Desmo is a tight A*se!

[Pheebs]

Courtesy of Focus Magazine this month...

Why do some of us break wind with a "pffft" so quiet it's barely audible, while others seem obliged to step on the proverbial duck?

There are a number of factors that can make for noisy flatus (the proper name for a fart's gaseous mixture), including the volume and speed of the escaping gas. Foods that produce a great deal of gas, such as baked beans, cook up flatus that's a lot noisier than that from low-gas foods, such as rice.

Another major contributor is how tight the sphincter muscle in your anus is. Tight sphincters typically produce louder flatus than looser muscles. Vegetarians provide a good example here. The large quantity of indigestible matter (plant figre, aka roughage) in a vegetarian diet often makes their stools larger than those of meat-eaters. This results in a looser sphincter and hence farts that are relatively silent - but deadly.