 1: do expel quite a bit of it. But the man
Speaker 1: who inspired really thoughtful study of how much we expel
Speaker 1: and even excessive gas is a man who in nineteen
Speaker 1: six complained of a five year epic bout of the
Speaker 1: twos he UM. He contacted gas from entrologist Michael Levitt,
Speaker 1: and in order to study the man, Lovett had to
Speaker 1: create a baseline of normal flattist output so or flatists,
Speaker 1: I should say. He recruited volunteers to keep flat too,
Speaker 1: graphic lags flogs of gas activity, recording every stirring in
Speaker 1: every output. He prefers that actually, but he did, and
Speaker 1: others have relied on um studies that use a rectal
Speaker 1: tube in collection syringes to determine average output. That is
Speaker 1: year old way of trying to figure out how much
Speaker 1: people are expelling. So basically the farting jar scenario, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but a little bit more foolproof and a lot more
Speaker 1: going on. And the syringes there just to extract the
Speaker 1: molecules and then to to figure out what sort of
Speaker 1: molecules are in there. Um, these days. Hydrogen output is
Speaker 1: measured in the breath because a fixed percentage of hydrogen
Speaker 1: produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and
Speaker 1: when it reaches the lungs, it's exhaled. Now, what he
Speaker 1: found was that this man was passing gas thirty four
Speaker 1: to forty two times a day. Okay, the baseline average
Speaker 1: here of the humans who doesn't have any lactose intolerance
Speaker 1: problems is about fourteen to twenty times a day in
Speaker 1: case you're wondering. So the problem that they finally figured
Speaker 1: out is that he was lactose intolerant, and as we
Speaker 1: learned before, lactose does not get broken down for some
Speaker 1: people in the digestive excuse me, in the small intestines
Speaker 1: hangs out in the colon, and then you have other
Speaker 1: bacteria which we're breaking that down, and then you've got
Speaker 1: the waste p act of that bacteria, and you've got
Speaker 1: a bunch of bunch of bunch of hydrogen being produced there. Yes,
Speaker 1: of course, we're talking about humans as a whole in
Speaker 1: regards to UH to flate us. But you can't help
Speaker 1: but get into gender scenarios when you start thinking about
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the articles that we were looking
Speaker 1: at um. Uh they are. The author made a point
Speaker 1: of of saying that men as as a whole, and
Speaker 1: she's really generalizing here and painting with a very broad brush,
Speaker 1: and I skilled her for it. U that all men
Speaker 1: are just enthusiastic about their gas and just love it
Speaker 1: and crave it and laugh at it all the time, yeah,
Speaker 1: and model it. Really, I am not one of those men.
Speaker 1: Like maybe that is the more baseline m relationship between
Speaker 1: men and fart, but I, for my own self, I
Speaker 1: don't engage that style of humor. For the most part,
Speaker 1: I will laugh at a fart joke if it is
Speaker 1: well crafted um or in some way, you know, insightful. Um.
Speaker 1: There have been occasionally they'll get me, like the instance,
Speaker 1: there was a Sarah Silverman Show episode that was very
Speaker 1: far heavy. She's she likes the farts. Yeah, and occasionally
Speaker 1: that will work. I mean, it's it's the right fartship.
Speaker 1: But as a whole, I do not. I'm more of
Speaker 1: a stereotypical if you're gonna go with these stereotypes, I'm
Speaker 1: more of a stereotypical woman when it comes to fart
Speaker 1: gags and self gas production than a stereotypical man. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what I'm hearing is that you don't have a
Speaker 1: cellar full of arrears. No I do not. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: this is good, um. And it's interesting that you bring
Speaker 1: out the stereotypes because you know, if it's were the
Speaker 1: Victorian age, we would say, oh, well, women just don't
Speaker 1: produce gas at all, right, it wouldn't even be a question.
Speaker 1: But we do have data on it, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that women have are seemed to be expelling more
Speaker 1: gas than men, as measured by the hydrogen exhaled. But
Speaker 1: Mary Roach questions this and says in her book, could
Speaker 1: it be that the suppression of gas could lead to
Speaker 1: a higher input of hydrogen exhalation? So maybe if you're
Speaker 1: going with the stereotypical um I almos don't want to
Speaker 1: say stereotypical female, but let's say, let's go with you.
