Smash Notes
12 - FARTS AND HICCUPS
In this episode we break down two understudied, but frequently experienced, phenomena: Farts and Hiccups. We cover what’s normal and what’s not, throw around big words like “flatogenicity” and “singultus,” and ask important questions like “can lighting a fart make your butt explode?” We also learn about the longest hiccup bout ever, why Mel refuses to eat…
Notes
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It's actually in a whole set of nerves that cause a reflex arc where you have this sudden breathing inward. Then, your glottis closes, which makes the initial hiccup sound.
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On This Won't Hurt a Bit's Farts and Hiccups episode, singultus is the medical term for ordinary hiccups. Dr. Mel Herbert and Dr. Jess Mason say the word comes from Latin and means a speech broken by sobs. They describe the reflex as a sudden breath inward, then the glottis closing, which makes the sound, while the diaphragm is the muscle that contracts. The diaphragm has a left side and a right side, and they say the spasm is on the left about 80 percent of the time. The word comes up because some patients come to the emergency room when hiccups will not stop.
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Charles Osborne. On This Won't Hurt a Bit, Dr. Mel Herbert and Dr. Jess Mason say his hiccups began in 1922, when he fell while trying to weigh a pig before slaughtering it, and lasted 68 years. They started at about 40 hiccups a minute and later slowed to about 20. They stopped mysteriously in 1990, a year before his death. His doctor blamed a burst blood vessel the size of a pin in the brain, in the brainstem area that inhibits the hiccup response. The hosts say the case is the one in the Guinness Book of Records.
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On This Won't Hurt a Bit's Farts and Hiccups episode, Dr. Mel Herbert and Dr. Jess Mason say five hours of hiccups does not meet the medical definition of intractable hiccups, however irritating it is. You have to be hiccuping for more than 48 hours. Anything shorter is a hiccup bout. They set that cutoff beside Charles Osborne, whose hiccups began in 1922 after he fell while trying to weigh a pig for slaughter and then lasted 68 years. People do come to the emergency room, the hosts say, when hiccups will not stop.
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It's because you have gas in your intestines and it has to come out. Based on loose data from the 1970s, you have between 30 to 200 milliliters in your gastrointestinal tract at any given time.
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There are a lot of gases. Most are the same that can be found in the air. There’s bacteria in your gut that creates gas. There has to be some methane in your gas that makes a fart flammable. Only one third of people produce methane. Both methane and hydrogen are flammable, but only methane will produce a blue flame when lit.
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On the Farts and Hiccups episode of This Won't Hurt a Bit, the hosts say a lot of what we eat is already gaseous, and that an apple is about 20 percent gas. They also read an old chart of foods by flatogenic potential, defined there as more than 40 passages of gas a day. The examples labeled extremely flatogenic are milk and milk products, onions, carrots, beans, bananas, and wheat germ. The hosts call the article old-school and doubt that milk does that to everyone, but they agree that beans belong on the list. They mention cabbage as another food people already expect to be gassy.
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It’s because the stuff that forms the outer layer of the vegetables are complex carbohydrates that your enzymes may not be able to break down on your own. So, you rely on your intestines to help you break it down.
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A study revealed that people fart about 20 times a day.