WTFlatulence

Sooo, you may have seen this week’s Ear to the Ground and thought: I’m going to throw up. For context, it was overheard at a Mexican restaurant in town – loudly and right in the middle of the restaurant – by a man with his wife and five kids, who we have strong reason to believe were from out of town.

As gross as it is, we couldn’t help but Google: “Is there a correlation between flatulence and altitude?” And god help us, there is.

In fact, there’s a whole article about it in Backpacker magazine, which begins: “I huffed and puffed as I approached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. In retrospect, some of my puffs weren’t just breaths.”

It turns out, the … condition? … has a name: high-altitude flatus expulsion. (Unbelievably, the term was coined by two docs on a hike in the San Juan Mountains in the ’80s).

The doctors found a direct increase in uh, gassy emissions, at high altitudes, yet were at a loss as to why. One theory is lower concentrations of oxygen makes it harder to digest, resulting in, yeah, more farts.