Speaker 1: If you're going with a fart avoidant person like myself,
Speaker 1: then they are going to be less inclined to just
Speaker 1: let it rip whenever the mood hits them. Right, So
Speaker 1: if you suppress it, then you're going to absorb more
Speaker 1: of it through your bloodstream and then you're going to
Speaker 1: exhale mark. Oh, so the way, you're kind of reversing
Speaker 1: it and farting into your body, into your blood. You're
Speaker 1: just breath farting, okay, right, and that makes it really
Speaker 1: a lovely thought, doesn't it. Do I think about that
Speaker 1: next time you give your significant other nice little kiss? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I I do. I should. At one point
Speaker 1: about about ladies and farting. I did work in a
Speaker 1: newspaper once and an individual in the front office was
Speaker 1: terminated for engaging in a farting contest with a with
Speaker 1: a with a customer. It was it was quite it. It
Speaker 1: It seems like it was mutual farting, so I guess
Speaker 1: it was just like, hey, this is we're going to
Speaker 1: make an example of you. We just fart with the customer. Maybe,
Speaker 1: you know, there could have been some other politics involved,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was just kind of this unwritten rule
Speaker 1: where if your customer comes in and celebrates his or
Speaker 1: her farts, that's fine, but then you are not supposed
Speaker 1: to then engage with them in a contest of farts
Speaker 1: or you know, it's it's kind of like it's it's okay,
Speaker 1: the customer uses foul language to a point, but you're
Speaker 1: in then not supposed to engage them in that kind
Speaker 1: of behavior, I guess. Or maybe maybe she showed him up,
Speaker 1: maybe she shamed him and they lost the customer because
Speaker 1: it was this a gastrontrology office. No, this was a
Speaker 1: newspaper with we didn't even have a flatest section, you know,
Speaker 1: just business and sports. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that
Speaker 1: I can recover from that store. I feel like I
Speaker 1: need time to think about that and chuckle. But we
Speaker 1: must go on, so I'm just gonna chuckle about that later. Um.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's talk about this one. Yes, or
Speaker 1: should we take a break? Oh? Yeah, let's take a break.
Speaker 1: Why not? When we come back, we will discuss the
Speaker 1: one percent of the fart it is responsible for the smell.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about extraordinary cases of flateust. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: people who have elevated um passing gas to an art form.
Speaker 1: And also the big question, if you're in microgravity, can
Speaker 1: you propel yourself across a spaceship just by virtue of
Speaker 1: your own uh slatest? All right, we're back. So as
Speaker 1: we've discussed of flateut is, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
Speaker 1: and methane, and uh these are coming from stuff that
Speaker 1: either gases that are inadvertently swallowed or it is released
Speaker 1: from the food is we're digesting it. But none of
Speaker 1: it produces the signature odors and it varies certainly, as
Speaker 1: we can all attest to. Uh. None of these elements
Speaker 1: contribute to the odor. Is just of tiny one that
Speaker 1: makes the gas so foul, that's right, that creates that
Speaker 1: singular a bouquet of smell. Micro Has really live for
Speaker 1: the most part in the colon where they attack and
Speaker 1: consume undigested food and in turn generate their own waste products.
Speaker 1: So in the case of microorganisms, waste usually means gas,
Speaker 1: and in the case of these microorganism organisms, that gas
Speaker 1: can be the really ripe stuff, usually molecules containing sulfur
Speaker 1: like dimethyl sulfide and method methyl um. These are waste
Speaker 1: products that ferment and they build up to a sufficient
Speaker 1: level and then they're released with the rest of the
Speaker 1: gas in the bowels. And by the way, we talked
Speaker 1: about this before, the birth of the fart happens when uh,
Speaker 1: you're stretch receptors um in your colon send a signal
Speaker 1: to your brain, Hey, I'm having some discomfort, and then
Speaker 1: this finkter is loosened up, and and then the message
Speaker 1: maybe when you get a chance, please do something about this,
Speaker 1: or maybe this is really important. So the next time
Speaker 1: you even have like a heavy thought in the back
Speaker 1: of your head, um, we're going to just go ahead
Speaker 1: and let it go even have you Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: The brain will sit there and respond and say, okay,
Speaker 1: now you gotta tampa down, sorry, swincter, or yep, we're
Speaker 1: overloaded here alright. So what brave soul figured out the
Speaker 1: scent profile of late us. Well, the same Michael Levitt
Speaker 1: who helped to determine the output of late US also
Speaker 1: studies the qualities of of gas. These smell profiles, he
Speaker 1: recruited volunteers to detect the three main elements of a
Speaker 1: fart so hydrogen sulfide which is described as the scent
Speaker 1: of rotten eggs uh metha nephiel that is described as
Speaker 1: rotting vegetation, and dimethyl sulfide, which is oddly described as
Speaker 1: sweet m Yes. So he didn't do this as a
Speaker 1: cruel joke. I mean, he wasn't just trying to you know,
Speaker 1: terrorize people with smells. He wanted to see if the
Speaker 1: noxiousness of the scent would correlate with the combined concentrations
Speaker 1: of these three types of sulfur gases, and it did. So.
