This story may make you think twice before downing a bowl of ramen noodles.
A video showing what happens inside the digestive tract has gone viral.
This technology will take your right inside the belly of someone who just sucked down a package of Maruchan Ramen noodles.
It’s a meal that college kids, and people on a budget, know well.
That kind of ramen is chemically preserved for a long shelf life, but no one's ever seen what happens to the noodles once inside the stomach-- until now.
Now thanks to a camera the size of a multi-vitamin, we have 32 hours of video that documents the digestive process.
In the video you can see a stomach contracting back and forth as it's trying to grind up the ramen noodle.
For comparison the study subjects also ate fresh, homemade ramen noodles on a different day. Here's a look at both at the 20 minute mark, and the two hours mark.
A striking difference can be discerned from the imagery.
“The most striking thing about our experiment when you looked at a time interval, say in one or two hours, we noticed a processed ramen noodles were less broken down that homemade ramen noodles,” said Dr. Braden Kuo, with the Massachusetts General Hospital
The study can't conclude processed is harmful-- in fact this study is too small to be conclusive about anything. But millions are drawing their own conclusions.
“I realize that the video is out there and it's provocative,” said Dr. Kuo.
Dr. Kuo does plan more research, that may reveal whether the slower digestion affects the amount of nutrients the body absorbs.
"It's still not really clear the impact is has on the gastrointestinal tract. Many things are good in moderation. I think processed foods still need to be investigated further," said Dr. Kuo
