e = | Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart ; : cr eee. <| Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart ca ‘ LaTHE FART He had very few friends. Women fart less, about eight or nine times a day. Sometimes you may not even be aware you farted. As you get older you'll find yourself farting with greater frequency, because your bowels become less elastic and thus less likely to store up gas. Generally the gas accumulates during the day and escapes at bed- time, when you're relaxing. You may even pull the covers over your head in order to savor the gas’s delics Some people turn their noses up at the mere mention of a fart, but farting’s pretty indispensable. Without farting, you're in a world of shit, my friend. Gas trapped in your colon’s various right- angled turns can cause severe pains throughout your chest and arms that resemble the symptoms of a heart attack. Chronic disten- te bouquet more fully. tion of the bowels c: nn create all sorts of health problems. If gas is kept prisoner for too long, it can make your life miserable. Two sci- entists in Holland announced in 1994 that for good health you need to fart about fifteen times a day, whether you want to or not. Sometimes you're probably embarrassed when people around you confuse a borborygmi, the gurgling sound of air bubbles pass- ing through liquids in your small intestine, with a fart. Ashamed that somebody might think it’s a fart (when in fact it’s only a nascent fart waiting to happen down the line), you'll often say your stomach is growling. Probably the most common sources of farting are three com- plex sugars—raffinose, stachyose, and verbacose—more commonly called oligosaccharides, dubbed by clinical researchers as the “flat- ulent factors.” Oligosaccharides are found in most green vegetables and legumes, but the vegetable kingdom’s poster boy for flatulence, the one that usually takes the rap and gets all the bad press, is the common bean, or Phaseolus vulgaris. Is there really anyone out there, whether you're 6 or 106, who can’t recite that old children’s rhyme, “Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot, the more you toot the better you feel, beans, beans for every meal”? A member of the legume family (seeds that grow in pods), the bean is one of nature’s perfect foods, at least for humans. It’sa little powerhouse of nutrition, bursting with goodness. For example, a cup of dry beans has about sixteen grams of protein but only one 11