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Hi, everyone. This is Soni Kassam, host of 1440 explores. Today, I'm handing things over to my colleague Dina Feinmarin, 1440's health and medicine editor, for an episode I think you'll love. I'll be back next time. Enjoy. Everyone farts. Not occasionally, but all the time. In fact, recent research suggests the average adult may be passing gas more than 30 times a day. Yet for something so universal, we spend a lot of energy pretending it isn't happening. Because, let's face it, farts seem childish. They're embarrassing. But in hospitals and inside labs, scientists are starting to take them very seriously.
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Yeah, I think flatulence is the best place to monitor gut microbial metabolism.
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That's fart scientist Brantley Hall. To him, gas isn't just some giggly punchline. It's more like evidence. A tiny status report from your gut microbiome. So what happens when one of our most useful health signals is also the one we're most embarrassed to talk about. Today? The science of farts. Why we do it. Why it sometimes smells. Why humans across centuries can't stop laughing about it. And why Brantley hall at the University of Maryland is asking thousands of Americans to wear Bluetooth underwear. Sensors that track every time they fart. We'll hear from him and dive into all of this and more in today's episode. I'm Dena Fine Marin and this is 1440 explores a show where we unpack elements of our daily lives. Stay with us. Every 27 seconds, someone makes their first sale on Shopify. Instock is the newsletter that follows what happens next. Founder Stories Trend Data Commerce Unfiltered. Subscribe for free at shopify.substack.com. So where do farts actually come from? The answer starts earlier than you may think. Not way down in your colon or your stomach, but the moment you eat. So let's begin there with one hypothetical bite of a sandwich. Bread, turkey, lettuce, maybe some onions. If you're feeling socially reckless, the moment you take that first bite, the fart genesis story begins. The fart prelude, if you will. That Sandwich enters a 30 foot long tube that runs from your mouth to your anus. It's known as your gastrointestinal tract. Muscles in the wall of that tube squeeze in tiny waves, a process called paras dulcis. They push food downward like toothpaste through a very long tube. And the whole trip can take anywhere from one day to three days. The first major stop, the stomach. Think of this like an acid bath. This is where your sandwich bite gets churned, squeezed, and hit with strong acid and digestive enzymes until it becomes a soupy sludge called Chyme. From there, your sandwich moves into the small intestine, which, despite the name, is actually the longest part of your digestive system. It's about 20ft of tightly coiled tubing. This is the extraction phase. Here, your body pulls out the valuables. Sugars, fats, proteins, vitamins, Things your bloodstream can carry off and turn into energy, muscle and thoughts. Then eventually, whatever's left that your body can't fully break down moves into the large intestine, AKA the colon. Despite the name, the large intestine is actually shorter than the small intestine. It's only about 5ft, but it's wider. Think of this place as a fermentation chamber. Here, trillions of microbes live out their lives in one of the densest ecosystems on earth. Scientists call this the gut microbiome. There, microbes help digest your food, produce gases, and shape everything from bloating and irritable bowel syndrome to your long term health. And those microbes are hungry. Here's University of Maryland microbiologist Brantley Hall.
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The microbes in your gut can effectively digest anything that you eat.
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And what they especially love are the tougher leftovers, Largely what scientists call fiber, which is a type of carbohydrate. Your body can't fully break down on its own. And think of things like beans, broccoli, whole grains, lentils. Because it can't be absorbed as well, fiber keeps moving down into the colon. And that's where the microbes take over and start to feast on it. As they feast, they create gas as a byproduct, most of which is odorless. As the gas builds in the colon, pressure builds. Some of it gets absorbed back into the body. Some of it may have also exited earlier in the process as a burp. But the rest, eventually it has to come out and ta da, the fart. The grand finale of digestion. A tiny microbial eruption from deep inside your gut. Sometimes that eruption is completely, shall we say, imperceptible. But occasionally it's not.
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The molecules that you smell. These gases are typically like hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, but also some other ammonia and kind of like ammonium containing compounds that
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rotten egg smell, that's sulfur compounds like hydrogen sulfide, tiny amounts, but powerful. And it seems they likely smell bad for a reason.
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It's related to our preference for not eating rotten food. Humans try to avoid food poisoning. And so when you smell Hydrogen sulfide and methanethiol. It's a true signal of microbial metabolism. And so we're trying to eat foods that haven't been metabolized by microbes.