Speaker 1: The best part of this, all this information is he
Speaker 1: took the data and he reversed engineer to fart so
Speaker 1: he could use the combined concentrations in other scenarios. Would
Speaker 1: would it be safe to call this a frank and fart, Yes,
Speaker 1: it would be absolutely Um it's a frank and part.
Speaker 1: And he wanted to figure out the absorptive properties of
Speaker 1: charcoal underpants or seat pads, which, by the way, is
Speaker 1: of interest to the airline industry. Which makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: I think that I said, go airline industry, put charcoal
Speaker 1: in the seat pads. Any degree to which you can
Speaker 1: cut down on the on the amount of flatus in
Speaker 1: that enclosed space on a long flight, the better, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: In speaking of a long flight or a spacewalk, NASA
Speaker 1: actually has used filters in the air circulation in space
Speaker 1: suits with charcoal to help bind sulfur and then prevent
Speaker 1: the astronauts from getting drive by farted every time the
Speaker 1: air is recirculated. Yeah, because if they build up enough
Speaker 1: along enough space walk, then fart madness ensues. I've heard
Speaker 1: about madness. It isn't earth. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: I was looking on snopes to see if there were
Speaker 1: any particular urban legends related to the farting of note,
Speaker 1: and one of them was this bit that occasionally circulates
Speaker 1: and emails about a man who who died because he
Speaker 1: farted under the covers and uh and had the covers
Speaker 1: up over his head. But that's just complete malarkey. That's
Speaker 1: just a Dutch Oven. Yeah, so so yeah, so death
Speaker 1: by by death by by Dutch Oven not really a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you can't try to, I mean, just for fun
Speaker 1: Dutch Oven astronauts, right, No, No, I mean they'd go
Speaker 1: through enough in the training. I'm sure they were, like,
Speaker 1: you know, after you've been in that spinny thing long enough,
Speaker 1: and I mean we've all seen the right stuff. They
Speaker 1: went through a lot of horrible things to prove themselves
Speaker 1: and and to you know, to get their bodies in
Speaker 1: shape and prepare themselves for this this experience in orbit.
Speaker 1: So and keep in mind that the air in their
Speaker 1: space suits is actually recirculated three times a minute. So
Speaker 1: now another interesting bit from Mary Roch's book, Packing for Mars.
Speaker 1: She talked to an astronaut by the name of Roger Crouch,
Speaker 1: and he was particularly interested in the idea of propelling
Speaker 1: yourself through a microgravity environment like a board the space
Speaker 1: station via your own farts. And he said that the
Speaker 1: math and velocity of the expelled gas is very small
Speaker 1: compared to the mass of the human body. So he
Speaker 1: tested it out found that it produced no real effect,
Speaker 1: though he did, uh, he did have this theory that
Speaker 1: the underpants and the pants might be prohibiting the expulsion
Speaker 1: of gas, and so he but he did not get
Speaker 1: to test this naked, but he apparently has lingering thoughts
Speaker 1: that that nude farting in microgravity would potentially give you
Speaker 1: at least a little push across the cabin. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: really is not going to win the hearts and minds
Speaker 1: of your fellow astronauts and face if you just drop
Speaker 1: trial and then try to propel yourself with your own parts.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine the dude's doing like the crying in
Speaker 1: space videos and all the different viral videos of Colonel Hatfield. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder, I wonder if he's on board for this.
