Excerpt
SUMMARY: For people with food allergies or sensitivities, the pleasure of dining out can be dampened by the stress of not knowing exactly what goes into what you're ordering. Now a San Francisco startup wants to take away the uncertainty with a small, portable gluten-detecting device. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Thirty-one-year-old Shireen Yates loves dining out with friends, but when she’s ordering, it’s often a stressful experience.
SHIREEN YATES, Co-Founder, 6SensorLabs: I would love the empanadas with black beans and plantains. Those are gluten-free, right?
WOMAN: Yes, everything is gluten-free.
CAT WISE: Yates says she suffers from severe gluten sensitivities, and she also has problems with soy, dairy and egg. Despite her best efforts to avoid those foods, she often finds herself in situations where she doesn’t know or trust what she’s told is in the food.
If she ingests even the smallest amount of the foods she has issues with, her health can be impacted for days. While in graduate school at MIT, Yates attended a friend’s wedding and had an unpleasant dining experience that sparked an idea.
SHIREEN YATES: This waitress comes by with these delicious looking appetizers, and I asked her, are these appetizers gluten-free? And she said, how allergic are you? I was probably really angry, angry. You know, just, like, starving. And I was like, why can’t I just test this? And that was that aha moment. I said, well, why not? How hard could that be? It’s hard.
(LAUGHTER)
CAT WISE: Three years later, after teaming up with Scott Sundvor, a fellow MIT grad who also has to avoid gluten due to a health condition, Yates is on the verge of turning that idea into a reality, with this small portable gluten detecting device called the Nima. Nima means fair and equitable in Farsi, Yates’ family’s native language.
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