Six scientists swallowed Lego figure heads in order to find out how long it takes to poop them out. I’m just happy to see that science is finally willing to tackle the big questions, to be honest.
Yep, while it may sound like a joke - paediatric health care professionals really did purposefully ingest the small Lego heads for a study titled: Everything is awesome: Don't forget the Lego.
Surely there’s no danger of forgetting it while you’re patiently waiting for it to reappear in the toilet bowl?
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The incredibly serious and super important study, that was published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, used two scoring systems: Stool Hardness and Transit, or SHAT, and Found and Retrieved Time, or FART.
Honestly, that is what they were called. The SHAT score was actually split into two a pre-SHAT score, which logged the normal bowel habits of the researchers, and a post-SHAT score that was logged after that Lego head was swallowed. The pre and post SHAT scores were then compared and data gathered.
Meanwhile, the FART score was a little more grim - if you can imagine - and required the participants to sift through their poop in the days following the swallowing in the hopes of finding a little yellow head.
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And while the whole thing may sound like a bit of a joke - and was probably quite difficult for the researchers to explain to their loved ones - the study did have a serious purpose.
As parents of small children can attest to - youngsters love eating things that aren’t designed to be eaten, occasionally with extremely dangerous results.
In the case of accidentally, or indeed purposefully, ingesting a bit of Lego the outcome is usually fine but to put parents minds’ at rest our heroic researchers aimed to find out how long it takes for a Lego head to work its way through someone’s digestive system.
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So what did our intrepid scientists discover?
Well, according to the study, the FART score averaged 1.71 days - meaning typically, the Lego head was out of the body in under two days.
Summing up their findings, the team wrote: “A toy object quickly passes through adult subjects with no complications. This will reassure parents, and the authors advocate that no parent should be expected to search through their child's faeces to prove object retrieval.” Good point, well made.
Claire Reid