You Gotta Be Shitting Me! A Group Of Doctors Swallowed Lego Pieces To Test How Long It Takes To Poop Them Out

Daniel Knighton. Getty Images.

NPR - When Dr. Andy Tagg was a toddler, he swallowed a Lego piece. Actually, two, stuck together.

"I thought, well, just put it in your mouth and try and get your teeth between the little pieces," he says. The next thing he knew, it went down the hatch.

As an emergency physician at Western Health, in Melbourne, Australia, Andy says he meets a lot of anxious parents whose children succumbed to this impulse. The vast majority of kids, like Andy, simply pass the object through their stool within a day or so. Still, Andy wondered whether there was a way to spare parents from needless worry.

Sure, you can reassure parents one-by-one that they probably don't need to come to the emergency room—or, worse yet, dig through their kid's poop—in search of the everyday object.

But Andy and five other pediatricians wondered, is there a way to get this message out … through science?

The six doctors devised an experiment, and published the results.

"Each of them swallowed a Lego head," says science journalist Sabrina Imbler, who wrote about the experiment for The Defector. "They wanted to, basically, see how long it took to swallow and excrete a plastic toy."

This is one of the funnier things I have encountered in a while. Let's first talk about that a bunch of doctors are spending their time figuring out how long it takes to shit out Lego pieces. Should they be researching much more important things .. yes. Would their time spent on other things but much more beneficial to society … of course. But hey they call the shots so if digging through shit for Legos is what they want to do than that's what they will do. 

Let's also discuss that the case study and findings all have terms like SHAT score  (Stool Hardness and Transit ) and FART score (Found and Retrieved Time ) that we are supposed to take seriously. I just picture Chandler's scene in Friends talking about the WENUS . 

Seriously … a bunch of doctors are discussing SHAT and FART and using them in real studies. What a world. The full results are documented here and have charts and data and everything. It's actually pretty thorough. 

My favorite was this data table breaking things down like a PGA Tour members scorecard. I also can't stop laughing at the poor schlep who had to dig through two weeks of his shit and still didn't find it. 

Online Library - The male participant who had not located the Lego head searched stools for a total of 2 weeks after ingestion.

Personally, and I know these guys take science seriously but if you were the guy who couldn't locate it … why not lie? Just go buy one that looks like it and say hey I found it. Two weeks of digging through your own shit? No way I'm doing that. Also did these maniacs just not leave their houses for two weeks? Imagine having to play a road game (aka take a shit not in your house) and that's the day you find the Lego piece. It's like Borat all over. 

All in all the study essentially found that most adults pass the Lego head in 1-3 days and that swallowing it, even for children is not the biggest concern in the world. I'm glad the smartest people in the world took shits and dug through them for days so we could get all that info. Still hilarious to me that was a day's work for them. "Hey Joe wanna catch a movie ? " … "Sorry I can't I have to see if this Lego Head I ate for work comes out in my shit."