Why some feces float and others sink

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

The mystery of why some people have their bowels move while others don't has been solved by a team of researchers. Their paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Scientists used to think that fecal matter sank or floated based on the amount of fat in it. That wasn't the case, according to experiments. The trials show that the difference was due to the amount of gas in the sample. Why do some people have more gas in their fecal matter than others?

In this new effort, the researchers were studying the microbiome of several lab mice, and sterilizing some of them as a way to find differences in digestion and overall health related to differentbacteria. The researchers noticed that the fecal samples produced by the mice weren't floating. Half of the samples in mice are floats.

It was thought that floating fecal matter was related to the makeup of the gut. The researchers injected stool samples from healthy mice that were not part of the original study into the guts of sterile mice. The test mice started to produce floaters. The researchers believe that the reason some fecal matter floats is due to the nature of thebacteria in the gut.

The researchers did note that Bacteroides ovatus has been found to produce more flatulence in humans. It is thought that it is one of the reasons for the formation of floaters in humans and lab mice. More work needs to be done to confirm the suspicions of the team and to find otherbacteria that are involved in producing more gas and thus floaters.

There is a link between fecal floatation and gut microbial colonization in mice.

Journal information: Scientific Reports

There is a science network.