Heather knew she farted a lot but didn’t know just how often until she began to track her daily output.
“I always thought that I just came from a farty family,” she said. “I’ll eat croissants or pasta or normal bread and I’ll end up having a sore stomach, and then I [would] just be tooting a lot after that.”
When she heard the CSIRO had developed an app for Australians to track their flatulence, she began logging her farts and reviewing the data. To her surprise, she found a big gap in entries in the middle of the day.
“I thought I was pretty consistent and then I realised I hadn’t actually eaten for a fair few hours and I didn’t eat anything bad,” she said.
“I don’t always want to be popping off … it has made me really think I shouldn’t be snacking out on all that crap.”
The CSIRO is hoping to capture flatulence data from tens of thousands of people, including frequency, stench, loudness and duration, to help researchers better understand the nation’s gut health.
Dietician Megan Rebuli said some people found farts embarrassing and uncomfortable but healthy bodies were meant to let them go.
“Sometimes it makes a sound and it might catch you by surprise. Sometimes there’s a smell that you might feel self-conscious about,” she said.
“Passing wind is a natural occurrence and a sign that our digestive system is working as it should.”
Rebuli said the average person passed wind between seven and 20 times a day.
“It’s really variable depending on the types of food that you eat, how much fibre you eat and how much you’re moving around,” she said.
“This is the big question – what is normal? We really want to get some good quality, comprehensive data to try to pin down that number.”
The Chart Your Fart app allows users to log features including stench, linger and detectability on a sliding scale. Heather, who preferred not to share her surname, said she found the app easy to use.
“Once I feel one’s coming, I’d just open the app,” she said. “The loudness, the duration of it, if it smells, or if it’s just a silent but deadly kind of thing – you get to really customise it.”
Heather said her observations of her gut’s responses to different foods have encouraged her to think about how her daughter could be affected.
“If I’m tooting after this food, maybe she’s a tooter because of this as well,” she said. “It could really home in and probably make better choices of all the snacks and all the treats that I buy in the house.”
Rebuli said flatulence happened when our bodies expelled excess gas that was produced from breaking down and processing food.
A CSIRO gut health study in 2021 found more than 60% of Australians reported excessive flatulence, with more than 40% experiencing it most days.
Rebuli said a person’s gut health was an important indicator of their overall health.
“People often complain about excess flatulence or feeling bloated and what we want to know is what is normal and what should people expect, and when things go different, what would that look like?”
“I don’t think anyone needs to be shy about it and [should] probably just recognise it more,” Heather said. “Everybody farts, right?”
