Some Researchers Studied How Long it Takes for a Human Body to Pass a LEGO Brick

Humor LEGO by Tommy Williams

If you can’t have fun with your work, what point is there in doing it? That must have been the question that six pediatricians asked themselves before performing a very small study.

Tessa Davis, Henry Goldstein, Katie Knight, Grace SY Leo, Damian Roland, and Andrew Tagg each swallowed a LEGO head in an attempt to determine how long it takes to pass through the body. I will warn everyone now that this may get a little gross.

These six individuals are pediatricians who know that kids swallow the darndest things. Apparently, there’s a fair amount of similar research for coins which are the most commonly swallowed foreign object, but there’s next to no data about plastic toys which are the second most common. The result? It takes an average of 1.71 days for a LEGO head to pass through the human body and be pooped out.

It is important to note that this research was done as a fun idea. The sample size is too small to really be useful and these were adults, not children. However, they did use fun acronyms such as FART which is the Found and Retrieve Time.

You can head on over to their blog network, Don’t Forget the Bubbles, to find out more about the experiment. You can also watch the video to see them all swallow the LEGO heads for yourself. Thankfully, they don’t show the end part.

Short video to accompany the publication in the journal of Paediatrics and Child Health https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpc.14309

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