I saw Khadaji’s earlier thread and it didn’t really address my question. Some burping is likely the result of swallowing air, but much burping (as well as chest pain) is the result of gases produced, or released, by the stomach’s beginnings of digestion of food. So, what gas or gases are released? I’ve never seen anyone light a burp.
According to this site, there’s a lot of methane inolved.
According to this other site, it’s just generic “gas” but implies that it varies according to the composition of whatever happens to be in the stomach (soda, air, whatever)
I just drank a few bottles of my homemade ginger beer, which I carbonate with yeast. I now have belching going on far beyond what the carbonation would explain. Perhaps the little yeasty beasties are hard at work on the sugary stuff in my nice ideally warm stomach (that would be CO2). I wonder if they could live in there…
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Maybe you have your own little colony. Is there a biologist in the house?
Most anaerobic digstion processes using microbes produce ‘biogas’, which is loosely 50/50 carbon dioxide and methane, plus trace gasses. The exact composition depends on the feedstock. I’d guess that eructative gasses might be similar. They definitely are for cows and other ruminants (but then we don’t have four stomachs, so maybe we’re different). Farts would definitely be biogas. The smell would depend on sulfur containing trace gases.
Carbon dioxide from carbonated beverages is just the result of the acid in your stomach shifting the carbonation into carbon dioxide. It’s not a metabolic digestion so much as a quick chemical shift driven by the pH. It’s not ‘biogas’.
Burps contain almost no methane. Methane is produce by anaerobic digestion of organic matter by some microbes. Burps originate from the stomach. There is no appreciable amount of microbial activity in the human stomach. Therefore burps are not methane. They are just whatever gases are swallowed, are in the food or are produced when the food reacts with acid. None of those origins permits methane.
That site doesn’t say that. I mentions methane in farts, and in the burps of ruminants but never says that any quantity of methane is involved in human burps.
Ruminants are a completely different kettle of fish. Their entire stomach is a microbial fermentation vat so of course they produce methane when they burp. The healthy human stomach contains practically no active microbes, and hence no methanogenesis.
:smack: yes, you’re right :smack:
(possible TMI)
One time when I was constipated, I felt a lot of gas brewing in my guts, but I didn’t fart at all. Then I started burping. Incredibly foul, sulphur-tasting burps. I guess the farts were just working their way down, hitting a roadblock somewhere around the colon, and deciding to take an alternate route via the esophagus.
Man, that was disgusting. But, burps can contain methane.