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.”
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.