The Five Second Rule: Is It Safe to Eat That Chip You Just Dropped?

Submitted by david.thacker on

“Is food good to eat when you drop it on the ground?” the most asked question in the know universe. After research, food that is dropped is immediately clung to by bacteria cells, but will it contain enough bacteria to make you sick? It might—but it is still best to not eat it.

Faster is better the faster you pull it off the ground the less bacteria on the food, but sometimes

fast is not fast enough. Foods with wet surfaces, like an apple slice, can pick up bacteria easier than foods that are dry like a cracker. Most times a clean looking floor isn't clean, and yet a dirty looking floor is less clean, but because bacteria can immediately cling to food so, when you don't know if you should eat it, just throw it out. It could give you nasty stuff such as diarrhea and other bad sicknesses. So what are you going to do when that delicious piece of food slips from your grip? Just throw it out.

“The five-second rule probably should become the zero-second rule,” said Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Eating dropped food poses a risk for ingestion of bacteria and subsequent gastrointestinal disease, and the time the food sits on the floor does not change the risk.”

 

Attributions
By Jacob Hardman—Reporter