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Articles on gastrointestinal tract

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When you’re constipated, you have hard or lumpy stools that are difficult to pass. Shutterstock

Health Check: what causes constipation?

Constipation can occur when there’s a delay in digested food passing through your body and being expelled. It can also happen when your poo is too hard, often because it doesn’t contain enough water.
Defecation duration is surprisingly similar throughout the mammal world. Elephant image via www.shutterstock.com.

Physics of poo: Why it takes you and an elephant the same amount of time

New parenthood got our fluid dynamics experts thinking about what ends up in the diaper. They headed to the zoo and the lab to come up with a cohesive physics story for how defecation works.
The process of passing a bowel motion is more complicated that you might think. Chakrapong Zyn/Shutterstock

What’s the best way to go to the toilet – squatting or sitting?

Pauline Hanson’s concern about the ATO installing squat toilets to cater for its increasingly diverse workforce has prompted debate about the best way to go to the toilet: sitting or squatting.
Threadworm infection is common but it’s often asymptomatic. Ayaka Darkly/Flickr

Health check: the low-down on ‘worms’ and how to get rid of them

Intestinal worms (or helminths) are multicellular parasites that live inside the gut. When mature, they can generally be seen with the naked eye. In developing countries with poor sanitation, the most…
Allergic reactions to food have dramatically increased over the past 10 to 20 years. Dan Peled/AAP

Changes to bugs in the gut could prevent food allergies

Changing the bacteria in the gut could treat and prevent life-threatening allergies, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal today. “These…
About 40% of people produce smelly gas because of a certain bacteria in their bowels. HyoJung Kim

Health Check: the ins and outs of burping and farting

To understand why we fart, you need to know something about the volume of gases produced in the bowels first. Imagine how much space 25 litres of gas would occupy – about one third of the interior of a…

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