Medical Question of a Somewhat Subjective and Sensitive Nature

What is an optimum amount of farting?

So, this is obviously something that I am afraid to so much as type into Google, because that is not something that I want to see the instant results of, nor do I want to know the top five phrases longer than that that other people have searched for. It has occurred to me, however, that when I swap out my latest doctor (the Bios Life Supplement guy who thought that I might have celiac disease because I am soft and doughy in the middle and fart a bunch and also it stinks when that happens) for a model that hopefully doesn’t want to sell me hundred dollar a month shit water to lower my cholesterol through the magic power of flower chemicals, it would be good to have a baseline in mind for what of my body’s peculiar functions could be considered outside of the norm and what is not worth bringing up because it will reveal to me that my doctor is, in fact, a crazy person.

I see great things for this thread.

14 times a day. NO MORE NO LESS.

I seem to remember reading that the median number of farts per day was 15. I have no idea if that distinguishes between small toots and real rippers, though.

That’s from memory and I don’t really want to search for that on my employer’s network, so outside confirmation will be required.

EDIT: Ah, well, I stand corrected then…14 it is!

It depends on how you define optimal. I think limiting yourself to 14 would unnecessarily deprive you of one of the few pleasures in life that one doesn’t have to pay for. I would suggest, instead, heeding the words of the wise man* who first noted:

Beans, beans the magical fruit
The more you eat the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So eat your beans at every meal.

  • Of course it was a man.

If your farting is so bad that you can’t stand to be around yourself, then you fart to much.

Have you tried diet changes, that yogurt stuff or maybe a cork?

Also, eat slower. You can swallow a lot of air when eating too quick or swallowing large unchewed bites.

I’ve just learnt that if you try to hold your farts in, the gas can enter your bloodstream and exit through your mouth.

Is that what “leaky gut syndrome” means?

I will remember this fact until the end of time.

Agreed.

Brian, is this something that really seems serious?

So, the short answer which doctors love to give is: it depends.

Intestinal gas (which causes flatulence) comes about in many ways: bacterial fermentation, air swallowing, digestion, etc. There are also several things that can affect how much gas you have. These include: intestinal motility (shit speed), food intolerance (lactose intolerance), bacterial overgrowth, malabsorption, infection, diet (higher fiber creates more gas), etc.

So, things will change from person to person and even day to day. Excessive gas, where you have severe cramping or is accompanied by diarrhea can be a sign that there is something wrong and not necessarily a normal variant.

I hope that answers your question.

^ He’s a doctor.

My wife is a gas production machine. Strangely enough, they rarely smell. But when they do, look out.

I am so glad she’s not on QT3.

If you are letting huge stinky honkers rip all day every day, then yes, that is a bit exceptional. Definitely worth experimenting with diet to see if anything can be done.

I personally generally have fairly mild farts, both in intensity and aroma – not uncommon for me to get through the day without really having a fart worth noticing (or nose-puckering).

Try an intestinal cleanse first if you want to wipe the slate clean, though I am scared of them personally.

Starting here, I should issue a warning - this doesn’t actually do anything. Production of gas aside, the intestines don’t have problems leaving large deposits of filth inside of them. They’re like a greased up toothpaste tube that’s always being optimally compressed. Colon cleanses come in two varieties that vary from a little weird to dangerous. The kind that come from pills and generate big ropy snakes of horror in your toilet (“mucoid plaque”) are straight frauds. Those pills consist of what is essentially the clay you get in kitty litter. When you take the pill, the clay expands and you get a mold of your butt pipes, which you then extrude. The kind that come from a machine do achieve SOMETHING (basically the same thing that any enema achieves, so if you’re not going in for surgery or planning on doing some really adventurous butt stuff, it’s probably not a necessity), but they come with their own dangers, like any medical procedure. Generally, anybody shoving a bunch of water up inside of you needs to be a doctor, because if it’s not a doctor, first you should know that the equipment is old (since it is now illegal to buy that equipment to do general health cleansing), and second, you should know that this is possibly a very crazy person. At the very least, keep in mind that this fellow is weird enough to dedicate a significant portion of his life to shoving hoses up strangers’ butts.

