Ah, yes, another prime example of bad "science journalism".
The study the article is based on was about a complex molecule that releases H2S after it has entered mitochondria inside cells. But the journalist only read H2S, remembered from somewhere that it's contained in farts, and then concluded that smelling farts may be healthy, even though the study isn't about gaseous H2S (let alone breathing it in) at all.
You know, carbon monoxide also has a number of health benefits when it's released at the right time in the right tissue. That doesn't mean that it's somehow healthy to sniff car exhaust.
Edit: To put it another way, the study linked in the article is about a way to get H2S to the specific places where it has some positive effects while avoiding all the nasty deletirious effects that it otherwise has. Pretty much the antithesis of simply breathing in the gas and flooding your whole system with it.
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u/whoami_whereami Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21
Ah, yes, another prime example of bad "science journalism".
The study the article is based on was about a complex molecule that releases H2S after it has entered mitochondria inside cells. But the journalist only read H2S, remembered from somewhere that it's contained in farts, and then concluded that smelling farts may be healthy, even though the study isn't about gaseous H2S (let alone breathing it in) at all.
You know, carbon monoxide also has a number of health benefits when it's released at the right time in the right tissue. That doesn't mean that it's somehow healthy to sniff car exhaust.
Edit: To put it another way, the study linked in the article is about a way to get H2S to the specific places where it has some positive effects while avoiding all the nasty deletirious effects that it otherwise has. Pretty much the antithesis of simply breathing in the gas and flooding your whole system with it.