Speaker 1: That's going to be a big shock when that when
Speaker 1: that YouTube video rolls out that might be the one
Speaker 1: that never really makes it too right. So though, if
Speaker 1: you were going to do that experiment without underpants and
Speaker 1: really truly test it, you would want to eat the
Speaker 1: gasest inducing foods that you could. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that the most eruptive edibles are beans, carrots, raisins, bananas,
Speaker 1: which is odd to me. Onions not odd milk and
Speaker 1: milk products for the very reasons that we talked before
Speaker 1: about milk being hard to digest and break down as
Speaker 1: opposed to something like um, let's say meat, fish, grapes, berries,
Speaker 1: these are these have the least amount of complex carbohydrates.
Speaker 1: It's it's this, uh, this really damning conundrum that that
Speaker 1: I that I have encountered, and then I think a
Speaker 1: number of people encountered that the healthier that you try
Speaker 1: to eat, you know, you're trying, you're trying to eat
Speaker 1: all these vegetables and these whole grains and lintels and beans,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's making you're gassier, and you feel
Speaker 1: like you're being punished for this diet. Uh. Dr Robert
Speaker 1: Lustig even put it this way. He said, in life,
Speaker 1: you have two choices. It's either fat or fart. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true, like if you were to radically change your
Speaker 1: diet from say a meat and very little um vegetable
Speaker 1: diet to grains and vegetables, you would really need to
Speaker 1: set aside a couple of days to transition into that.
Speaker 1: Kid you not, Well, there's that great Portlandia sketch where
Speaker 1: they go to the restaurant that has the raw food.
Speaker 1: It's like an all raw food places may actually have
Speaker 1: a a flateist patio with fans the fat patio. That
Speaker 1: is just one of my favorite things, one of those
Speaker 1: that that clip is just great because it's not hearty
Speaker 1: horror laugh laugh, but it kind of speaks to that
Speaker 1: whole experience when you do go to a rough foods
Speaker 1: restaurant or a vegan restaurant and the result of that afterwards,
Speaker 1: they just kind of brought it more to the forefront. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a clever it's a clever bit of of
Speaker 1: parody there and uh and and commentary. So that's that
Speaker 1: is a fart gag that I at least chuckle that sure,
Speaker 1: because really, when you get down to it, every restaurant
Speaker 1: should have a fart patio. Now, as we mentioned before,
Speaker 1: you you have a very rare individual like the individual
Speaker 1: that NASA uncovered who barely farted at all. Just the
Speaker 1: one person in the world, the one person that's a
Speaker 1: mutant that that barely produces any flatus. But then there
Speaker 1: is there's another side of that coin as well. There
Speaker 1: this the super fartre's the the extraordinary flat went individuals
Speaker 1: that that make life so interesting. They just thought that
Speaker 1: some people have types of bacteria that produce more sulfur
Speaker 1: than other people, so that could be part of it.
Speaker 1: Diet is certainly part of it. And then of course,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, some people are gonna have different
Speaker 1: coins of ptations of hydrogen methane, so some people are
Speaker 1: going to be more explosive, which is UH. And I
Speaker 1: feel like we've discussed this before, but it's it's more
Speaker 1: of a serious issue when there's some sort of surgical
Speaker 1: recedure going on, you know, with the colon UH in
Speaker 1: which you're going to have to cauterize wounds with a
Speaker 1: heat element. That heat element plus hydrogen methane that's built
Speaker 1: up that can have literally an explosive reaction, which is
Speaker 1: not good for anybody involved in that procedure. Now, I
Speaker 1: believe there's an Ignoble prize that was given out this right,
Speaker 1: that's where we discussed it before. But we normally we
Speaker 1: say it's just it's really very funny stuff, but this
Speaker 1: one um study was very serious because it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, what if if you are doing this procedure
Speaker 1: on someone, if someone has a pole up and you're
Speaker 1: moving it, Uh, you don't want them to explode and die. Right,
Speaker 1: So that's that's one of the things that doctors have
Speaker 1: been really cognizant of, and these days they actually pipe
Speaker 1: in a little air um and air that doesn't have
Speaker 1: flammable carbon dioxide as well to try to dilute any
Speaker 1: methane or hydrogen that might be left over. Although for
Speaker 1: anybody who's going to the guests for entrologists and and
Speaker 1: had one of these procedures like a colonoscopy, then you
Speaker 1: know that there's a lot of prep work ahead of
Speaker 1: time to try to remove anything that might antagonize or
Speaker 1: create a spark in your rectum. Another aspect of flate
Speaker 1: us in in the medical community is that it can
Speaker 1: actually be used as a disease fighter sort of. I
Speaker 1: mean it's more like a canary in the coal mine.
