HERE鈥橲 a piece of trivia with which to impress your drinking pals. The average adult in the Western world farts roughly 10 times a day, releasing enough gas to inflate a party balloon. Despite numerous anecdotal claims to the contrary, there is no significant difference in the frequency of emissions between the sexes, although women are smaller and so tend to produce less. More than 99 per cent of these emissions are made up of five odourless gases. What exactly causes their foul smell has long been a matter of debate. But one man says he has the answer.
That man is Michael Levitt, a gastroenterologist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis. He has been studying flatus for over 30 years and has solved numerous mysteries that might otherwise trouble the flatulent reader. Well known in gastroenterological circles for his painstaking research and undying enthusiasm, Levitt has written over 200 papers on this subject and is acknowledged as a world authority. And in recent years his fame has spread further. Articles about him and his work have appeared in everything from The Sydney Morning Herald to The Daily Telegraph.
Many scientists would welcome this exposure, but for Levitt it has been disastrous. Readers have written angry letters to his employers complaining that his research is a waste of money. It has become so bad that he now refuses to talk to the press for fear of jeopardising his career. Just what has gone wrong?
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Part of the problem is the chortle-provoking nature of the topic itself. The temptation to turn out stories brimming with puns and fart jokes is often too great for journalists to resist, and the tone of the story inevitably colours Levitt鈥檚 image in the mind of the readers. The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, began its story about Levitt with the euphemistic headline 鈥淭ail wind鈥�. The Washington Post started cheekily with 鈥淲aiting to inhale鈥� but dampened further enthusiasm with the sub-heading 鈥淢ainstream and alternative practitioners agree that diet is central to controlling flatulence鈥�. And online magazine Salon.com plumped for 鈥淒r Fart speaks鈥�.
Levitt鈥檚 work attracts the media because it is serious research on a snigger-inducing topic. For instance, he was the first to correctly identify the gases that make farts smell. Previously, researchers had suspected that the guilty parties were foul-smelling compounds such as indole and skatole, created by the breakdown of amino acids in the gut. But nobody had ever bothered to check.
Evaluating a smell is a difficult task, so Levitt turned to the noses of two people with a rather unusual ability. Both could identify different sulphur-containing gases purely by smell. These lucky individuals were asked to evaluate the flatus of 16 healthy men and women who, the previous evening, had eaten 200 grams of pinto beans to ensure ample gas production. Levitt says the results pointed to hydrogen sulphide as the culprit in smelly farts, accompanied to a lesser extent by other sulphur-based gases such as methanethiol and dimethyl sulphide. But indole and skatole were nowhere to be smelt.
Levitt and his colleagues Fabrizis Suarez and John Springfield published their results in 1981. Incidentally, in the paper they say: 鈥淭he anecdotal belief that men tend to produce more objectionable flatus than women was not supported by our limited number of observations.鈥� On the contrary, the group found that the women in the test produced significantly higher concentrations of hydrogen sulphide and both judges deemed their farts to be significantly more smelly.
With the culprit gases identified, Levitt and his colleagues have gone on to look at how our bodies cope with high levels of these noxious compounds. One answer, revealed just weeks ago in his paper in the journal Biochemical Pharmacology (vol 62, p 255), is that the lining of our gut may contain a specialised detoxification system. And defects in this mechanism may trigger colon disorders such as colitis.
Levitt has even tested an artificial detox system-a commercially available device claimed to reduce the odour of farts. The Toot Trapper is a foam cushion covered on one side with activated charcoal-charcoal with an increased surface area-which absorbs certain gases. Since no standard technique exists to carry out such tests, Levitt developed his own by designing airtight Mylar pantaloons to trap the gases for analysis. The good news is that the Toot Trapper works well, reducing the concentration of sulphur-based gases by a factor of 10. The bad news is that it is rather unwieldy.
Research like this is bound to attract media coverage. But Levitt鈥檚 work is far from pointless-it has saved lives. Hydrogen and methane, two of the main gases that form in the gut, are combustible. In the 1980s, they caused a number of fatal explosions during otherwise routine operations on the gut. Somehow the purgatives used to clean the gut enhanced the production of hydrogen or methane and a chance spark during the operation triggered an explosion. Levitt and others have since developed purgatives based on polyethylene glycol, which clean the bowel with minimal gas production. Colonic detonations are now rare.
Levitt also studied a 28-year-old man who meticulously recorded every passage of gas he produced over a 3-year period. Farting about 34 times a day, he let out over 8 litres of gas, equal to several party balloons. Through Levitt, he achieved the dubious fame of being the only thoroughly studied man with excessive flatus on record.
Journalists certainly seem to like Levitt, and stories about him are littered with the good-humoured quotes he gives. Explaining to The Washington Post that gut bacteria absorb gas as well as produce it, he says: 鈥淚f we passed all the gas that we made, everybody would be farting a million times a day.鈥�
Yet Levitt is no stranger to controversy. He has repeatedly attacked the widespread belief in the US that those who cannot digest lactose produce far more gas if they eat dairy products containing it. In a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1995, he and his colleagues studied the amount of gas produced by lactose-intolerant people after drinking milk. They found there was little if any increase compared with when they drank liquids containing no lactose. As he told The Boston Globe, it 鈥渞iled up the lay public like you wouldn鈥檛 believe鈥�. For some people, he said, lactose intolerance is a religion not a condition.
Does this view on lactose intolerance justify the level of complaints? Hardly. But just why Levitt believes the public responds as it does to stories about his work we will never know. In an e-mail response to an interview request for this story he says: 鈥淚鈥檝e sworn off interviews about gas. Every time I am interviewed regarding this topic, the resultant article prompts letters and calls to the Veterans Administration (for whom I work) complaining about frivolous research, waste of valuable tax dollars, etc. Thanks for your interest.鈥� For the readers of 快猫短视频, his lips remain tightly sealed. Shame!