A relative of mine routinely feels a sudden burst of nausea several minutes after taking an omega-3 oil capsule. We believe that it’s the result of the soft wall of the pill suddenly breaking down (in HCL with a pH of around 1) and releasing a burst of harmless, but sickening, oil (we hope it’s harmless and at least the effects disappear within a few minutes).
Today’s invention is to use the time-to-nausea as a non-invasive measure of stomach acidity. It turns out, surprisingly, that this isn’t a predictor of that many diseases, but it may help to highlight when someone is undergoing heightened stress.
If we could only find a way to encourage eg suspected criminals to ingest such pills, there might be a way to use the effect as a back-up to lie detection techniques.