Speaker 1: So doctors can actually identify tough to spot viral or
Speaker 1: bacterial infections of the gut in someone's gas. So what
Speaker 1: they do is they just perform this test where they
Speaker 1: collect a stool sample and then they try to take
Speaker 1: the gases um and they extract those gases from a
Speaker 1: smart needle and then they figure out the plate us
Speaker 1: molecules and the machine then will analyze these molecules and
Speaker 1: tell you what the infection. Is. Pretty cool. That is
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Discussing the various smell profiles of human flateust
Speaker 1: UH and ultimately human waste, I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: horse excrement because really, if you've smelled horse excrement, it's
Speaker 1: really the best excrement out there. You know, like if
Speaker 1: you had to be around a bunch of poop all day,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to go wrong with horse. Yeah, Or
Speaker 1: you used to used to work at a zoo, so
Speaker 1: you know that there are various odors related to different
Speaker 1: different animals leavings, and some of them were more pleasant
Speaker 1: than others. Well, yeah, it was funny because I worked
Speaker 1: in the administrative building, but the keepers would come in
Speaker 1: and they had all sorts of smell molecules stuck to
Speaker 1: their bodies. So they might have been working with the
Speaker 1: zeebers that day, who knows, but they passed by the
Speaker 1: elephants and that took it all down. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: elephants not a good smell profile, okay, but the horse,
Speaker 1: I the horse, I think is a good good smell profile.
Speaker 1: So what do you think about the latest artist? Ah? Yes,
Speaker 1: do you think they're even concerned with a center profile? Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting because first of all, I should I
Speaker 1: should back up and say that I was not aware
Speaker 1: of this until about a year ago. I was recovering
Speaker 1: from Wisdom Tooth Removal, and I was I was on
Speaker 1: pain pills and I was taking I was reading the
Speaker 1: book Madeline is Sweeping by Sarah Shoon Leen Binnum, which
Speaker 1: is a very dreamy book. Anyway, it's like a dream
Speaker 1: within a dream with all this surreal stuff happening. And
Speaker 1: then on top of that, I was a little loopy
Speaker 1: um from everything else that was going on. But one
Speaker 1: of the characters that shows up is a fart artist
Speaker 1: or a fartist if you will, or a flatist or
Speaker 1: a flatuist, but not a flattist, not a flautist. That's uh,
Speaker 1: that's something that's something different entirely. But it turns out
Speaker 1: there's one individual that was a particular note, and it
Speaker 1: was This was a Frenchman whose real name was Joseph
Speaker 1: pugel Uh lived eighteen fifty seven to five, but his
Speaker 1: stage name was Lipped Up the Maine Uh, and he
Speaker 1: was known for having remarkable control over his abdominal muscles,
Speaker 1: and he seemed to be able to just fart at will,
Speaker 1: just NonStop, just well beyond the three coke cans of
Speaker 1: flatists that any normal individual could could muster. But there
Speaker 1: was a secret to what he could actually do. Um.
Speaker 1: He he had again phenomenal control over the muscles down there,
Speaker 1: particularly the anal sphincter muscles, and he could actually inhale
Speaker 1: air through the sphincter and then release it. So he
Speaker 1: wasn't that he was releasing gas that was built up
Speaker 1: as part of this natural farting process that we've discussed
Speaker 1: in this episode. Rather he was inhaling air into the
Speaker 1: rectum and then releasing it again. Wow. So we talked
Speaker 1: about reverse feeding in our last podcast. Yeah, yeah, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if you've ever been generally occasionally
Speaker 1: counter a kid who's doing in this where they'll burp
Speaker 1: over and over again because they're inhaling the air, and
Speaker 1: then they're burping in haling the air and then burping.
Speaker 1: He was doing the same thing but with his bottom.
Speaker 1: I would love to tell some stories about my family,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that would be correct. All I
Speaker 1: can say is that I think maybe in past generations
Speaker 1: we've had some artists excellent. So anyway, on that note,
Speaker 1: we should probably bring closure to this. Yes, let's let's
Speaker 1: call over the robot. Well, that was a robotic fart,
Speaker 1: I know, but really, I mean, I thought this was
Speaker 1: a really classy episode on farts, and here Arnie had
Speaker 1: to come and stink up the joint. It doesn't really smell.
