Fart Chart to Measure Your Gut Health?

Person holding their stomach with a graphic of intestines overlayed

Australian scientists built a fart-tracking app, published the results in a major medical journal, and what they found may change how you think about your gut health.

Quick Take

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) built a free app called Chart Your Fart to collect real flatulence data from the public.
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found healthy adults pass gas between 7 and 20 times a day, depending on diet and other factors.
Users log not just how often, but also loudness, smell, duration, and detectability — because frequency alone does not tell the whole story.
For decades, doctors quoted a “normal” range built on surprisingly thin evidence — this study is the first large-scale attempt to replace guesswork with real data.

The “Normal” Number Was Never Based on Much

For decades, doctors told patients that passing gas 5 to 20 times a day was normal. That figure was not backed by a large, rigorous study. It was more of a medical best guess passed down through textbooks. Nobody had actually asked thousands of real people to track their flatulence in detail, until now. That gap in basic human health data is exactly what CSIRO set out to close.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is Australia’s national science agency. It launched the Chart Your Fart app to recruit everyday Australians, age 14 and up, to log their gas over a three-day period. The project page states the goal plainly: to better understand the flatulence patterns and concerns of Australians through public-led research. The results were published as a cross-sectional study in JAMA Network Open, one of the most respected open-access medical journals in the world.

What the App Actually Measures

The app does not just ask how many times you passed gas. Users rate loudness, duration, smell strength, how long the smell lasted, and whether it was detectable by others. This matters because gut health is not a single number. Researchers are treating flatulence as a multi-part symptom, not a simple tally. That approach is smarter than it sounds, and it reflects how gastroenterologists actually think about digestive complaints in a clinical setting.

A 2021 CSIRO gut health study found that over 60 percent of Australians reported experiencing excessive flatulence, with up to 43 percent saying it caused them concern. Those numbers suggest this is not a trivial topic. Gas is one of the most common reasons people visit a doctor about their digestive system, yet clinicians have had almost no reliable population data to work from when deciding what counts as a problem worth investigating.

Why Frequency Alone Will Not Diagnose You

Here is where the science gets more careful. The study is cross-sectional, meaning it captures a snapshot in time. It can describe how often people fart and what patterns exist across a population. It cannot, by itself, prove that a certain number means you have a gut disorder. Conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and others can all increase gas, but so can a high-fiber diet or a single meal of beans. Context matters enormously.

The researchers appear to understand this. By collecting multiple symptom dimensions rather than just frequency, they built a richer dataset than anything that existed before. The honest read of this research is that it gives doctors and patients a real reference point for the first time, not a diagnostic checklist. If your number sits well outside the 7 to 20 range consistently, that is worth a conversation with your doctor. If it does not, you can probably stop worrying.

Citizen Science With Real Stakes

Some people will laugh this off because the topic sounds absurd. That reaction is understandable and also a mistake. Gut health connects to immune function, mental health, inflammation, and disease risk in ways researchers are still mapping. The microbiome field has exploded in the last decade, and flatulence is one of the few external signals the gut sends that anyone can observe without a lab. Dismissing this study because of its name means ignoring data that took serious scientific infrastructure to collect.

The Chart Your Fart app is available on Google Play and was designed for broad public participation. CSIRO’s goal is to gather enough responses to build a true population reference range for Australian adults. Whether that range will eventually apply to Americans or Europeans depends on future research, but the framework is sound. Gut bacteria vary by diet and geography, so a locally grounded dataset is a reasonable starting point. The fart chart is real science. It just happens to have a funny name.