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Men fart more when eating a plant-based diet due to good gut bacteria
Plant-based diets cause men to fart more and have larger stools, researchers have found – but that seems to be a good thing, because it means these foods are promoting healthy gut bacteria.
Claudia Barber at the Liver and Digestive Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Centre in Barcelona, Spain [ciberehd.org], and her colleagues compared the effects of a Mediterranean-style diet mostly comprised of plants with a Western-style diet containing fewer fruit and vegetables on the guts of 18 healthy men aged between 18 and 38. Each participant was randomly assigned to follow one of the diets for two weeks, then after a break, they switched to the other diet for two weeks.
The men did a similar number of poos per day on the two diets, but each one was about double the size while they were on the plant diet. The men collected and weighed their own stools using digital scales and found they produced about 200 grams per day on the plant diet, compared with 100 grams on the Western diet.
This is because eating plants promotes certain types of bacteria in our guts that make food for themselves by fermenting plant fibre, says Rosemary Stanton [unsw.edu.au] at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
[...] The findings suggest that flatulence associated with eating more plants should be welcomed, says Stanton. “Our Western idea that farting is a sign of something being wrong is totally false,” she says. In most cases, “farting is a sign of a healthy diet and a healthy colon”, she says.
NEW SCIENTIST [newscientist.com]
[Journal Reference]: Differential Effects of Western and Mediterranean-Type Diets on Gut Microbiota: [mdpi.com]
