CHART YOUR FART – New Mobile App Measures Your Gut Health!

Person holding their stomach with a graphic of intestines overlayed

Scientists built a fart-tracking app, logged 360,000 gas events, and now can claim they know what “normal” looks like.

Story Snapshot

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) launched a free app called Chart Your Fart to track flatulence as a gut health signal.
The app collected roughly 360,000 logged gas events and found most people pass wind about 2 to 7 times per day.
A University of Maryland researcher says no scientific baseline for healthy flatulence frequency actually exists yet.
Diet and fiber intake drive gas output far more than gut disease does, which makes any fixed “normal” range hard to trust on its own.

Australia Built a Fart App and Got 19,000 People to Use It

In November 2024, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) — Australia’s national science agency — released a free phone app for people aged 14 and older. ^[2] The goal was to track flatulence patterns across the general public. Users logged at least three days of data, rating each event on frequency, smell, loudness, duration, and how long it lingered in the room. ^[2] The project is called Chart Your Fart, and yes, that is the official name.

The app pulled in about 19,000 downloads and roughly 360,000 usable logged events after bad data was removed. ^[8] That is a large citizen-science dataset by any measure. CSIRO used it to describe what gas patterns look like across a real population, not just in a lab. The observed range for most participants landed between 2 and 7 times per day. ^[2] But here is where it gets complicated — and worth paying close attention to.

Why a 2021 Study Pushed Researchers to Act

CSIRO did not build this app on a whim. A 2021 gut health survey found that over 60 percent of Australians reported what they called excessive flatulence. ^[2] Nearly half said it caused them real concern. That kind of widespread worry, without any solid reference point for what is actually normal, creates a public health gap. Doctors get the questions. Patients feel embarrassed. And nobody has clean data to work with. The app was designed to fill that gap with real-world numbers.

The Problem: “Normal” Is Harder to Define Than It Looks

Here is the catch. A researcher at the University of Maryland studying the same topic said flatly, “Right now, there is no scientific baseline on what constitutes a healthy amount of passing gas.” ^[4] His team’s data showed a range from about 4 to 175 times per day among participants. That is not a typo. One hundred and seventy-five. That range alone tells you how much individual variation exists, and it should make anyone cautious about treating 2 to 7 as a universal rule.

Older clinical research backs up that caution. A study using a rectal catheter in 10 healthy volunteers found that daily gas volume varied widely and tracked closely with fiber intake. ^[5] Put people on a fiber-free diet and gas output dropped sharply. Feed them baked beans and it climbed. That means diet is doing most of the heavy lifting here, not gut disease. Flatulence frequency is a noisy signal with a lot of interference. ^[7]

What the CSIRO Study Actually Claims — and What It Does Not

To be fair, CSIRO never claimed the app could diagnose disease. The project page describes flatulence as one of many gut health symptoms, and researchers asked participants to log multiple qualities — not just count. ^[8] The study published in JAMA Network Open is cross-sectional, meaning it describes a population snapshot, not a cause-and-effect relationship. ^[10] That is an important distinction. Describing what people report is not the same as proving what those numbers mean for health outcomes.

The honest read here is that CSIRO is doing useful groundwork. Before you can know when something is wrong, you need to know what typical looks like. That is legitimate science. The problem comes when media headlines and casual readers skip the fine print and treat a descriptive range as a clinical rule. “2 to 7 is normal” sounds clean and certain. The actual data says it is far messier than that, and your diet yesterday matters more than any chart. ^[5]^[7]

What This Means for You Right Now

If you pass gas 10 times a day but eat a high-fiber diet with lots of legumes and vegetables, you are probably fine. ^[7] If you pass gas twice a day but also deal with bloating, cramping, or changes in bowel habits, those other symptoms matter far more than the count. ^[2] Gut health is not a single number. It is a pattern of signals read together. The fart chart is a starting point for research — not a report card for your digestive system. Talk to a doctor if something feels wrong. Do not outsource that call to an app.