Speaker 1: I mean it just it smells like a train passing
Speaker 1: in a subway or something, you know. Kind of nothing really,
Speaker 1: but don't do it again. Okay, here's some mail from
Speaker 1: our robot. This one is from Adam. Adam writes, and
Speaker 1: he's for solving to responding to our episode Eating Alive,
Speaker 1: where we talked about the prospect of being swallowed whole
Speaker 1: by a sperm whale. And he says, Okay, let's say
Speaker 1: I was swallowed whole by a whale. I'm alive and
Speaker 1: uninjured in the pre stomach. The situation looks grim, but
Speaker 1: alas all hope is not lost, because how did I
Speaker 1: get there? I was inspecting a gaping maw of a
Speaker 1: giant whale while scuba diving. I have a full tank
Speaker 1: of air and a very sharp dive knife, as does
Speaker 1: any diver worth the salt, and a healthy desire to live.
Speaker 1: What are my chances of jabbing and slicing my way
Speaker 1: to freedom? Slim to none. Well, uh, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: tough one because certainly, those the squid that are being
Speaker 1: swallowed by the sperm whale, they have rather tough beaks,
Speaker 1: so they don't have any bones otherwise, so they can
Speaker 1: kind of they're sort of loot in this in the
Speaker 1: way that they can contort their bodies. Yeah, but they
Speaker 1: could they have the ability to to use that beak
Speaker 1: on on the predator. They're able to to use their
Speaker 1: their their little suction cups with the sharp things. And
Speaker 1: then you see the scars and the sides of sperm
Speaker 1: whales where they've suckered and and and picked at them,
Speaker 1: and well that's creates the ambergies right there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then yeah. Then of course, once they passed the
Speaker 1: beaks on, they they we discussed in that episode, end
Speaker 1: up scarring the side of the intestinal wall. So I
Speaker 1: don't I feel like if you were too to try
Speaker 1: to use that knife and fight your way out, that
Speaker 1: you're just that's gonna cause the perm whale to really
Speaker 1: gnash its teeth even more. Yeah, and and chaos wouldn't sue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it hasn't already. Yeah, I'm thinking that. I mean, certainly
Speaker 1: you're not going to cut your way out. I guess
Speaker 1: the only the only possibility here was if you somehow
Speaker 1: create enough of the disturbance to where it vomits you.
Speaker 1: Oh right, if you could just stick your finger down
Speaker 1: its throat. Yeah, or I think I think Pinocchio escaped
Speaker 1: by started They started a little fire, right, and the
Speaker 1: smoke builds up, and then then the creature sneezes everyone free.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of you. Obviously you're not going
Speaker 1: to start a fire in there, um, But if you
Speaker 1: were to stab away and start stabbing the size, would
Speaker 1: you possibly be able to get those firm let us
Speaker 1: put you up? Well, I tend to doubt it if
Speaker 1: you had a little pocket of poison, But then you're
Speaker 1: going to expose yourself to that poison as well. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of ways that you could regurgitate.
Speaker 1: We don't know. I bet butt you guys out there
Speaker 1: might have some ideas. Think it over. I would like
Speaker 1: to to hear some people's thoughts on that, and hey,
Speaker 1: may you know we get a spare moment here and there,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll try and contact an expert on this, and
Speaker 1: someone who has survived thinks well, by the way, all
Speaker 1: guess alright, So there you have it. Um, if you
Speaker 1: have some thoughts who would like to share with us,
Speaker 1: particularly about this episode, which I'm sure lots of people
Speaker 1: will have something to share about this episode, about the
Speaker 1: science of late us, about the way culturally we understand farting. Um,
Speaker 1: I know we have listeners from all over the world.
Speaker 1: We haven't listeners who are trying, who have traveled and
Speaker 1: are traveling all over the world. So i'm i'm I'm
Speaker 1: definitely interested in various cultural responses to flate us and
Speaker 1: uh passing gas in public or in private or across
Speaker 1: uh you know, gender profiles. Uh, let us know about
Speaker 1: all this stuff. We would love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: There are a number of ways to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us. You can always go to the Mothership to
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