Have you ever looked down after doing your business and noticed that your poop is floating?
Maybe this comes and goes, or maybe your poop is always buoyant.
You might have even worried that this was a problem.
Like, if you look it up online, a lot of reputable websites will mention that one reason your poop floats is because of fat.
Fat is less dense than water, and so, the thinking goes, if you have enough of it in your poop, that's probably why it floats.
But fatty stools — what doctors like to call steatorrheic stools — happen because you aren't absorbing the fat you eat.
And that's usually a sign of a really serious problem, like pancreatic cancer or cystic fibrosis.
Back in the early '70s, Michael Levitt and William Duane, a pair of researchers at the University of Minnesota, were annoyed by this assumption that fat is why feces float.
They suspected that trapped gas was the more likely culprit.
After all, about 15 percent of perfectly healthy people — including Duane — consistently had bobbers.
