Is The '5-Second Rule' A Real Thing?
ACROSS AMERICA — It’s hard to escape childhood without hearing the “five-second rule” at least once. If a tasty bite of food falls to the floor or other surface, it’s safe to eat if it’s scooped up within five seconds.The thinking is that five seconds is too short a time for bacteria to glom onto the food. It’s household science, for sure. Your parents and their parents may have grown up hearing the idiom, and you may tell your kids to suck it up and eat the fallen morsel as they’re learning to keep their food on their plates. The five-second rule is that generational and embedded in culture. It has been around for a long, long time, since the 1200s when Genghis Khan made it a thing.Is there any validity to it? Or is eating food dropped on the floor just disgusting and gross?Science has largely dismissed the rule as a silly thing people say. Only a couple of rigorous investigations have been done. The first, a 2007 peer-reviewed study by Clemson University food scientist Paul Dawson, focused primarily on how long bacteria can survive on surfaces and potentially contaminate food. The conclusion: Food can pick up bacteria immediately on contact with a surface.The answer is more nuanced than that, food scientist Donald Schaffner of Rutgers University and his student Robyn Miranda, who tested the rule using a variety of sources, foods and contact times. Their study, published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 2016, supported Dawson’s findings, but also found that the type of surface, the type of food and how long it lingers on the contaminated surface are of equal importance.And so is moisture.The wettest food in their experiments, watermelon, picked up more moisture than bread or gummy candy, which were also used in the Rutgers scientists’ inquiry. Food dropped on carpets picked up less bacteria than other surfaces tested in the experiment, ceramic tile, stainless steel and wood, most likely because it soaked up the bacteria solutions scientists applied.Other studies have shed light on how easily bacteria moves around the kitchen, whether by hands and fingers or using a single cutting board for meat and vegetables — even if it’s washed between uses.None of that means a bacterial infection is in your future if you eat the cookie or potato chip that fell to the floor. It depends on where it happens and what bacteria may be present, Dawson, the lead investigator in the 2007 study, told National Geographic.“If you’re in a hospital and you drop something, you probably don’t want to eat it,” Dawson told the outlet, adding that eating food dropped on a surface that might have chicken juice carries the risk of Salmonella. With dry foods like cookies, it’s a calculated risk, he said.“Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s probably safe,” he told National Geographic, adding the greatest defense is a clean house.Schaffner, the Rutgers food scientist, thinks the five-second rule will prevail, even if it isn’t scientifically sound.“People really want this to be true,” he told National Geographic. “Everybody does this; we all eat food off the floor.”Mongol ruler Genghis Khan coined the first iteration of the five-second rule, called the “Khan Rule.”“If food fell on the floor, it could stay there as long as Khan allowed,” Dawson and food microbiologist Brian Sheldon wrote in their book, “Did You Just Eat That?” The rationale was that “food prepared for Khan was so special that it would be good for anyone to eat no matter what.”“In reality,” they continued, “people had little basic knowledge of microorganisms and their relationship to human illness until much later in our history. Thus, eating dropped food was probably not taboo before we came to this understanding. People could not see the bacteria, so they thought wiping off any visible dirt made everything fine.”The article Is The '5-Second Rule' A Real Thing? appeared first on Across America, US Patch.
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