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In other words, your nose likely evolved to keep you away from food that's already been broken down by microbes out in the world, maybe lying out in the savannah, because that can make you sick. But the twist is, inside your gut, that same process is exactly what digestion is supposed to do. Okay, that's normal flatulence, the everyday cost of digestion working exactly as it should. But what happens when the gas doesn't move through the system the way it should, when it builds up, when bloating becomes painful, when farting stops being funny?
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1 in 5 people report excess intestinal gas. And if I'm being generous, one in three people say that they were bloated recently. So bloating is a really big problem. Bloating is also a nicer way to say it than like, I'm very flatulent. I think people want to say, you know, I feel bloated. It's kind of a very difficult problem to solve because there's multiple causes of bloating and there's very few objective measures of, like, what's going on. And so they kind of have to give patients bad advice or give them a series of tests where hopefully all the answers are no. And you end up with this disease of exclusion called ibs.
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Irritable bowel syndrome. It's a very common condition affecting an estimated 10 to 15% of adults in the United States and worldwide. It can mean cramping, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and excessive gas. It can be painful and embarrassing. And as he mentioned, it's often surprisingly hard to diagnose compared to many other common health conditions. Part of the problem is that doctors rely on symptoms people describe rather than something they can measure. Things like, do you feel bloated? How much are you farting? Which is strange, because if something's wrong with, say, your heart, doctors can measure it in real time. But if something's wrong with your gut, they mostly have to ask you how it feels. And therein lies another cruel twist, because farts might actually be one of the very best real time signals we have of what's happening inside the digestive system. That's because every fart contains gases produced by your gut microbes as they break down food. So in each one is information about what your microbes are eating, how active they are, how well your body is digesting. Certain foods and whether something in that system is a bit off. Too much gas might mean certain foods aren't being broken down correctly. Too little might mean something else is wrong. Even the type of gas, hydrogen, methane. It can hint at which microbes are doing the work. In other words, farts are packed with information. The problem is, for decades, scientists had no good way to measure them, so they studied poop instead. But poop only shows you the end result. What your body didn't use. It doesn't tell you what's happening in real time, or much less pleasantly. They performed rectal tube studies, a process that involved inserting a tube into the rectum and directly measuring intestinal gas. Not exactly something people volunteer for twice, basically. Until recently, getting a real time picture of flatulence was incredibly difficult. And that's where Brantley hall, our expert, comes in. He thinks there may be a much better way to measure what's happening in our gut and maybe help people suffering from bloating and IBS in the process. It involves smart underwear, Bluetooth sensors, and thousands of volunteers willing to strap them on and record their gas. We'll get there, but first it helps to know this. Humans have been fascinated by farts for centuries. Long before microbiome labs, there were court jesters, stage performers, old timey scientists, all. All trying to understand or profit from the art of passing gas. That wonderfully weird history is next after the break. Every 27 seconds, someone makes their first sale on Shopify. But behind every breakthrough, there's a universe of untold stories. In stock is Shopify's newsletter about entrepreneurship. Sometimes it's a peek behind the curtain of a fast rising brand. Sometimes it's the data and trends changing how we shop and work. Always it's real and unfiltered. Subscribe for free at shopify.substack.com. Before farts were data and science, they were a mix of entertainment and embarrassment. That strange combination seems to be universal A across cultures and centuries, we seem to laugh at farts and be deeply ashamed of them. Why? Part of it may be the surprise factor. A sudden involuntary noise from a part of the body that we spend most of our lives pretending doesn't exist. Part of it is about decorum. Humor often comes from breaking social rules. And few rules are clearer than don't make bodily noises in public. A fart is funny because it's a tiny social disaster which shatters decor. Some of the oldest recorded jokes are basically fart jokes. Ancient Greek comedy used them to great effect. Medieval manuscripts illustrated them. And in 12th century England, one man even turned farting into a royally sponsored profession. He was commonly called Roland the Farter. According to fee records from the time, Roland was given land from King Henry II in exchange for performing at court every Christmas. His act, listed in Latin, is loosely translated as a jump, a whistle, and a fart simultaneously. The act clearly involves some pretty precise coordination, timing and sphincter control. Sure, it sounds a bit ridiculous, but it also tells us something useful. Fart humor was not just for kids or taverns. It made it all the way to the king's court. And then a few centuries later in Japan, artists turned flatulence into visual spectacle. In the Edo period, scrolls, informally known as fart battles, show people using farts like weapons. People bend over and blast each other while others fan the air. And then in 1781, Benjamin Franklin gave farts the Enlightenment treatment in a satirical essay often called Farts Fart. Proudly, Franklin argued that passing gas was natural. The real problem was not the gas itself, but the smell. His fake proposal was scientists should figure out how to make flatulence pleasant, even perfume, like so, fast forward to modern times, and yes, there are still professional farters. Google it. Here's microbiologist Brantley hall again on what those acts may truly be offering.
