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We tried a fermentation-tracking device and highly recommend it to find out which foods are making you bloated

Following is a transcript of the video.

Michelle Yan: Burping, farting, bloating, diarrhea: We all experience these things. Some may know exactly what foods are causing them these problems, but others may not. Sure, generic lists on Google may help, but they’re not personal or quantifiable enough. This device, called FoodMarble AIRE, may give you a clearer idea of exactly what foods are causing your discomfort.

Kara Chin: My digestive problems include…

Gene Kim: Feeling gassy all the time.

Abby Narishkin: Constipation.

Manny Ocbazghi: Sharp pains in my stomach.

Abby: IBS.

Gene: And also violent diarrhea.

Michelle: So what exactly is this device?

James Brief: FoodMarble AIRE is a breath-analysis device that tracks a specific kind of digestion called fermentation. And fermentation’s a healthy part of digestion, but sometimes too much fermentation from certain foods can cause symptoms in a lot of people. Bloating, pain, gas, and even diarrhea.

Abby: My stomach does not respond well to things like onions and garlic.

Gene: Meat or oily foods.

Abby: Brussels sprouts.

Kara: If it says “sugar-free,” I know I shouldn’t have it.

Abby: If I eat an apple, game over. And avocados, sadly.

What could be causing these symptoms?

James: Fermentable oligosaccharide, disaccharide, monosaccharide, and polyols. It’s a fancy word that means some complex carbohydrates and not carbs like we think of like bread. FODMAPs are found in all kinds of fruits, dairy, vegetables, grains, and these nutrients, while very healthy, if they’re not absorbed properly in certain people, this fermentation causes a lot of the symptoms that people experience.

Manny: I don’t know exactly what I’m reacting to. It could be gluten. It could be dairy. So hopefully this test will help me figure that out.

James: So there’s two general ways that people can use this device. One, you can use it in your regular, everyday use. You can track your foods, track your symptoms, and then you take several breaths throughout the day, and then with our app’s food database, we can tell you which foods contain higher and lower amounts of FODMAPs.

The second way that people could use the app is that we optionally provide pure samples of FODMAPs. You mix it into a little bit of water, and then for three hours while you have an empty digestive system, except for this one FODMAP, we can test you and see if you’re fermenting a lot from this. It’s day one of this experiment.

Gene: I got some teriyaki chicken.

Kara: I got noodle soup.

Gene: Are you excited?

Kara: Uh, yeah, we’re gonna learn things.

Gene: Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s figure out what’s causing our digestive problems.

Manny: So my first week using AIRE has been pretty interesting.

Gene: So it felt like the device was accurately measuring my activity in the stomach.

Kara: My fermentation levels are really high after I’ve had pizza and pita chips and hummus.

Manny: One of the surprising results I got was when I went to Chipotle last week. I purposely stacked my bowl with like dairy products, and then I did my breath test probably about a half an hour later, and my fermentation score actually decreased from the morning.

Abby: I would eat the almonds, and this past week I’ve been recording it, and my fermentation score has been really high. So we asked why that might be happening, and it turns out that almonds are low FODMAP only in smaller quantities, which I have a problem with portion control.

Gene: When I eat meat with vegetables, it was actually fine. The levels would show a low indicator. But when I would eat meat with bread, like a sandwich or a hamburger, the levels were high.

Manny: So when you first download the app, it does tell you not to use the breath tests while you’re drinking. But I was still curious to see what it says, and my readings were like 10 out of 10, like off-the-charts red. But that does let me know that the app is working.

Gene: I tried the inulin elimination diet. I didn’t even know such thing existed before this. I came in thinking that meat is the main problem in my diet, but it turned out that it wasn’t necessarily meat. It was the things that I ate with meat, like bread, garlic, and onion.

Abby: So going forward, I’m gonna eat less almonds and definitely work on portion control.

Kara: I think I just will prepare for suffering whenever I have these foods that I love but know that my body doesn’t react well to.

