Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taguata.

When restaurants first shut down early in the pandemic, Americans raided grocery stores.

They started cooking more at home and presumably generating more leftovers.

Those leftovers can be a convenient future meal, but they've also got a dark side.

There's a tendency that if you put an

item on the plate that's a leftover, there's a higher probability that you're not going to

fully consume that item, and so it's probably going to go to waste. Brian Rowe, an applied economist

at the Ohio State University. He and his colleagues recently studied leftovers and food waste

by tracking the eating habits of 18 men and women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The participants tracked what they ate using an iPhone app, and during the week-long study, the study subjects collectively piled 1,200 different foods on their plates.

After analyzing what got eaten, saved, or thrown away, the researchers found that leftovers were more likely to be picked at and not fully eaten, which is a finding we can all probably identify with.

But they also observed that leftovers, perhaps due to being older and less fresh, directed diners' attention to the other more novel items on their plate, which brings up an interesting possible strategy

to get people to eat their veggies. Yeah, I guess if you have an item that you don't normally

eat as much of and you're trying to get people to eat their peas, perhaps surrounding it with

leftovers is a way to make them focus on the newest item on the plate. The findings are in the

journal Plus 1.

Overall, Rose says one bigger lesson emerged on how to avoid scraping perfectly good food into the trash.

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