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I think some of them are truly eating a very high fiber diet and farting a lot, while others are sucking air into their rectum and expelling it on demand, which is also very interesting. I don't know how they found they have that skill,
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but eventually flatulence made its way off stage and into the lab. It took a while, but by the early 20th century, gastroenterologists began measuring intestinal gas, not because farts were funny, but because, as we mentioned, they were clues. In the 1970s, gastroenterologist Michael Levitt became a leader in the field widely called the king of farts. He published extensively on flatulence and the gases inside them. But science was still mostly stuck with a problem. How do you actually measure a fart? Other than asking, so how much are you farting? Then, in the early 2000s, something happened, and it wasn't about farts at all. But it ended up changing fart science anyway. Scientists got much better at sequencing and reading DNA. Before that, studying gut microbes was incredibly hard. Many of these microbes are anaerobic, which means they often may die when exposed to oxygen. So if you tried to grow them in a normal lab dish, they might die before you could study them. It was sort of like knowing there Was an entire city living inside the gut. But being locked outside the gates. New DNA sequencing changed that. Instead of trying to grow microbes, scientists could just take the samples, often from stool, and read the genetic fingerprints the microbes left behind. Suddenly, they could identify who was living there without needing to keep them alive in a lab. And that led to huge projects like the Human Microbiome Project and the American Gut Project, where thousands of people sent in samples to help map the hidden ecosystem inside us. From these pivotal studies and related works, we learned western guts look different than non western guts, that humans have less microbial diversity than many primates, that your dog may be sharing part of his microbiome with you. And that diet, especially fiber, shapes a huge part of this invisible world. For the first time, scientists could really see the cast of characters living inside the gut. And that made one thing even more frustrating. They knew more than ever before about who was there, but they still struggled to understand what those microbes were doing in real time. Why did one person eat beans and feel fine, while another looked like they'd need to move up a pant size before the next meal? Why did some people live with constant bloating, pain and gas, while others didn't? Getting some data from poop could help, but that picked up information at the end of the process. Basically, it showed the leftovers farts were different. They were real time evidence of microbial activity while digestion was still happening. And yet, even with all this new science, doctors were still often stuck asking the same question. Yup, you guessed it by now. So how much are you farting? And that's where our microbiologist, Brantley hall, comes in. Again, not because he set out to become a fart scientist. Actually, it started because a key experiment in his lab kept failing.
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So we're microbiologists, and gut microbes can't grow in atmospheric oxygen, so we have to grow them in a special bubble. It's kind of like if you saw Seinfeld bubble boy. It's like we're growing microbes inside of that bubble, but that bubble has no atmospheric oxygen in it. So we were trying to measure hydrogen in there, but our sensor wasn't working. And so we thought maybe we should take it out and fart on it, because that's the microbial metabolite we're trying to measure as well. So I took it home over one weekend and farted on it, and the signal was extremely strong. And we thought, oh, well, maybe we're doing this all wrong instead of doing it in the Lab, we should do it in people.
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Instead of trying to recreate gut chemistry in the lab, why not measure it where it's actually happening? And actual humans living actual lives, eating actual sandwiches at lunch. The problem was, until very recently, there was no practical way to do that. You couldn't exactly send people home with a rectal tube. But in recent years, consumer electronics have been getting dramatically smaller. Wireless chips, tiny batteries, Bluetooth transmitters. Basically, the same miniaturization that gave us things like AirPods suddenly made it possible to build tiny wearable gas sensors.
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The technology we're using is brand new. There's been a revolution in electronics. I think AirPods and wireless headphones in general have driven a lot of this innovation. So when people ask, like, what is the actual electronic basis of our smart underwear device? It's kind of like an airpod with a nose.
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An airpod with a nose. And that's how fart science moved from the deeply imprecise, so how much are you farting? To something much more useful. Dr. Brantley Hall's human Flatus Atlas. His lab is building tiny wearable sensors, basically smart underwear, that measure the hydrogen in your flatulence over several days while you're going about your normal life. Remember, hydrogen is a huge part of our farts, and that's only part one. With a smart underwear, part two is food. Participants also photograph everything they're eating so Brantley's team can compare meals, microbes, and flash lens patterns. At large scale, the goal is to finally define what normal actually looks like.
