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The Chocolate Fart Pill Is A Real Thing

by Lulu Chang

The greatest need often begets the greatest innovation, and when it comes to the holiday season, there is no greater need than a cure for the embarrassing post-dinner smells emitted by close friends and family. Don't blush, we're all buddies here — you know that after-Thanksgiving gas is the worst. Luckily, so do the great inventors of our era, which is why Christian Poincheval has invented the chocolate fart pill, or the pill that makes your farts smell like chocolate. If this product does what it claims to do, I daresay that it will be the greatest culinary (or perhaps scientific, who knows what category this falls into) breakthrough of our generation.

The chocolate fart pill, which you can test at your own risk for the bargain price of $12.50 for 60 capsules, has been in the works for the better part of a decade. According to Poincheval's interview with the Telegraph, he first conceived of the idea in 2006 following a particularly decadent meal at a restaurant. Said the 65-year-old, "Our farts were so smelly after the copious meal, we nearly suffocated." When suffocation is a side-effect of a meal, you know you've done something either horribly right or horribly wrong. He continued, "The people at the table next to us were not happy. Something had to be done."

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And that something resulted in the miracle of the chocolate fart pill. Made of all natural, organic ingredients like fennel, seaweed and blueberries — or in the case of the chocolate version, bilberry, plant resin, seaweed, vegetable coal, and cacao zest — this medicinal remedy is sure to be the most unique gift you could possibly give. Not only does Poincheval's home remedy make the gas that exits your body smell sweeter, but it also helps to ease the digestive process, according to French news site TheLocal.fr. The pills, which can also make your farts smell like roses or violets, if that's the poison you'd like to pick, are also purported to reduce bloating and other stomach ailments.

His line of flatulence medicine also includes a remedy for your four-legged friends — a "fart-reducing powder for pets." Because if there's an animal smellier than your friends after a big meal, it's your dog. But how did the entrepreneur develop the pills? According to Poincheval, his laboratory experiments began after copious amounts of homegrown experiments. He told TheLocal.fr that he and his ill-fated friends noted that their gasses smelled different depending on the foods they ate, saying,

When we were vegetarian we noticed that our gas smelt like vegetables, like the odor from a cow pat, but when we started eating meat, the smell of the flatulence became much disagreeable.
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You are, after all, what you eat. But ostensibly, Poincheval has found a way to disrupt what goes into your digestive tract by way of these pills which assert their own aromas to mask the smells of the food you just ate.

Apparently, the 65-year-old Santa Claus lookalike has met with considerable success with these pills. Sold on the website pilulepet.com under his screen name "Lutin Malin," which translates as "Crafty Imp," Poincheval claims that since beginning the enterprise eight years ago, he sells "several hundred of the pills every month." But Christmas is a particularly busy season for him, as thoughtful friends and relatives attempt to find a gift that not only benefits the receiver, but the giver as well. Speaking with the Telegraph, the inventor noted, "Some buy them because they have problems with flatulence and some buy them as a joke to send to their friends. Christmas always sees a surge in sales."

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And this chocolate variety is just the latest and most festive edition to his growing line of products. Poincheval calls it "The Father Christmas fart pill," because no one knows marketing better than the French. And apparently, his tactics are working because his customers are coming not only from France, but from parts of the United Kingdom as well, who seem as fascinated as I do by the man who claims to have cured the most pressing holiday problem of all — flatulence.

Of course, the science behind this all may be a bit shaky, at best. As the International Business Times points out, a new study has found that "the human nose is capable of distinguishing between a whopping one trillion different scents," which makes "a cure for intolerable odors" a rather difficult accomplishment to achieve. After all, there are any number of smells and combinations of smells that we may interpret in different ways, and it does seem a bit unlikely that one little pill could transform all these scents into chocolate, violets and roses. But hey, I've never tried these things, so who am I to say?

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My only point, friends, is that I've practically just done all your Christmas shopping for you, and I'd really like to know if these fart pills work.