people farting right now
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
by the numbers
Are you farting right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 08:41 | 85% | 445,581 |
| India | 06:11 | 25% | 421,031 |
| United States | 19:41 | 90% | 109,102 |
| Indonesia | 07:41 | 60% | 87,039 |
| Pakistan | 05:41 | 8% | 71,296 |
| Brazil | 21:41 | 74% | 66,277 |
| Nigeria | 01:41 | 5% | 66,007 |
| Bangladesh | 06:41 | 25% | 50,530 |
| Mexico | 18:41 | 92% | 42,247 |
| Russia | 03:41 | 2% | 39,672 |
Why do we fart?
Two separate processes make the gas, and only one of them is about your diet. The smell is a third thing entirely.
- You swallow air. Every time you eat, drink or chew gum you swallow air. Most of it comes back up as a burp; what does not travels down the gut and is passed later. Swallowed nitrogen alone accounts for roughly 213 of the 700 millilitres of gas a day.
- Bacteria ferment what you did not digest. Carbohydrate that reaches the large intestine intact - fibre, beans, resistant starch, and lactose in people who cannot break it down - is fermented by your gut bacteria. That makes hydrogen, carbon dioxide and sometimes methane. This is the part your diet genuinely changes.
- The smell is a trace, not the bulk. The main gases - nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane - are odourless. The smell comes from sulfur compounds made in the same fermentation: hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol and dimethyl sulfide. Together they are well under one per cent of the volume, which is why a very small quantity can travel such a long way socially.
- Methane is optional, and uneven. Not everyone makes it. Only about a third of people host the archaea that produce methane at all, and even among those the amount varies widely. In measured studies only a minority of volunteers produced any. So a methane-based account of human flatus describes a minority of people.
Volume varies wildly between individuals - measured daily totals in healthy volunteers have run from about 100 ml to over 1,600 ml - and it varies more with what you ate yesterday than with anything fixed about you. Ten to twenty a day is the normal adult range, which is where the counter at the top of this page starts.
Composition and odour figures from measured flatus studies (Gut, 1991 and 1998); the odour compounds were identified as trace sulfur gases.
Effect on the environment (genuinely)
Flatus contains methane, and methane is a potent greenhouse gas - about 28 times more warming than carbon dioxide over a century. So does the world fart itself into trouble? No. Here is the honest accounting.
Two honest caveats. First, most gut methane is absorbed into the bloodstream and exhaled rather than emitted as flatus, so the true figure for human gut methane is higher than the number above - but still trivial against agriculture. Second, cattle are ruminants with four stomachs and vastly more methanogens per kilogram, which is why a single cow outperforms thousands of people. Blame the cow, not the person.
Composition from measured flatus studies (Gut, 1991); comparison figures from IPCC and FAO methane inventories.