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If someone goes to the doctor in the future and they say, I have excess flatulence, I hope to give the doctor the baseline for what excess might be. And so we'll have thousands of people rather than just dozens of people, and we'll be able to understand how far from the average this person actually is and whether it likely represents a problem or not.
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Grantly sent me one of the same kits they're mailing to thousands of volunteers. So I opened the package. Inside, there's a quarter size sensor that goes on the outside of your underwear. He and his team produced it with a 3D printer in his lab. And then there's a clip to hold the sensor onto your underwear and several spare clips as well. There are instructions that politely describe with the diagram the target zone of where to place the sensor. And then there are details in there about how to download the app, upload the data. There's also a charger similar to the one I would use for my phone. Hall asks people to wear the device for most of three days, taking it off during intense exercise, showers, and if you're going through airport security, I guess that makes sense. The sensor may look suspicious and be hard to explain. So each morning, you're supposed to briefly take it off, plug it in, and upload your results. The payoff? You get your own personal flatulence report. Big farts, small farts, patterns, timing, and also how you are comparing with others in the study. Your percentile. So on two of the three days, I found that I was right around average. But on the day I chowed down on bean tacos, the sensors definitely detected the aftermath. Spike city, as you may expect, but people don't typically process food within hours of eating. So I asked Brantley what was going on there. He told me there were several possibilities. Some of that gas could be early fermentation from the fibers in the beans, but more likely, it's actually what's called a gastrocolic reflex. Essentially, when you eat, your gut gets a signal to start moving everything along. So if gas from earlier meals had been building up, dinner basically opens the floodgates. Or maybe he said it was a combination of the two. So it's not as simple as beans in, gas out. I was fascinated. As Brantley explained, the timing combined with the food logs and the fart sensors tells us something about transit and fermentation that you'd never pick up from bloating symptoms alone. And as for Brantley, the real hope for this work goes beyond curiosity. As we mentioned, for many people with IBS or chronic bloating today, the medical advice can feel brutal. It's basically stop eating almost everything you enjoy. Brantley wants to do better.
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Right now, people get an extreme diet where they can basically eat nothing containing fiber. And that exclusion diet is extremely hard. It kind of ruins your life because you can't go out to eat. You have to eat all the, like, very defined food, very boring food. But if we could figure out people's individual triggers, we could have people eat a more diverse, delicious diet rather than this extremely restrictive diet. And hopefully that will lead them to, like, reduce their symptoms while still kind of enjoying life and eating healthy food,
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Food that really is the payoff, the freedom from the guesswork that for years has been the default in this painful area. Brantley hopes that he'll have his first raft of data for publication later this summer. His dream, to begin to fill in more details about which foods cause problems for your bodies and which ones aren't beyond, you know, issuing general advice about beans. He wants us to eat well and to still enjoy our lives. So we started with a simple what is a fart? It turns out it's kind of the end of digestion. Food your body couldn't break down, handed off to trillions of microbes, turned into gas, and then eventually released. And we've spent centuries laughing at that release. We turned it into performances for the King of England, fart battles in Japanese art, even a satirical essay by a founding father. But now scientists like Brantley hall are asking whether we should also listen to it. Because for people living with real pain, understanding flatulence could mean something much better. Real answers. And maybe that requires changing the way we think about farts in the first place.
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I think that we should kind of destigmatize them so that people can more readily eat healthy food. I think, like, our diet is a crisis and that we need to eat healthier foods. One of the things we need to do to overcome, you know, this dietary barrier is kind of accept farts and talk about them more and measure them more and not stigmatize them the way we do today.
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Maybe that's the real lesson here. For most of human history, when we heard a fart, we laughed or we cringed. But we were wrong. Because the whole time it was information hiding in plain sight. And only now, with sensors small enough to actually capture it in real life, are we starting to catch up. Not just to laugh, but to listen. And maybe finally to understand. Many thanks to Brantley hall for joining us in today's episode, and thanks to all of you for listening to 1440 explores. I'm Dena Fine Marin. Make sure to follow the show and leave us a review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And let us know what you thought of this episode at podcastsoin140.com 1440 explores is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Minogni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Alice Jones and our sound designer is Jay Cowett. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff, and the executive producers at 1440 are Sony Kassam and Drew Steigerwald.