Designed to assess gut microbiome activity and diet tolerance in real-time, VENTOs is a coin shaped tracker that discreetly clips onto underwear and measures the release of hydrogen gas.
“This is an unmeasured dimension of human physiology that we are taking from subjective to objective,” Brantley Hall, CEO and co-founder of tech start-up Ventoscity, told NutraIngredients.
Speaking ahead of his presentation at IPC (19th International Scientific Conference on Probiotics, Prebiotics, Gut Microbiota and Health) in Kraków, Poland, later this month (June 22-24), Hall said he aims to appeal to the industry to objectively study their products designed for improved digestion and gut comfort.
“By measuring flatulence, this is going to enable us to differentiate between products that work, versus those that don’t... We think there’s huge potential for optimization of products that hasn’t occurred due to lack of objective measurement.”
After launching six years ago and spinning off from the University of Maryland just last year, the toot-tracking tech is now in its 14th revision and ready to deliver deeper insights into users’ microbiome activity.
“Stool sample analysis tells you about the microorganisms at the very end of the GI tract but the gas that matters is probably produced in the small intestine. Through stool samples, you are probably not measuring in the right place to measure the microbes involved in this phenomenon.”
Thousands enrol to help quantify average fart-count
More than 12,000 people, and counting, are enrolled into Ventoscity’s Human Flatus Atlas research program, through which the firm aims to set a realistic baseline of human flatulence patterns.
“Already, we know people fart more than the doctors know. Medical textbooks say 14 plus or minus six is the average. In our study, the average is 32 and we’ve had some people farting more that 200 times a day. We call those hydrogen hyper-producers.”
He said the opposite end of the spectrum is even more interesting.
“There are people that can eat a healthy high-fiber diet and only fart three to four times a day, we call these people zen digestors and they are mostly lifelong vegans and vegetarian. What’s so cool about this is it shows there’s a microbiome configuration that allows you to eat this diet without experiencing the GI symptoms associated with fiber.
“If we can understand how that works and apply that to other people, it could be really amazing,” he said, noting that the vast majority of people eating Western diets, aren’t getting enough fiber.
“If we can lower the barrier to switching to a high-fiber diet, we can really make a difference in the world.”
Many people with IBS follow the low FODMAP diet in order to get control of their symptoms but Hall said the goal of that diet is essentially to ‘starve the microbiome’, plus the diet will additionally lead to nutrient deficiencies.
“If we can take people who say they benefit from a low FODMAP diet and transition them to a healthy high-fiber diet without the associated issues that would be perfect, but right now we do not know how to do that.”
The team is expanding the technology’s ability to be able to measure a wider range of gases which he said would provide insights into specific microbes within the gut and specific GI symptoms.
The technology is currently being used within a number of industry research projects and eventually will be sold D2C for consumers to test their own flatulence patterns.
With one in five people reporting excess intestinal gas, Hall suggested the main users of the tech will probably be everyday consumer who simply want to know how the food they eat impacts their gas production and GI comfort.
A theory on protein
Discussing further insights he already gleaned from VENTOs data, Hall argued there is a major misunderstanding in nutrition and healthcare.
“I think we are describing the causes of gas very poorly,” he said. “If you look in medical or nutrition textbooks, gas is said to be caused by microbial fermentation of carbohydrates.”
Although Hall agreed carbohydrates are a cause, he said protein is a trigger for a lot of people and he believed this can cause significantly more issues than carbohydrate-induced gas.
“People trying to eat a high-protein diet are saturating their capability to absorb amino acids and those amino acids are fermented by gut microbes, and there’s bigger consequences to amino acid fermentation.
“When your gut ferments amino acids it creates smelly molecules but also these molecules are pretty toxic and they can leave your gut and enter your circulation and that you really don’t want.”
With this theory in mind, Ventoscity scientists are studying the impacts of amino acid malabsorption.
Three days of microbiome insights
Hall will speak at IPC amid a line-up of 60 formidable microbiome-focused academics and industry experts, such as Filipe Cabreiro, Professor at the Imperial College London, who will unveil how the microbiota can regulate health and lifespan.
Christian Roghi, co-founder of Microbiome Futures, will discuss how probiotics are increasingly being considered as a measure to support human health during spaceflight.
From Novonesis, Dr David Groeger, innovation science manager for human health research, will unveil the immunoregulatory and neuromodulatory potential of Bifidobacterium longum 1714.
And Dr Chris Callewaert, aka Dr Armpit, CEO at Phiome, will explore how manipulating the skin microbiome can eliminate body odor.
The full three-day agenda can be viewed here.
To secure your place at the event, visit the IPC website here.
