Hello, everyone! I have a lot of great news to tell you. I got lots of help in these two weeks. At this stage of my internship, I was working on the nutritional analysis for the recipes that I got from the chef in YOU. There were some questions that I needed to solve. First, the YOU manager wanted to know the daily percentage of a serving of Fiti composed in the recipes. In addition, he wanted to know the viability of bacteria in these recipes. Finally, he needed the full nutritional charts for the sauces and dips’ recipes.
Speaking of the help I got, we had a new intern who was a work study student and her name is Ana. She also had a nutritional background. We could work together, and she provided lots of help to me during this time. I could have discussions with her about the nutritional problems. Ana provided different perspectives on the priorities of the community partner. Originally, my thoughts were too complicated. I thought that we needed to analyze all the 30 recipes, but after the discussions with Ana, we just needed to analyze the recipes that did not kill probiotic bacteria. We had less work needed to do. I was really happy that we can work as a team. It’s better than working by myself, because I might easily make mistakes and be on the wrong path.
From the community partner’s priorities, we had a challenge. We had some problems on how to determine the viability of the Fiti probiotic bacteria. From here, we got help from Dr. Sharareh Hekmat. She is an expert on the Fiti probiotic problems. We asked her about the viability issues of probiotics. We got the information that the probiotics were alive under 40-45 degrees. Thus, the recipes that contained the heating process might not work for the bacteria.
I think we had lots of progress during the two weeks. The next step is to give an example recipe analysis to the manager to see if we are doing right.
Zhihui Xiao - Western Heads East 