Farts To The Rescue

Farts are funny and sometimes smelly. But are they a legitimate topic of research? More than 40% of people worldwide are estimated to suffer from some kind of functional gut disorder — from acid reflux, heartburn, indigestion, constipation and irritable bowel syndrome to inflammatory bowel disease. So, yes, freelance science writer Claire Ainsworth http://claireainsworth.com/about thinks so. Claire speaks with Emily https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong about two teams of scientists studying intestinal gases, who she profiled in a recent New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26435212-200-the-scientists-on-a-mission-to-catch-farts-for-the-good-of-our-health/ article — and why understanding people's gut microbiome through a fart-shaped window may help treat these conditions at the source. Read more https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26435212-200-the-scientists-on-a-mission-to-catch-farts-for-the-good-of-our-health/of Claire's reporting for New Scientist. Have another bodily function you want us to explore or just want to report to us about a funny time you passed gas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  Hey, short wavers. Have you ever wanted to ask a marine biologist, I don't know, anything? Like about sea stars or sponges or other ancient spineless creatures of the ocean? Maybe you've wondered what it's like to live underwater or how you even become a marine biologist. Well, we are talking to one soon, and we want to ask them your questions. Send them in by recording your name, location, and your question in a quiet space, and email that audio to [email protected] by the end of the day on Thursday, January 30. Yes, I'm giving you a deadline. Thank you so much and enjoy the show. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Farts are funny.

• 1:00Emily Kwong?

  Depending on where you are and who you are, they might also be smelly, or silly, or just rude. But could they be a topic of scientific research?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  There are some scientists who are trying to collect them, physically collect farts.

• 1:14Emily Kwong?

  Claire Ainsworth got her PhD in developmental biology, and she's now a freelance science journalist based in the UK who covers things like farts.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  I thought, what on earth is motivating these people to go to such lengths and such, you know, such care to collect farts? You know, how did they get funding for that? Why would you do that? And it took me on this really fascinating journey into just how important and fascinating farts really are.

• 1:41Emily Kwong?

  Claire published a piece about all she'd learned in New Scientist, which is a science magazine, in December. She says, "Think of farts like a window into the giant microbial world that lives inside of us, in the largest microbiome in the human body, our gut. Microbes along the GI tract break down what we eat, aiding with nutrient absorption, regulating our immune systems, and yes, producing intestinal gases." But studying people's gut microbiome directly and non-invasively is difficult. Like, beyond sampling what comes out either end of the human body, how do you learn what's inside?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  And this is why gases are so cool, because they kind of let us eavesdrop on the conversations that are going on within this ecosystem and how that relates to our health.

• 2:26Emily Kwong?

  And to our diet. More than 40% of people worldwide are estimated to suffer from some kind of functional gut disorder. These are chronic conditions, like acid reflux, heartburn, indigestion, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease. They can be really painful, so understanding our gut microbiome through a fart-shaped window may help treat these conditions at the source. If only, Claire says, we could study the gases themselves as they billow and bulge through our digestive system.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  You know, most of the gut is this big, black box. What we really would like to do is look at what's going on in real time and how it responds to changes in diet.

• 3:08Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, farts to the rescue, how gases move through our gut, and two experimental methods scientists are testing out to catch gas to better care for the gut microbiome. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:42Emily Kwong?

  Farts are made in our gut, and our gut is long, at least 15 feet. It's a twisting landscape through which our intestinal gases move.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Some of the gas that comes in is you swallow it. Your mom probably told you off for eating too fast. You swallow gases like oxygen and nitrogen. Most of that comes from swallowed air.

• 5:02Emily Kwong?

  Those gases travel down to your stomach, through your intestines, down to your colon. And all along the way, your gut microbes are fermenting the food you eat and producing more gases: carbon dioxide, sulfur. Some even eat those gases and release others. And this is the cocktail that comes out the other end.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  You know, you feed yourself, but you also feed your gut bacteria, your gut microbes with your diet. And it's this fermentation, then producing these gases.

• 5:31Emily Kwong?

  But before the gases come out, which is the exciting and embarrassing part, I wanted to ask Claire, what happens along the way? Like, how are the gases interacting with, say, our cells?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these are the things like hydrogen sulfide or methane. They are gases that can act as signals. They tell our cells to do things. They can affect how our immune cells respond. They can affect the blood vessels in the gut. They can affect the function of the gut and affect other parts of our bodies as well. They could promote gut and liver health, for example, that sort of thing. So they're not just waste effluent. You're not thinking like a factory chimney stack that belts out smoke. They have a function.

• 6:14Emily Kwong?

  So what's the end product? Like, how is the fart different from the gases that are like in the tube before it comes out?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Well, I guess it's much more complicated than what goes in at the top.

• 6:24Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  In many ways, you kind of fart when we breathe as well, because I've only just met you and I'm insulting you, I do apologize. The problem of course with measuring breath is it doesn't tell you where the gas is being produced. Which bit of the gut, and that's key, really.

• 6:40Emily Kwong?

  Right, farts are not as illuminating in this regard as farts are.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  You know, when you say come out at the other end, it's composed of gases, you know, like carbon dioxide, depending on what else you've been eating, hydrogen, methane, perhaps, that sort of thing. But also a whole load of other stuff, these tiny trace amounts of things like hydrogen sulfide, these volatile organic compounds I mentioned, that probably lend a certain bouquet to the whole proceedings. The smell, should we put it.

• 7:15Emily Kwong?

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so what actually comes out, farts are actually really complex, they're very dynamic. And they, like I said, they give us a rather, you know, slightly smelly window into what's been going on on our insides, at least in the, towards the end of our gut.

• 7:32Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so in reporting this story, you started looking around for different methodologies to measure this slightly smelly window.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:43Emily Kwong?