Abby: I think I would recommend this device. Although it didn’t necessarily give me the answers that I wanted, I think it would be really helpful for someone who definitely has an intolerance to lactose or one of those four pillars and so that they can get a pretty solid answer on what they should avoid to eat.

James: Unfortunately, breath analysis is limited to fermentation-related issues. So if breath analysis and fermentation are not their cause of their problems, they should see a dietician, a healthcare professional, a gastroenterologist for further analysis that can help their issues.

Michelle: So be like, “This is Gene the farting machine.”

Gene: All right, you give me the cue.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This video was originally published in May 2019.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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The real reason you should never eat raw cookie dough

Following is a transcript of the video.

Licking the spoon is the best part of baking cookies. But it’s a bad idea. Because eating raw cookie dough really can make you sick, and not just because it contains raw eggs.

In 2009, over 77 people across 30 states got food poisoning after eating prepackaged raw cookie dough. Many experienced vomiting and bloody diarrhea, and some had severe kidney damage. In the end, Nestlé had to recall 3.6 million packages of its refrigerated cookie dough. And in 2016, another group got sick after eating raw homemade cookie dough made from General Mills products.

But despite what you’d expect, the culprit wasn’t salmonella in the eggs. It was a shiga toxin-producing E. coli in the flour, the same type that sometimes finds its way into romaine lettuce and hamburger meat. In fact, the CDC estimates it’s responsible for 265,000 illnesses, 3,600 hospitalizations, and 30 deaths in the United States every year.

Now, normally E. coli likes to bunker down in moist places. That’s why scientists were surprised when it turned up in flour. And even today, it’s a mystery as to how the E. coli got there in the first place, or how it survived in the flour’s dry environment. The problem is that the bacteria could have infiltrated the flour during any step of the manufacturing process. It might have snuck onto the wheat from animal poop, or jumped to the flour from a contaminated processing equipment. There’s really no way to know for sure. Now, just to be clear, although flour was the culprit in this case, raw eggs can still be just as dangerous. In fact, the FDA estimates that every year contaminated eggs cause 79,000 food-borne illnesses and 30 deaths in the United States. With that in mind, the CDC warns against eating any raw cookie dough.

But, there’s good news. Although, yes, there’s a risk your cookie dough is contaminated, it’s a pretty minimal one. Many bakers, for example, taste test all the time, no worse for wear. Plus, a study found that over half of college students ate unbaked cookie dough, and they lived to tell the tale.

Even better, the risk is lower today than ever before, at least when it comes to store-bought varieties. Because, after the 2009 outbreak, companies like Nestlé and Pillsbury have started including heat-treated flour and pasteurized eggs in their dough. By heating flour to 71 degrees Celsius, you kill off any E. coli. And the pasteurization process heats eggs just enough to kill off bacteria without cooking the egg. Heat-treated flour and pasteurized eggs also explain why the sort of cookie dough you find in ice cream is harmless. But if you insist on making your chocolate chip cookies from scratch, there’s a DIY way to sterilize your own ingredients: bake the cookie! It’ll still taste good.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This video was originally published on February 12, 2019.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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How autopilot on an airplane works

  • Autopilot is a flight-control system that allows a pilot to fly an airplane without continuous hands-on control.
  • But this feature isn’t as automatic as you might think. There’s no robot sitting in the pilot seat and pressing buttons while the real pilot takes a nap.
  • A modern automatic flight-control system is made of three main parts: a flight-monitoring computer, several high-speed processors, and a series of sensors placed on different parts of the plane.

  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories. 

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Autopilot isn’t as “auto” as you might think. There’s no robot that sits in the pilot seat and mashes buttons while the real pilot takes a nap. It’s just a flight-control system that allows a pilot to fly an airplane without continuous hands-on control.

Basically, it lets a pilot fly from New York to Los Angeles without white-knuckling the controls for six straight hours. But how does it actually work? Kind of like a polar bear. A polar bear’s core temperature sits at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so well insulated against the frigid Arctic cold that it often overheats. When that happens, its body reacts by releasing excess heat through its hairless parts, like its nose, ears, and feet. The polar bear’s body temperature returns to a comfortable 98.6, and it’s free to hunt seals another day. That cycle is called a negative feedback loop, and it’s the same way an autopilot functions.

