Dr. Oz Answers Men's Health Questions
The Oprah Winfrey Show | June 24, 2009
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Do men pass more gas than women? Dr. Oz settles the debate once and for all with an explosive experiment from the Discovery Health series The Truth About Food. Two wranglers have agreed to settle this age-old question. They put on special rubber pants with a tube attached. The gas is directed into airtight bags strapped to their backs like backpacks. After 24 hours, researcher Dr. Jeff Leach releases the gas into a measuring jug to see how much wind they produced. The difference is slight—the woman produced 3 liters, the man produced 3.3 liters. Now that we know men and women have roughly an equal amount of hot air, what exactly is the anatomy of a human-produced gas? Billions of bacteria live deep inside the colon and feed on our undigested food. "In fact, you have more bacteria in your gut than cells in your own body. They do something that's really very important. They actually make things like vitamin K and folic acid, key nutrients you have to have. They actually digest some of the foods that we can't otherwise digest," Dr. Oz says. The side effect of this digestion, however, is gas. "There's no way of getting around it. And so for most of us out there, you realize that a little gas is probably good for you," Dr. Oz says. And by the way, men and women in every major study have the exact same amount of flatus. Don't feel bad, guys." |