  You found two very promising ones, we're going to talk about both. The first was developed by a team in Spain at the University of Barcelona. Tell me about that, what are they doing over there to try to catch farts?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so the Spanish team was led by Santiago Marco at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia and Antonio Pardo at the University of Barcelona.

• 8:04Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And one of them, the ways they've been trying is a, not to put too fine a point of it, a catheter up the rectum.

• 8:14Emily Kwong?

  Ah. So a tube up the butt to gather the fart, to gather the gas.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  One of the problems with this is A, it's a little bit invasive, but also you can contaminate the sample with atmospheric air. It can leak in.

• 8:27Emily Kwong?

  Yep.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  And also this, how do you measure it? How do you measure it accurately? How do you get, you know, reproducible findings from it? So this was the challenge this team took on. So they designed a fart-catching device, which is a tube up the rectum with a special plug in it to keep the atmospheric gas out, and a special bag for collecting gas. And then they got five volunteers, set them up and said, "Don't move. Stay very still for the next four hours and we'll collect some gas."

• 9:00Emily Kwong?

  Oh, wait. So the volunteers sat there, were they encouraged to fart or?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  If you've got a tube up there, I don't think, I don't know how much voluntary control you have over it, to be honest.

• 9:09Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, it's just kind of whatever came out was gathered.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:12Emily Kwong?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  And they then, they took them over to the scientists who used a technique called gas chromatography on the farts. And this is a very sensitive, very precise way of measuring what molecules are in a sample, right?

• 9:28Emily Kwong?

  Hmm. What did they find?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Well, they found, actually, they could detect with, you know, good accuracy the five main gases in fart, so oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane. And they gave the subjects a meal that either didn't make them fart much or was predicted to make them fart a lot, and then did the experiment again. And then they were able to show in their gas chromatography measurements, they could tell the difference between the samples.

• 10:03Emily Kwong?

  Right. They fed some volunteers a high flatulence diet of bananas and white beans, and other volunteers a low flatulence diet of orange juice and a sandwich, and they could tell, like through the gas sample. The difference, which is a big deal. It's a promising procedure for intestinal gas research. Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  But the idea was that actually you can use this to get a really nice, accurate, reproducible way of detecting what those gases in farts.

• 10:33Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, yeah. And the second potential method for getting fart data comes from a medical device company in Australia called Atmos Biosciences. And they invented an actual capsule.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:45Emily Kwong?

  So something people swallow that can sniff out intestinal gases along the gut? And then like transmit data to be analyzed? How does that all work?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is the Atmos capsule and it builds on work from a number of scientific groups around the world. And

• 11:04Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Obviously, we can't swallow a gas chromatograph, but we can send something else in that doesn't have that same sort of analytical power, but still, you know, as a trade off, tells us stuff we couldn't find out any other way.

• 11:17Emily Kwong?

  It's like when the magic school bus gets swallowed by Arnold and they like learn all about his different systems. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit like that. So they've got this little capsule and it's about half the size of a sort of AA battery. And you can swallow it.

• 11:30Emily Kwong?

  It's like a big pill.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And it makes its way through your guts over a couple of days. And it can detect hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and it can also work out through various means if there's a low oxygen in the area. And it's got a temperature sensor, so it knows when it's come out the other end. You know, Atmos has left the building. And the great thing about it is it transmits its results telemetrically to a receiver outside the body. You just send the data off for analysis. One of the useful things it can tell you Is whether fermentation is taking place at a particular point in the gut. So the cool thing is you know where it is. And you know, for example, if there's hydrogen there, if there's hydrogen there, there's got to be fermentation.

• 12:15Emily Kwong?

  It can tell you where in your gut gases are coming from?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:20Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And one of the theories in IBS is that it's the location of fermentation that might be an issue. And they showed, for example, that by changing diet and measuring it with these capsules, they were able to show that change in the diet shifted the location of fermentation in the colon.

• 12:43Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and it's important to say, of course, this capsule is not available for sale. It's not on the market. It needs to go through a lot more regulatory approval and experimentation. But taking a step back, you know, when you think about all the reporting you did for this story and all the scientists you've talked to, has this been helpful for you and your farts? And do you have any advice for people currently suffering from a functional gut disorder of some kind?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  I almost say it gives me a whole new appreciation of farts.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  It's a classic Cinderella story, isn't it? It's rags to riches. We thought they were rubbish. We tried to get rid of them or hide them.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  But you can, you can take pride in your farts. They are a miracle of biology. But maybe keep that miracle to yourself in the bathroom for now.

• 13:33Emily Kwong?

  That's right.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Farts are hilarious, right? I mean, I had a lot of fun reporting this story, but there's a, you know, a very serious side to it. Because, you know, these gases can help us understand some diseases that cause a huge amount of suffering worldwide. You know, if you're, if you're affected by any of these issues, what I suggest is to seek out good quality information. You don't try and treat yourself with a diet because there's so much rubbish. You know, try this bad diet or buy that overpriced supplement to fix your problem. What you want is good evidence-led treatment from a physician. It's very early days, but you know, work, people are working on it.

• 14:12Emily Kwong?

  Claire Ainsworth, thank you so much for talking to me about this work.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  No problem.

• 14:20Emily Kwong?

  And before we go, we want to say a big thank you. If you are one of the listeners who answered the call in the last few months and supported our show by signing up for NPR Plus, oh, my gosh, that support is so important to keep our work going. Thank you, thank you. And if you have heard about NPR Plus but aren't supporting us yet, it's so easy to sign up. Just go to plus.npr.org. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 15:00Emily Kwong?

  Thanks, as always, for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 15:10Emily Kwong?

  I'm not very good at doing fart noises. I didn't get that particular elementary school training.

• 15:18Emily Kwong?

  I can't believe this is my job.

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