The great variety of flatus smells—from person to person and from meal to meal—presented a quandary for the second phase of the study, the evaluation of various odor-eliminating products. Which—whose—wind should represent the average American’s? No one’s, as it turned out. Using mean amounts from chromatograph readouts as his recipe and commercially synthesized gases as the raw ingredients, Levitt concocted a lab mixture deemed by the judges “to have a distinctly objectionable odour resembling that of flatus.” He reverse-engineered a fart. This “artificial flatus” was put to work testing a variety of activated-charcoal products: underwear, adhesive-backed underwear pads, and chair cushions. (Activated charcoal is known to be effective at binding sulfur gases. The circulating air supply in NASA spacesuits is filtered with activated charcoal, lest astronauts’ flatus be blown across their face three times a minute for the remainder of the spacewalk.) In a separate study to simulate real-life gas-passing conditions, Levitt taped a tube beside the subject’s anus, beneath the charcoal pad or underpant and the subject’s pants. (Cushions were strapped in place.) The subject then pulled the Mylar pantaloons over whatever product was being tested, and an assistant duct-taped the cuffs and waistband to the skin. Levitt hit a switch, and just under a half cup (100 milliliters) of synthesized flatus shot through the tube for two seconds—Levitt’s best guess for the size and life span of a typical fart. “Immediately following gas instillation,” wrote Levitt in the final paper, “air inside the pantaloons was constantly mixed via vigorous palpation over a 30-second period.” Levitt claims to have no video footage. Last, a syringe was fitted into a port in the Mylar to withdraw the gas, and Levitt measured the sulfur gases the charcoal had failed to trap.
The challenge, it turned out, lies in bringing the gas fully into contact with the charcoal—easy with an airtight spacesuit, less so a business suit. Seat cushions were relatively useless, most products trapping a scant 20 percent of the sulfur gases. The underwear pads delivered a 55 to 77 percent reduction, their efficacy compromised by “rectal gas blow-by”: the tendency of the wind to glance off the pad and out the sides rather than penetrate it. The seventy-dollar briefs performed best, adsorbing virtually all sulfur gases, though it was unclear how many wearings they were good for. And given the cost, in terms of both cash and self-esteem, they would seem to have a limited market.
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AS AN ALTERNATIVE to wearing activated charcoal or gluing it to your underpants, you could swallow some pills. But don’t bother, because Levitt has done a study on this too. Activated charcoal pills did not “appreciably influence the liberation of fecal gases.” Levitt surmised that the binding sites were saturated by the time the charcoal made it to the rectum.
Bismuth pills, on the other hand—and Levitt has tested these too—reduce 100 percent of sulfur gas odor. Bismuth is the bism in Pepto-Bismol. Daily doses of Pepto-Bismol can irritate the gut, but not bismuth subgallate, the active ingredient in Devrom “internal deodorant” pills.
I had never before heard of Devrom. This may be because mainstream magazines often refuse to run the company’s ads.* Devrom’s president, Jason Mihalopoulos, e-mailed me a full-page ad he had hoped to run in Reader’s Digest and AARP magazine. A smiling gray-haired couple stand arm in arm below the boldface headline “Smelly Flatulence? Not since we started using Devrom!” Mihalopoulos was told he could not use the phrases smelly flatulence and stinky odor or the word stool. One of the magazines suggested changing the copy to say that the product “eliminates intestinal gas,” but that’s not what Devrom does. That’s what Beano does. So unless you read the Journal of Wound Ostomy & Continence Nursing* or the International Journal of Obesity Surgery, you won’t see the happy, internally deodorized Devrom couple.
The noxious-rectal-gas taboo in mainstream advertising has proved stronger and more lasting than that of condoms and even vibrators, which now turn up in brazenly suggestive ads on cable television (though still under the century-old euphemism “massager”). Mihalopoulos told me the editors of a CNBC feature on quirky businesses refused to air a segment about Parthenon, the family-run business that makes Devrom. “People don’t like to hear flatulence,” he said, quickly adding that he meant the word. Or anyway, people think people don’t.
Given the obvious strength of the taboo, I wondered who had posed for the Devrom ad. How much do you have to pay people to appear in a full-page ad in a national magazine, talking about their smelly flatulence?
“Oh, I’d be shocked if someone would be willing to pose in an ad we’d run,” Mihalopoulos said. “It’s a stock photo.” Meaning anyone, for a fee, can run the image for whatever purpose they choose. The couple probably have no idea. Think twice before you sign a model release form.?
Most Devrom customers are people with extenuating digestive circumstances. They’ve had their stomachs stapled or bypassed to shed weight, or they’ve had all or most of a diseased gut removed and they’re excreting into an ostomy pouch. Mihalopoulos explained that, depending on how high up the opening is, the pouch may need to be emptied every few hours. Less time in the colon means less water is absorbed. The runnier the waste, the more surface area is exposed to the air and the more volatiles escape to reach the nose. “If you were to use the restroom at the airport, say . . .” Mihalopoulos paused to figure out where he was going with this. “You could tell right off that someone was emptying their pouch.”
It seemed, then, that we were not even talking about passing gas. “No, that too,” said Mihalopoulos. He explained that some people with an ostomy pouch will open a corner of it to let a little gas out. “It’s like Tupperware.”*