So that’s why I haven’t had one of those.

As for the seriousness, this is one of those situations where I really don’t know, because I don’t know what’s normal, sort of like you never know where your dick fits on the size spectrum because it’s not the sort of thing that there’s a whole lot of charts and graphs for (though in this case, I kind of suspect that there might be more resources for that question). My father basically had a steady breeze going down there for the entire sixteen years that I knew him, but I don’t know if that’s an indication of a family problem or just one of the curious features of our screwed up stupid genes or possibly a side effect of the diabetes (even though I learned from him not to eat Sorbitol - I’ll take this opportunity to warn every human away from Velamints).

What I think I’ve learned, from this thread and my own experimentation, is that the phenomenon is coupled (hard to make the distinction between tight and loose on that, since I take a supplement on the daily, but I also eat fruit and vegetables and all sorts of crap that would add to that baseline) to fiber intake (specifically, “prebiotic fiber,” whatever the hell THAT is), so my guess is that this is mostly a dietary issue that I’m going to get to live with for the rest of my life, since consuming large quantities of fiber is my primary method of keeping the amount of tasty fat in my blood in a reasonable range. It doesn’t sound like I’m too far out of normal, though, which is what I really needed some guidance to.

Thanks for the assist, everybody.

If you don’t have any other underlying digestive conditions (Colitus, Crohn’s, IBS, diverticulitus, etc.) then usually excessive gas is a byproduct of diet. As others have mentioned, the way you eat may play a part as well. If you eat too fast or swallow a lot of air while eating, or if you swallow chunks of food instead of chewing each mouthful thoroughly, then gas can become an issue. Soda and other carbonated beverages exacerbate the problem.

In summary, an easy and unobtrusive way you can tell if your diet and eating habits are to blame for your gas issue would be to do the following for one week and see what effect it has on your situation:

  1. Make an effort to chew each mouthful of food when you eat. If you’re thinking about it, chances are you’ll chew it enough and not swallow a lot of air while eating.

  2. Eat slower. Put the fork down between bites, that helps you eat at a more regulated pace.

  3. Skip the soda. Get your caffeine fix from coffee or tea instead.

  4. Balance your diet. Try to watch your fiber intake, and make sure you’re not eating entire meals made up of fiber (like a salad for lunch) but balance in protein and starches as well.

  5. Drink more water. Dehydration can cause gas in the digestive tract. Make sure your digestive tract is a well-lubed machine by drinking plenty of water daily. Bonus : You will avoid painful kidney stones!

Try all those changes for a week and see if it makes any difference. If it doesn’t, it’s probably a good idea to speak to your new doctor about it.

Yeah, that’s pretty good advice I reckon. Ever since I stopped drinking caffeine drinks and having more water, my fart smells are much more tolerable to non-existant, and the amount of gas passed during the day is much less.

I guess we can file this whole thread under - shit happens.

Which, is pretty much my philosophy on the subject. I was raised in a liberal unrepressed household. I just let it all hang out when I can, figuring, it was probably meant to come out and who would want something nasty inside them that wants to be … free?

This can be a problem, in certain circumstances, as in:

-elevators - this is where I realised it was not an act of genius, if you find yourself riding an elevator alone, to think of yourself as alone and in a convenient spot to, um, adjust the ballast in the tanks. Invariably you end up stopping at the next floor and getting a chance to be mortified. It’s usually a good looking woman, which doesn’t do wonders for my self esteem, like, I just know she is looking at me and thinking, this confirms it, men are swine, literally and figuratively. I can take a little humiliation but I don’t deal well with repulsion.

Mostly I fart for amusement and to get attention from my wife. Pretty much guaranteed reactions, and I suppose scatalogical evidence I never got past some of the issues in that stage of Freudian development.

Thanks, I really had to get this out of my system. This thread delivers!

THERE IS A WAY

Every morning, get up early

Drink strong coffee until you induce MEGA DUMPITUDE

Get in the shower and WASH YO ASS as Redd Foxx put it

Noxious emissions, skid marks, and seat sweat will disappear from your life if you follow these simple steps.