Whether you try to hide it or not, you fart. Everybody does. But even though it's such a routine activity — the average person farts between 10 and 20 times per day — there's a lot about farting that you might not know. As part of research into the microbiome — the rich community of bacteria that live throughout your body — scientists have learned all sorts of interesting things about the bacteria that produce gas inside your intestines. Here are 9 crucial things to know about flatulence.
1) You produce about 500 to 1500 milliliters of gas per day, and expel it in 10 to 20 farts
This might be more than you'd expect, but it's been measured in controlled studies. The surprisingly hefty amount is the result of bacteria that live in your colon and feed on most of the food you eat, says Purna Kashyap — a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic who studies the gut microbiome.
"There are a lot of carbohydrates that we consume — mainly present in vegetables, grains, and fruits — that our bodies don't have the enzymes necessary to digest," he says. "These end up in large intestine, where microbes chew them apart and use them for energy, through the process of fermentation. As a byproduct, they produce gas."
A huge variety of foods contain these complex carbs that we can't fully digest: virtually all beans, most vegetables, and anything with whole grains. For most people, this leads to somewhere between 500 to 1500 milliliters of gas daily — the equivalent of half a two-liter bottle of soda, every single day.
2) 99 percent of the gas you produce does not smell
One of the reasons that we produce so much more gas than we realize is that nearly all of it is odorless.
Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane make up as much as 99 percent of the gas produced in our large intestines by volume. (They're supplemented by air you swallow — more on that below.) All of these gases are odorless, which is why much of the time, farts don't actually smell at all.
The potent stink, research has found, is largely due to the 1 percent or so of compounds with sulfur in them, such as hydrogen sulfide. (This sort of research itself is pretty amazing: one experiment involved two people judging the smelliness of farts of 16 participants who'd been fed pinto beans, collected with the aid of "gas-tight Mylar pantaloons.")
Bacteria need to consume sulfur to produce sulfurous gases, and though not all foods with complex carbs contain sulfur, many do. They're mainly foods that you probably already associate with farting — things like beans, onions, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and dairy.
3) Gum and soda can make you fart more
Apart from the gases produced by bacteria, a significant proportion of your flatulence is simply made up of inadvertently swallowed air. It doesn't smell — it's mostly nitrogen and oxygen — but it sounds and feels the same coming out.
Some of this swallowing goes on while you're asleep, but it can be increased by drinking carbonated beverages (after all, you're ingesting the carbonation) and by chewing gum.
4) Farting is the result of a healthy, complex ecosystem in your intestines
Bacteroides fragilis, one of the bacteria species involved in gas production, cultured in a petri dish. (Nathan Reading)
Modern society views flatulence as a negative. This is unfortunate, because in most cases, it's the byproduct of a beautiful thing — the intricate ecosystem of bacteria living in your intestines…Continued
See more at source :http://365merms.com/forum/15836435/Everybody+Farts+-+Facts+about+Fart
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