It turned out that owing to strictures of the pylorus, the stomach’s lower sphincter,[83] the food in the young man’s stomach was held back an uncommonly long time. Plus, McNaught claimed to have cultivated strains of acid-resistant, gas-producing bacteria. Carbohydrates plus bacteria plus time and body heat equals fermentation.
The story made me curious about cows. As we learned earlier, the rumen is a vast fermentation pit, a massive bacterial slum. A grazing cow can produce a hundred gallons of methane a day, vented, as stomach gases typically are, through the mouth. You would think that cow-belch-lighting would rival cow-tipping as a late-night diversion for bored rural youth. How is it that growing up in New Hampshire I never heard a cow belch? My ag pal Ed DePeters had the answer. When a ruminant is feeling bloated and needs to make room in her rumen, she pushes out some methane, but instead of belching it up, she can shift her internal tubing to reroute the gas down into the lungs and then quietly exhale it. To, say, a pronghorn out on the savannah, quiet can be key to survival. “Ungulates in the wild tend to go off and hide someplace while they ruminate,” DePeters explained. “If a lion walks by and hears a loud urrp…” Sayonara, antelope.
Because my readers, perhaps more than anyone else’s, might be inspired to head out to the pasture with a lighter in their pocket and bovine malfeasance in their heart, let me add this: lighting a cow’s breath will not produce a McNaughtian geyser of flame. Because of the afore-described methane rerouting system, the gas is diluted by nonflammable gases in the breath. For ignition, you would need the sort of concentrated blast that is a belch. And cows don’t belch.
Snakes don’t either, but they can, under certain circumstances, create an inflammable eructation of literally mythical proportions. For this story, we leave Ed DePeters in his muck boots and feed cap and turn to our snake digestion man in Alabama, Stephen Secor. First, a little background: Many plant-eating animals lack rumens, so some fermenting takes place in the cecum, an anatomical pouch at the junction of the small intestine and the colon. These same plant-eaters—horses, rabbits, koalas, to name three—tend to have a larger-than-average cecum. Pythons and boas do too, which struck Secor as odd, because they’re carnivores. Why, he wondered, would a meat-eater need a vegetation digestion unit? Secor theorized that perhaps these snakes had evolved ceca as a way to digest and take advantage of plant matter inside the stomachs of their prey.
To test his theory, Secor fed rats[84] to some of the pythons in his lab at the University of Alabama and hooked them up to a gas chromatograph. He tracked the hydrogen level in their exhalations as they digested whole rats over the course of four days. He did see a spike, but it appeared long before the rat arrived at the python’s cecum. Instead, Secor suspected, the hydrogen spikes were the result of the decomposing, gas-bloated rat bursting inside the python. “One thing led to another.” (Secor’s way of saying he popped a bloated rat corpse and measured the hydrogen that came off it.) Suspicion confirmed. The hydrogen level was “through the roof.” Secor had stumbled onto a biological explanation for the myth of the fire-breathing dragon. Stay with me. This is very cool.
Roll the calendar back a few millennia and picture yourself in a hairy outfit, dragging home a python you have hunted. Hunted is maybe the wrong word. The python was digesting a whole gazelle and was in no condition to fight or flee. You rounded a bend and there it was, Neanderthal turducken. Gazython. The fact that the gazelle is partially decomposed does not bother you. Early man was a scavenger as well as a hunter. He was used to stinking meat. And those decomp gases are key to our story. Which I now turn over to Secor.
“So this python is full of gas. You set it down by the campfire because you’re going to eat it. Somebody kicks it or steps on it, and all this hydrogen shoots out of its mouth.” Hydrogen, as the you and I of today know but the you and I of the Pleistocene did not know, starts to be flammable at a concentration of 4 percent. And hydrogen, as Stephen Secor showed, comes out of a decomposing animal at a concentration of about 10 percent. Secor made a flamethrowery vhooosh sound. “There’s your fire-breathing serpent. Imagine the stories that would generate. Over a couple thousand years, you’ve got yourself a legend.” He did some digging. The oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China: where the giant snakes are.
13. Dead Man’s Bloat
AND OTHER DIVERTING TALES FROM THE HISTORY OF FLATULENCE RESEARCH
THE SAME QUALITY that has allowed Mylar to rival latex as the material of choice for party balloons has secured its place in modern-day flatus research. Mylar is airtight. Your helium-filled Mylar Get Well Soon balloon will continue to float long after you are discharged from the hospital. The Mylar balloon I inflated in 1995 as part of a flatulence study might still, had anyone kept it, contain gas I produced by eating two-thirds of a pound of chili in the Kligerman Regional Digestive Disease Center cafeteria.
Alan Kligerman is the Kligerman of the Kligerman center, and he is the Ak in AkPharma, the company that founded the center and created Beano.[85] The active ingredient in Beano is an enzyme that breaks down certain complex carbohydrates, called oligosaccharides, found in large quantities in beans and other legumes. You have this enzyme in your colon, courtesy of bacteria that live there. Because your small intestine can’t absorb these complex carbohydrates, they carry on into your colon, where bacteria and their enzymes break them down—and create a lot of hydrogen in the process. Translation: beans make people gassy. Adding Beano to chili while it’s still on the table preempts this. It’s like having a surrogate predigest your beans.
I had visited Kligerman’s lab for a magazine piece. I still have my notes and interview transcripts, and a teal Beano windbreaker[86] that Kligerman gave me, but the details are hazy. I recall eating my carefully weighed chili at a table with Kligerman and Betty Corson, the voice of the Beano Hotline. My notes attest that a man called Len was also there. My lunch mates were eating the chili too, though they weren’t part of the study. They were just people who like beans, or had come to like them, since AkPharma purchased them in volume and cans could usually be found in the cupboards of the employee kitchen.
“I’ll open up a can of black beans, and I’ll eat the whole can,” said Betty.
Len was nodding. “I’ll take a can of baked beans. Pour the liquid off. That’s what I’ll eat for lunch a lot of times. I hate to admit it, but I’m one of the 50 percent of Americans that’s not troubled by beans.”
When someone at AkPharma says, “Troubled by beans,” trouble doesn’t refer to the embarrassment caused by the sounds or smells of flatulence. (Hydrogen and methane are odorless, remember.) Trouble refers to the pain and discomfort caused by gas inflating your colon. When the colon balloons, it activates stretch receptors that send a message to your brain, which your brain forwards to you as pain. Like most pain, it’s an alarm, a warning system. Because stretching can be a prelude to bursting, your brain is highly motivated to let you know what’s happening down there.
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AkPharma has since sold the Beano brand to pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. As part of a marketing campaign, GSK’s website included an online University of Gas. Hoping to matriculate—or at least buy a sweatshirt—I clicked on the video. The stately campus building in the background was instantly familiar to me as Baker Library at Dartmouth College, where my parents once worked. Given what I know of the Dartmouth frat scene, it was kind of apt, but I ratted GSK out anyway. The president’s office did not seem to share my outrage (“At this time, I don’t have a comment from President Kim about the Beano University of Gas”), but a cease-and-desist letter eventually went out, and the image was removed.
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But one example of the sly marketing genius of AkPharma. Beano was also the sponsor of a team of hot air balloonists in a prominent race.