A negative feedback loop is a self-regulating system that reacts to feedback in a way that maintains equilibrium. Generally, it uses a sensor to receive some sort of data or input, and the system uses that data to keep functioning in a preset way.

For the polar bear, that preset is body temperature. For an airplane, it’s lateral and vertical movement. A modern automatic flight-control system is made of three main parts: a flight-monitoring computer, several high-speed processors, and a series of sensors placed on different parts of the plane. The sensors collect data from the entire plane and send them to the processors, which in turn tell the computer what’s what.

AFCSs come in three different levels of complexity. There are single-, two-, and three-axis autopilots, based on the number of parts they control. Single-axis controls the ailerons, which are these guys. They make the plane do this. Single-axis autopilot is also called the “wing leveler” because it controls the roll of the plane and keeps the wings perpendicular to the ground. Two-axis handles everything the single-axis does, along with the elevators, located here. They move the plane like this. And three-axis juggles those two plus the rudder. That one there is in charge of this movement. Then the computer tells the servomechanism units what to do. Servos are the little instruments that actually move the parts. All of these pieces come together to make sure your plane stays in the air, where it belongs. But they don’t just work on their own.

The success of the autopilot depends on the knowledge of the actual human pilot.

Greg Zahornacky: Autopilots are dumb and dutiful, meaning this: that if you program them incorrectly, they will kill you.

Narrator: Dumb and dutiful are the “two Ds of automation,” according to Earl Wiener, a former US Air Force pilot and an aviation scholar. He once described autopilot as, “Dumb in the sense that it will readily accept illogical input; dutiful in the sense that the computer will attempt to fly whatever is put in.” It’s crucial, and I cannot emphasize this enough, that you know how to fly a plane before you use an autopilot. Step one is inputting a flight plan. And step one is also where things could start going wrong.

To get from New York to LA, a pilot needs a route. That route translates to a flight plan, and that flight plan gets punched into the computer and logged into the database. If the pilot doesn’t know what the heck they’re doing, then they can end up programming the autopilot to fly the plane upside down or to spell out “I’m a Bad Pilot” in the sky. If they correctly navigate step one, step two is simply turning on the autopilot. The system executes the flight plan and takes over from there.

Zahornacky: That will stay operational until such time as they tell it or turn it off. But it is capable of flying the aircraft essentially from takeoff all the way to touchdown and including touchdown.

Narrator: But you can’t just tap it and nap it. It’s the ABCs of autopilots: Always be checking. Because autopilots can and do fail. Sometimes it’s user error when entering the flight plan. Sometimes it’s a sensor or servo malfunction. Either way, this is when it becomes very important that an inflatable toy isn’t flying the plane.

– Why is it doing that?!

Zahornacky: If it’s not doing what I expect it to do, I’m gonna disengage the autopilot. I’m gonna go back to hand-flying the aircraft and say, OK, this is what I want you to do. I’m gonna rebuild it again.

Narrator: The good news is autopilot will never take over a plane, à la HAL. Worst case, the pilot turns it off and on again or pulls the circuit breaker if that doesn’t work and reprograms it to behave itself. Worst-worst case, the pilot just has to fly the plane themselves.

Zahornacky: So, I am a very large proponent of hand-flying that airplane to keep your skills high because, you know what, you’ve gotta go through a check ride at least once a year.

Narrator: A check ride is a practical test regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration that US pilots must pass to get their licenses. And most airlines require yearly check rides to make sure their pilots can actually fly.

Zahornacky: ‘Cause if it’s on autopilot all the time, how can you keep your skills sharp?

Narrator:  There’s a reason we still have pilots flying planes and haven’t handed the yoke over to robots. As advanced as the technology is, an autopilot is not auto enough to think for itself, which means it’s not smart enough to fly a plane by itself, and that’s another thing autopilots have in common with polar bears.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This video was originally published in October 2019.

Read the original article on Business Insider