Want to See How Ramen Noodle, Blue Gatorade, and Gummy Bears Are Digested?
- Posted on February 6, 2012 at 1:53pm by
Liz Klimas
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Did you eat Top Ramen for lunch, chase it with blue Gatorade and finish with a side of gummy bears for dessert? If so, you’re about to see what the breakdown — or lack thereof — of these college-student comfort foods looks like from the stomach point-of-view.
As part of a project to show the difference in how the human body digests processed food versus homemade foods, Stefani Bardin, a fellow with TEDxManhattan, with gastroenterologist Dr. Braden Kuo at Harvard University have conducted a clinical study using two devices to give us an inside look.
According to Gizmodo, one subject ate the meal described above, while the other had homemade ramen noodles, drank a hibiscus version of Gatorade and enjoyed pomegranate and cherry juice gummy bears for dessert.
The processed ramen (left) and homemade noodles (right) started off looking like this. The green-blue tint on the left is from the Gatorade.
Here's digestion after more than two hours.
Watch the footage (Note: Digestion starts around 2:00):
“The incentive for this project is to try to present unseen and often veiling information about our food system in unexpected ways, so the public is armed with as much information as possible in order to make informed choices about the food they eat,” Bardin said.
Bardin explains the technology used included a M2A™ — stands for mouth-to-anus — that has a camera, light source and a transmitter. She also used a SmartPill, which measures things like temperature and pH inside the body.
TEDxManhattan is a nonprofit devoted to “ideas worth spreading” and it recently hosted a conference on “changing the way we eat.”
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SgtB
Posted on February 7, 2012 at 2:13amI like how she says that the blue dye in the gatorade is oil. It only proves that she is trying to sensationalize her results. In actuality, aromatic rings are found all over our bodies naturally. They are also extremely stable. In fact, in order to add hydrogen to the double bonds of an aromatic ring, you need to have a catalyst and extremely high pressure and temperature. About 100 atmospheres, or the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas trench and 400 celcius might do the trick. That is why the blue color doesn’t go away. It is simply too stable of a configuration and doesn’t react with the hydrochloric acid in the stomach (unless your stomach is a few miles underwater and on fire). It doesn‘t cause harm as it doesn’t react.
Also, does it surprise anyone that the store bought ramen noodles that were compressed and dried to a level that could not be achieved at home took longer to break apart? I’m not surprised.
There are alot of things that we can actually find hard evidence against putting in our foods. Such things are acids which erode tooth enamel, fluorides, mercury, aluminum, and chlorides which are all either toxic, free radicals, or neurotoxins with wide ranging side effects such as bone loss, erectile dysfunction, DNA mutation and the list goes on. But instead we have people focusing on inert molecules that do little more than pass through our GI tract and do no harm. BTW, the human body is compose primarily of water and hydrocarbons. Oil is a hydroc
Report Post »Calm Voice of Reason
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 7:26pmAs I write this, there are only 6 comments on this story. I want to put my two cents in here before the inevitable commenter begin asking “Who cares? Why is my tax money going to this?” I have a personal stake in this kind of research and I support it wholeheartedly: my wife suffers from a condition known as gastroparesis, which has many pathologies, but hers is due to a paralysis of her vagus nerve which is a cranial nerve that serves many functions but is especially important for digestion. Essentially, her GI tract is immobile. What would take an average person a matter of hours to digest, sits in her stomach for days, sometimes. She is losing what little ability she once had to absorb nutrients through her intestines and must feed high-caloric formula through an ostomy tube 24/7. In addition to her “J-tube”, she is one of a very few people with an implanted gastric “pacer”. Think of a heart pacemaker and you kind of get the idea, though it’s not EXACTLY the same. In her particular case, there is no cure, but it is due to studies like this that help is made possible. The condition is rare enough that there are no free-market solutions forthcoming; it simply isn’t profitable to anyone to study. This is why I feel it is important to support government funded research when it has a chance at demonstrable utility.
Report Post »LastAmerican
Posted on February 7, 2012 at 8:13amI can’t imagine her discomfort. It must be terrible. I’ve had gerd before and that sucks. Not to sound crazy but have you explored acupuncture? I would try anything for relief. You never know.
Report Post »MOLLYPITCHER
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 6:21pmThats gross. I don’t eat that crap, although in my late teens I guess I did. I won’t feed any of it to my kids, but when they get to college age I suppose they’ll eat whatever they feel like eating.
Report Post »thegreatcarnac
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 4:43pmReplace blue Gatorade with beer and you pretty much had my regular diet during college. I still passed. That is amazing to me.
Report Post »AndiAndiAndi
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 4:43pmHome made noodles taste so much better and are so freakin easy to make. I think if more people knew how easy they are to make they would abandon top ramen. I learned how to make noodles when I was young and on a tight budget. Flour, salt, an egg and some milk or water. Roll it out thin, slice it up with a knife and drop them into boiling water or chcken broth. Once you do it from scratch you’ll never go back. I never learned the proportions. It’s almost too easy to screw up.
Report Post »FreedbyTruth
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 4:11pmDid anyone notice that in the first few seconds of the video (before the food seems to reach the stomach) the “whole food noodles” are already pretty much crushed. Any guesses to the reason. It would seem as if the “processed” noodles were swallowed whole were as the “whole food” noodles were not. I wonder if there was an agenda here.
Report Post »EGsimi1776
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 6:42pmhaving made my own spaghetti from scratch more than a few times I can say that the home made noodles are softer and more delicate than the stuff from the store so they tend to begin breaking apart with a minimum of chewing. I can only assume that the home made ramen noodles are very similar.
no agenda there… and really… would eating less processed food be so bad?
Report Post »Mil Mom
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 7:22pmI think you’re onto something. Also, they totally discount the reason “store bought” is made with preservatives is to prevent spoilage. If they accomplish their agenda, how many people will die from “food poisoning” because foods no longer are preserved well?
Report Post »SgtB
Posted on February 7, 2012 at 2:22am@ milmom, we can actually preserve foods by means that make them more nutritious than their raw counterparts. Fermentation is the best way to do this. However, this process takes skill, timing, and most importantly, time. In today’s world, it is far easier to make pickles by just dumping vinegar on pickles instead of populating a vat with lacto bacillus acidophilus and letting the bacteria do the work. BTW, it is the same bacteria that produces yogurt, so if you want to make some good sauerkraut, just chop up some cabbage, carrot, and onion then salt it to bring out the liquid and prevent other bacteria and molds from taking hold. Then add in a small amount of yogurt to populate it with the necessary bacteria and jar it up keeping the fluid over the solids. In a few weeks you’ll have fermented cabbage (sauerkraut) and it will keep for months or even over a year in a fridge without adding any preserving agents other than a small amount of salt.
Also, this bacteria is good for you to eat and it will help you digest food. So eating this kind of processed food is good for you and has been proven in over a thousand years of real world experimentation.
Sadly, for mass production, the only processing that still utilizes real fermentation is the production of alcohol, which is itself a great way to preserve grain and the caloric content of grain for later use.
Report Post »tea-sack
Posted on February 6, 2012 at 4:03pmM2A….A2M was already taken by the porn industry.
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