Methane (CH4). Odourless gas.
Does methane cause smelly farts is clearly a topic of popular interest, since it’s my most common source of hits from Google searches – I used the word fart on the interwebs! Out of curiosity I put ‘methane smelly farts’ in Google to see what else came up (and if I came on the first page – yeah, I know searching for yourself is a bit …).
On the first page of the search results there was a men’s health site saying that methane is smelly.
If it had been the article on the men’s magazine site I wouldn’t have been surprised – but their journalist got it right. No, it was on a men’s site with health advice written by an Aussie medical doctor, on farting:
Methane is one of the main causes of smelly farts. Bugs producing methane are only found in 30% of the population. So if you have smelly ones – it may not be your fault – you can blame it on your bowel germs.
Oops. And it seems like the author Dr Nick Cooling really is a Tasmanian GP, since it looks like the same bloke with different glasses lecturing at the University of Tasmania School of Medicine.
We all make mistakes, but if you’re going write an article with health advice that sounds authoritative because you’re a medical doctor, and it’s not your area of expertise, then you probably should at least try to check the peer reviewed literature (he provides 2 references but they’re only books). A quick search of Pubmed would have produced research explaining that sulfur-containing gases produced by bacteria in our intestines give flatulence its odour (summarised here).
Or if he was in a hurry, Wikipedia could have told him that methane is an odourless gas.
February 8th, 2012 → 4:51 pm
[...] Thanks to my colleague who sent me this article about a kiwi school girl doing a speech on farts. If you look in the last column you’ll see the erudite Ms Paterson identifies the source of fart smell correctly, as even university lecturers have failed to do. [...]