Everyone farts and that’s a fact! They may be loud, silent, stinky or odourless but the truth is, the average person lets one rip 5 to 15 times a day (or more depending on one’s diet). Yes, you fart in your sleep!
Discover our latest podcast
Medically speaking, farting or flatulence is a naturally normal part of digestion that shows the activity of the bacteria in your gut.
Here are some other explosive facts about farting that you should know, or maybe not.
99% of fart is odourless
That means only a percentage of intestinal gas contains hydrogen sulfide—a chemical that has an extremely foul smell. The human nose can easily detect even small quantities of this gas making the 1% a force to reckon with. The other 99% is made up of non-smelling stuff like carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and methane.
Vegetarians fart more than meat eaters
In general, vegetarians tend to eat more beans than their carnivorous counterparts. Beans contain carbohydrates made of molecules too large for absorption into the small intestine during digestion. These molecules are unable to break down in the large intestines, producing large amounts of hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas. Here’s the twist though, meat-eaters’ farts smell worse than those of vegetarians due to the increased sulphur in meat producing more hydrogen sulphide.
Women’s fart smell worse than men’s
Yep, you read right! Not only do ladies actually fart, they are more likely to stink up a room than their male counterparts. A 2014 study found that women produce more hydrogen sulfide during digestion and as a result their farts smell worse. Also, farts are normal symptoms of pregnancy and are common during periods as well.
You can produce rosey smelling farts
A French inventor and free-spirited hippy Christian Poincheval, 69, developed a pill that supposedly alters the malodorous gases you emit from your stomach so that they smell like chocolate, violets or roses. You would have to take it for a week to let out sweet-smelling farts.
Farting is a sexual fetish
A 2013 paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior describes a 22-year-old man who is sexually aroused by flatulence. Apparently, it is common a fetish enough to warrant a scientific term, eproctophilia. Some individuals are at their horniest when farting on their sexual partners, whereas others are most turned-on by the act of being farted upon.
Worth exploring?
