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Uncategorized Monday, February 6th 2012 at 12:05 pm

This is What Ramen Looks Like Inside Your Body

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I know that most of you have thought about your health and digestive system while slurping down a bowl of Maruchan instant ramen. However, if you haven’t, I’m about to force the issue thanks to a new art-science crossover projected called Mouth to Anus (M2A, not kidding). The brain child of artist Stefani Bardin, working with gastroenterologist Dr. Braden Kuo of Harvard University, the project centers around data from a pill cam that shows you what processed food looks like during digestion. In case you’re wondering, the answer is “distressing.”

Bardin used two different pill probes in the project. One of them carried pressure, temperature, and pH sensors to monitor the conditions inside the gastrointestinal tract. The other, more dramatically, recorded video footage while inside the body of participants. Both pill devices transmitted the information in a manner similar to Bluetooth, and were limited only by the eight hour battery life of the pill cam.

In Bardin’s experiment, she fed two subjects similar but fundamentally different meals. The first subject received gatorade, instant ramen, and gummi bears; the second subject ate handmade noodles, hibiscus tea, and pomegranate-cherry juice gummies. The digestion of these meals was recorded with the pill cams, demonstrating quite viscerally how differently the human body handles these foods.

The project, which may be culminating in an immersive installation experience, aims to reveal the hidden world of eating. Firstly, by showing viewers how difficult it is for the body to digest processed foods — after two hours, ramen still looks like ramen. Secondly, and this is touched on briefly in the video below, the project also seems intent on revealing some of the surprising and disconcerting ingredients which are often hidden or somehow obfuscated on the food’s nutritional information. Did you know that ramen has a chemical similar to lighter fluid in it? Unsettling!

Bardin certainly has an axe to grind in this project, and while some may find that off-putting it’s a nonetheless revealing look at what goes on inside of you. Personally, I still feel like processed food has a place in my life, but maybe I should be making it a smaller portion of my eating habits.

(M2A™: The Fantastic Voyage via Gizmodo)

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  • Loki08

    The short video is not very informative. Who is to say that a noodle maintaining its shape has no negative or positive affect. Perhaps some more medical research is needed into this and not just trying to scare us with images.

  • Anonymous

    Yes, more science would be good.  …but, the food industry spends billions on psychologist, psychiatrist and PR companies to trick us into eating their unhealthy foods, why not use the same tricks to get people to eat better? 

  • Guest

    i can’t imagine swallowing a camera with a battery is all that healthy for you either.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_S2FKTF3MVLASN3KN6R6ZSMIXUM Christian

    On the contrary. These cameras are used in health care all the time…

  • Ethel hitchcock

    Wow, the eater didn’t even chew the process ramen noodles. No wonder they are still intact.

  • Ian Cummings

    Err, the point of noodles is to be for food, if they don’t get broken down and absorbed by the body then they completely fail in their mission.  And if you think that consuming petrochemicals of any kind is a good idea then I suggest you do some research.
    I agree that the video could have been a lot better and more informative.

  • http://twitter.com/GodsAccident GodsAccident

    Loki08 said what I was going to say. While this video will make me think more about what I eat, I still would like to know if there is any actual harm done to the body/digestive system simply because the Ramen noddles maintained their shape longer. I am not trying to be funny here, but perhaps a digestive system that at least *occasionally* eats processed foods and works longer/harder to digest is also a digestive system that will last longer because it has more exercise?

  • kristy

     Because the 1st one is a dishonest trick, and the second one is education.  Using trickery and psychology should not be the “norm” in our society – we have enough of that crap to deal with!

  • http://www.leochaos.com/ Leo_chaos

    my problem with this video… the person eating the processed noodles… were they swallowed whole ?!
    there’s long tangles of them, unless they’re somehow reforming within the gut, surely chewing would make the noodles unrecognisable after… seconds not hours
    without seeing how each person is eating them in the first place this cant hold any credit scientifically  

  • Guest

    How much were the different noodles chewed before swallowing?

