Can A 'Fart Walk' Help With Healthy Aging?

Walking is one of the simplest ways for you to get your recommended 150 minutes of exercise each week to keep your heart healthy and bones strong. Taking a 30-minute walk every day is especially important as you age to lower your risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease, osteoporosis, and high blood pressure. Staying active through exercises like walking can help you live more independently later in life.

A casual walk after dinner can also reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, says the self-dubbed "Queen of Fibre" Mairlyn Smith on TikTok. She coined the term "fart walk" because if you get enough fiber in your diet, you might notice a little farting going on. Yet there's much more to a fart walk. "Walking is helping maintain your blood sugar [by] keeping it from ricocheting all around," she said.

Turns out, there's a little bit of science behind a fart walk. According to UW Medicine, taking a walk after eating stimulates your bowels to help improve digestion. You might notice less bloating and acid reflux. Exercising after meals controls any blood sugar spikes better than exercising before meals or doing no exercise, according to a 2023 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine. That little fart walk each night could indeed lower your risk of type 2 diabetes.

Your risk of type 2 diabetes increases with age, and you're five times more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes after age 45, says WebMD. Carrying more weight, eating too much processed food, and a lack of exercise can increase your risk. As you age, your body also becomes less effective in releasing insulin to control your blood sugar after a meal. Combine that with more belly fat and less muscle, and your body becomes more insulin resistant, according to a 2017 article in Menopause Review.

The American Diabetes Association says exercise such as walking forces your cells to use the glucose from your blood to fuel your muscles. Exercise also improves your insulin sensitivity, which means your body does a better job at using insulin to regulate your blood sugar while you work out and post workout.

Just a 15-minute fart walk after each meal was enough to lower the blood sugar in older adults over 60, according to a 2013 study in Diabetes Care. Although a 45-minute walk in the morning or afternoon helped to control blood sugar, the 15-minute walks after meals did better at regulating blood sugar overall.

Although a light walk after a meal helps to control your blood sugar, some of walking's healthy aging benefits might surprise you. According to a 2023 review in GeroScience, exercise can improve your mood, creativity, and psychological well-being as you age. Exercise also improves the function of your endothelial cells, which are the cells that line your blood vessels. As you age, these endothelial cells lose their ability to regulate your blood pressure and prevent blood clots. Exercise increases your blood flow and releases nitric oxide (NO) to relax your blood pressure.

That post-dinner fart walk adds to your daily exercise to protect you against dementia. A 2022 study in JAMA Neurology followed more than 78,000 older adults for seven years and found that walking 3,800 steps each day is linked to a 25% lower risk of dementia. You can cut your risk of dementia in half if you aim for 10,000 steps a day. If you can walk 112 steps a minute, your dementia risk is reduced by 62%.