The Flatulence Fun Fact
5–3–17, Lefko
Short one this week since I’m traveling.
Farts are a finicky thing, boyos. They’re natural, of course…So there really isn’t anything shameful per se. Yet, culturally, we hide them, suppress them, and disperse them in ever clever ways [at least, if you’re trying to be civil] — surely it isn’t like this everywhere? Turns out, there’s been quite a bit of variety in the cultural response to passing gas. The Yanomami tribe, living in the Amazon rainforest between Venezuela and Brazil, actually greet each other by farting!
Pivoting to another continent, the Chinese have actually begun to capitalize on the fart industry (is that a thing?). One of the hotttttttest new jobs in Chinese healthcare is professional fart smeller. This oddly intimate career provides compensation for smelling and diagnosing physical health based on your nasal analysis of a patient’s miasma and can land you up to $50,000 USD annually!
So what exactly does a professional fart smeller do?
By picking up on traces sweet, savoury, bitter and even meaty aromas, these brave anal analyzers are allegedly able to identify illnesses and pinpoint their location in the body.
According to the smellsperts, extremely stinky farts indicate bacterial infection in the patient’s bowels or intestines. A raw, fishy or meaty smell, meanwhile, could point to infection in the digestive organs or even highlight the presence of bleeding or tumours in the intestinal lining. Finally, the presence of garlic or chives in our farts is thought to be an indicator that we’re consuming too much of the foods in question, which could ultimately result in inflammation of the small or large intestines.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: where do I sign up (/s)? Well, don’t go packing your bags yet. Evidently there are some pretty stringent vetting mechanisms:
Those hoping to break into the industry must be aged 18–45, completely abstain from smoking and alcohol, and be free of any kind of nasal impairment or related illness. If you fit the bill, you must then undergo a series of smell recognition tests and complete a long training course.
Okay okay, this sounds ridiculous, right? Well, maybe not as much as you would think. There’s actually some scientific evidence that dogs — whose sense of smell is literally orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours — can smell prostate cancer from urine samples and colorectal cancer in stool samples (with up to 97% accuracy!).
Got it, people are now profiting from farts. Thanks capitalism.
Next question: have farts always been noticed? What’s the mention of them in history like?
Glad you ask.
Turns out the world’s oldest one-liner had to do with farts! Archaeologists identified a joke in Sumerian writing dating back to 1900BC that went as such:
Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.
That’s a real knee-slapper if I’ve ever seen one!
Where else do we see farts in history? In literature, of course: Shakespeare mentioned flatulence 5 (!) times over the course of his plays, the famous satirist Jonathan Swift penned an entire essay titled “The Benefit of Farting Explain’d,” Geoffrey Chaucer described a man in Canterbury Tales who “let fly a fart as loud as it had been a thunder-clap,” Dante mentions a demon who “used his ass as a trumpet” in Inferno, and Ben Franklin even wrote an essay titled “Fart Proudly.”
Sadly, humanity peaked with those old folk, and we have regressed to people actually making a living out of fart entertainment. “Le Pétomane” (translates roughly to “Fartomaniac”) was a French (of course) performer in the early 1900s who dazzled audiences at Le Moulin Rouge by using his anus to emulate “sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms” as well as playing songs on “an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus.”
Nowadays, a British performer —” Mr. Methane” — has continued in this tradition (ugh).
Oh, also, Hitler had hepatitis and chronic gastrointestinal cramps. His farting was so out of control that he had to take 28 medications daily.
Over time, some more scientific analysis was conducted, and we’ve purposely learned some basic facts about flatulence:
-Farts normally consist of 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% CO2, 7 % methane, 4% oxygen, and ~1% hydrogen sulfide and mercaptans (which have sulfur and cause the bad smell).
-Farts can fly out of your anus at up to 10 feet per second! (~6.8mph for the normal people among us)
-Humans fart ~700mL of flatus daily (that’s enough to blow up a birthday balloon). Better question — how do they measure this? With a rectal catheter (You definitely shouldn’t not google that if you aren’t intrigued what it might be)
I’d like to finish this FF with two flatu-stories of #science and farts.
- The methane gas in flati (?) is flammable, as most of you degenerates know. If you want proof of that, watch this idiot:
Well, this has had some unintended implications. Just last year a woman was undergoing surgery on her cervix at a Tokyo hospital when she passed gas. The surgeons were using a high powered laser for ablation during the surgery…see where this is going?
The laser ignited the gas and she spit fire out of her rear end. Even the surgical drape caught on fire!
Fortunately, no one was successfully sued.
2. Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is an Australian legend. A nurse had asked him whether “she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations” (a hilarious but valid question). Turns out (unsurprisingly) no one had ever looked into it. He became determined to uncover the truth.
Kruszelnicki recruited a microbiologist colleague and they ran an experiment. A research colleague was asked to unleash the thunder down under onto two petri dishes from 5 centimeters away — the first one fully clothed and the second with his draws dropped. They incubated the dishes overnight.
Upon examination the next day, the petri dish exposed to the clothing-filtered flatus was unscathed and ungrown, indicating that the clothing did, indeed, “scrub” the gas clean! The petri-au-naturale, however, had sprouted visible lumps of two types of bacteria that are usually found only in the gut and on the skin.
Conclusions from the experiment? Kruszelnicki said it better than I ever could, so here’s your moment:
Our deduction is that the enteric zone in the second Petri dish was caused by the flatus itself, and the splatter ring around that was caused by the sheer velocity of the fart, which blew skin bacteria from the cheeks and blasted it onto the dish. It seems, therefore, that flatus can cause infection if the emitter is naked, but not if he or she is clothed. But the results of the experiment should not be considered alarming, because neither type of bacterium is harmful. In fact, they’re similar to the ‘friendly’ bacteria found in yoghurt.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/