  • http://MyShocker.com Nudo

    lol nice zinger!!!

  • neut

    CHEW YOUR FOOD!

  • Slsrme

    Um….did the Ramen subject swallow their noodles whole? I would say we have discovered the issues with this persons digestive problem if so!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=622065328 Francisco Jimenez

    Well, you swallow the tiny camera knowing that it is not food, that it cannot be digested and that it will come out later poop. Most people eat Ramen thinking that it is food- something that can be broken down and digested, and then absorbed into the body, giving the body healthy nourishing substances needed by cells to heal and reproduce. Fake foods like Ramen do none of these- and people wonder why there is such an epidemic of cancer in the world.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1680931320 Charlesha Anderson

    I was wondering what happens to the battery pill…all the acid in the stomach would split it and doesn’t it then, if possible, melt it all together?

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  • Shien-ko

    Hmm, I don’t eat the stuff in the packs.  When I  was in Japan I was treated to fresh ramen and learned to make it at home.  Everyone knows that the more foods are processed the less likely they are to be healthy. So to single out ramen just doesn’t seem right.

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  • Gemfyre

     ”Did you know that ramen has a chemical similar to lighter fluid in it? Unsettling!”
    That really doesn’t mean much at all really.  Commercial ice cream has a chemical similar to paint thinner.  Margarine and plastic have similar molecular structures and hydrochloric acid and water are just a molecule apart.

    That said, the footage is fascinating anyhow.

  • Ramen4Lyfe

    At least you can poop that out easier…

  • banana

    Hmm…it gives Dr. Branden Kuo Harvard University credentials…but I can’t find anything that actually links him to Harvard…can anyone find anything that verifies this is true or are they just totally making it up?

  • Allie Murdock

    You should watch the documentary The Beautiful Truth.  They go into more about the science between the effects of processed food on our bodies (doesn’t break down, made with artificial chemicals and ingredients, many derived from petrol products) versus whole, natural foods.

  • AKFox

    You could always chew your noodles better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/AprilElizabethRansom April Elizabeth Ransom

    And….I still eat Ramen. Just finished a bowl!

  • http://www.facebook.com/AprilElizabethRansom April Elizabeth Ransom

    P.S. If processed food didn’t get digested by our bodies then they wouldn’t make us fat, they would just pass through. So you can’t say they are bad and making us fat on one hand, and they are bad and our body won’t process them on the other. They obviously get processed. I don’t crap out Ramen noodles whole. I smell more than B.S. on this. It’s all based on agendas and fact warping and I am not buying it.

  • Enoughisenough

    food is food noodles are cheap. doin the just moved out and not much money to spend noodles are a perfect way to spend my money. dont like em or what they do to your body? dont eat em :P im perfectly healthy just gotta keep up with vitamins and workout. people think dieting is the answer to all their problems but no. walking and jogging everywhere is, you just have to get off your lazy ass first.

  • Pineapple Beast

    I read this while eating maruchan instant cup ramen. I’m sick so fuck it, i need mah soup.

  • http://twitter.com/Juliane_Collins Juliane collins

    Actually, you can digest Raman, otherwise you would be shitting out noddles from your anus, which you obviously aren’t doing. While I regress that Raman noodles are not the healthiest of food choices, I will also state that there us no evidence whatsoever for a connection between consumption of “fake-foods” and the pseudo-epidemic of cancer.

    Please, stop perpetuating false fear-mongering information in order to scare people into accepting your claims as truth. That is one of the lowest forms of persuasion.

  • http://twitter.com/Juliane_Collins Juliane collins

    One can only be tricked if they are gullible. It takes no more then a simple google search to get adequate nutritional information about just about every food, not to mention all packaged foods have a label portraying what is or isn’t in them.

    And to toss in a little factoid, no one eats Raman, Gummi-bears, candy, chocolate, or fast food for their nutritional abundance.