This Is How Long It Takes for Someone to Digest a Lego

Legos may be among the most fun toys to play with, but for parents they also produce a number of potential problems, including the dreaded moment when you discover your little architect has swallowed a Lego block. This would typically be a panic-inducing moment for any mom or dad, but fortunately, a group of pediatricians in the UK just figured out approximately how long it takes for a Lego to go in one end and come out the other.

This paramount founding came from a study that was published in The Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health last week, with the six authors agreeing to ingest a standard Lego head for the sake of scientific progress. From there, they each checked their own feces with chopsticks to locate their ingested Lego head.

So how long did it take for the Lego to show up? According to the study, it took an average of 1.71 days for them to find Lego in their shit, although one of the authors never found their Lego head, suggesting that perhaps they didn’t parse through their poop carefully enough. Even with this missing piece, the researchers hope that the study will help assuage the concerns of parents who discover their child included a Lego in their balanced breakfast.

“A toy object quickly passes through adult subjects with no complications,” they wrote in the study. “This will reassure parents, and the authors advocate that no parent should be expected to search through their child’s feces to prove object retrieval.”