Can you ignite farts

Eggs, cauliflower, and meats are often more sulfur-rich and so add a little hydrogen sulfide to the final, ah, product. What will? Occasionally, if the person does have the lucky gut that produces methane, it will burn along with the hydrogen.

In order to get the most flammable fart, people will generally eat sulfur-rich foods. About a quarter of the fart igniters get burned in the process. The surprisingly hefty amount is the result of bacteria that live in your colon and feed on most of the food you eat, says Purna Kashyap — a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic who studies the gut microbiome.

As a byproduct, they produce gas. A huge variety of foods contain these complex carbs that we can't fully digest: virtually all beans, most vegetables, and anything with whole grains. For most people, this leads to somewhere between and 1, milliliters of gas daily — the equivalent of half a 2-liter bottle of soda, every single day. One of the reasons we produce so much more gas than we realize is that nearly all of it is odorless. Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane make up as much as 99 percent of the gas produced in our large intestines by volume.

They're supplemented by air you swallow — more on that below. All of these gases are odorless, which is why much of the time, farts don't actually smell at all. The potent stink, research has found , is largely due to the 1 percent or so of compounds with sulfur in them, such as hydrogen sulfide.

This sort of research itself is pretty amazing: One experiment involved two people judging the smelliness of farts of 16 participants who'd been fed pinto beans, collected with the aid of "gas-tight Mylar pantaloons. Bacteria need to consume sulfur to produce sulfurous gases, and though not all foods with complex carbs contain sulfur, many do. They're mainly foods that you probably already associate with farting — things like beans, onions, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and dairy.

Apart from the gases produced by bacteria, a significant proportion of your flatulence is simply made up of inadvertently swallowed air.

It doesn't smell — it's mostly nitrogen and oxygen — but it sounds and feels the same coming out. Some of this swallowing goes on while you're asleep, but it can be increased by drinking carbonated beverages after all, you're ingesting the carbonation and by chewing gum. Bacteroides fragilis , one of the bacteria species involved in gas production, cultured in a petri dish. Nathan Reading. Modern society views flatulence as a negative. This is unfortunate, because in most cases it's the byproduct of a beautiful thing — the intricate ecosystem of bacteria living in your intestines.

The whole community benefits from a single carbohydrate that you consume. Like many Sundays, I had abhorrent rhino farts from drinking the night before. I told her the next time I had to let one rip she could hold the lighter to my fart box. No more than 5 minutes later I had one in the chamber ready to let loose. I did my best to hold it in while my girlfriend sprung up from the couch to find the lighter. Of those fart components, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and methane can all be set on fire.

Yes, there's methane present, but it's a small part of the equation and generally isn't the reason people are capable of turning their butt into a putrid roman candle. To some extent, you can actually tell what's in a fart by the flame's color. The flame from a fart where hydrogen is the primary fuel will burn yellow or orange, while an atypically high methane content will turn the flame blue.

If you've spent any time looking at YouTube videos of fiery toots, you've almost certainly noticed these candles in the wind are usually yellow or orange. Few are the blue angels of YouTube.