Gas Forecast
Build a lunch and Barry Metric, Channel GG’s weatherman, reads tonight’s outlook for Downtown. Barry is heard but never seen. Budget reasons.
1. Pick a lunch
Tap foods to put them on the plate. 3 on the plate.
Pick a lunch first
Where the bubbles come from
Gas is what a well-fed crew sounds like. Here’s how the front moves in.
- UpstreamYour own enzymes cut starch, protein, fat and milk sugar in the small intestine, and you absorb the pieces.
- No tool fitsSome fibres and sugars, like inulin and the raffinose in beans, have bonds no human enzyme can cut. They slide on through.
- DowntownIn the colon, where most of your gut microbes live, the crew ferments them into short-chain fatty acids: acetate, propionate and butyrate.
- The weatherFermentation also makes gases: hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and in some people methane. Passing some is normal, more than once a day.
Fibres and bean sugars your enzymes can’t cut reach the colon, where microbes ferment them into short-chain fatty acids and gas.
Most of that fermentation happens in the first stretch of the colon, the ascending side, where the fibre arrives fresh.
Cartoon physics noticeBarry’s bubble index is strictly cartoon. Every crew is different, so the same lunch makes different weather in different towns. Stormy all week? That’s one for your doctor, not Barry.
Biff
Alpha-galactosidase
Lactase
InulinComing up next on Channel GG
The Soundboard
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