How long does it take to poop Lego?

Have you ever wondered how long it takes for a small yellow Lego head to cross the human body? No, we either, but an international team of pediatricians decided to discover it anyway.

The answer: an average of 1.71 days.

In the name of science, six health professionals volunteered to swallow a Lego head and spend the next few days examining their stool for evidence. To be eligible, volunteers must not have had gastrointestinal surgery or be able to demonstrate their ability to swallow such an object – but, perhaps most importantly, they should not have a problem with dig in their own shit.

The results were published in the Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health in an article entitled "Everything is great: do not forget the Lego". A reference, in case you have not seen the movie, to the song "Everything Is AWESOME !!!", as well as to the blog of pediatricians, Do not Forget the Bubbles.

To account for individual differences, intestinal habits prior to ingestion were normalized by a suitably named scale, the stool hardness and transit score (or SHAT). The time it took to get from the mouth to the toilet was also rightly called – the score of time found and recovered (or FART).

So what did they find? It took an average of 1.71 days for the Lego head to go out of the body, with a FART score ranging between 1.14 and 3.04 days. The researchers also noted that "women may be more adept at looking in their stools than men," adding that "could not be validated statistically". Presumably, this refers to the fact that a male volunteer has never found a Lego head. (Hope this has gone well.)

Although the tongue pinches loudly, there is a point to this search. The team hopes that parents will now be able to rest knowing that their children's eating habits outside of meals will not likely cause unhealthy complications.

"It is possible that the transit time of the child's intestines is fundamentally different from that of an adult, but there is little evidence to prove it, and it is likely that objects will move faster in a more immature gut, "wrote the authors of the study. "This will be helpful to anxious parents who fear that transit times are prolonged and potentially painful for their children."

And if a Lego's head or a similar object mysteriously disappears, pediatricians' advice to parents is do not Go find it.

"If an experienced clinician with a Ph.D. is unable to properly find objects in his own stool, it seems clear that we should not expect parents to do it – the authors believe that national guidelines could include this advice. "