The nutrition teacher Ms. Hontales posted a link to this article on schoolloop...
No longer is it safe to eat something that has fallen on the floor. Growing up we all used this rule when we dropped food on to the floor and we didn't want to waste it. In the NY Times Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College was quoted saying "The 5-second rule probably should become the zero-second rule," ... "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." .
SO the question the article posed was this When something you're eating falls to the ground, do you pick it up and eat it, or do you throw it in the trash or wash it off?
Squishable Pre-Dawn Open Thread
50 minutes ago
10 comments:
Really it depends what it is.... but really sometimes we are getting overtly afraid of germs and stuff like so much so that are bodies are weakened from so much protection. I mean how does your body build up resistance and the proper defenses if it doesnt get a little "dirty" sometimes?
Well obviously when something falls on the floor, any type of bacteria or virus will get onto it. A lot of people use the five second rule but I personally wouldn't use it because to be honest it's kind of gross and you don't know what's on the floor or what's been there so it wouldn't be a good idea to eat it. Most people say not to waste food but seriously, if it has fallen onto the floor, I think it should just be thrown away.
When I was little I used to use this rule, but now a days I just throw the food on the trash ( usually it's a little piece of food not a whole piece) and it is kinda gross once you think about it.
We don't necassarily know exactly what's been on our floor, we may say this and this is there, such as a shoe or something, but we don't think about the diseases an sickness we can get from eating something that might have been attacked with germs and what not.
I think no one should ever listen to this rule at all.
It's just gross
I actually never used this rule before; I guess it's just the mere concept of picking up food from the ground after I've dropped it and then eating it makes it all very unappealing to me. However, I do have a friend who does the "five second rule," or she also believes in a "thirty second rule." Needless to say, she's the only one constantly getting sick out of my friends, haha. I just think that once food falls on the ground, there really shouldn't be a need to pick it back up and put it in your mouth. No matter how hungry you are, the consequences of doing this could result in illnesses that none of us want.
I disagree with most of you guys- I think the 5-second rule still holds for a lot of foods. I don't ever pick up something sticky and eat it off the ground (like a piece of bread butter-side-down), but Mythbusters tested this saying and found that hard things (like jelly beans) don't pick up very many germs in 5 seconds. Honestly, I think that our modern anti-germ attitude isn't necessary. I wash my hands, get enough sleep, and eat a little dirt now and then, like I did as a kid (shout out to third period!)
As long as the floor doesn't look excessively dirty and the food isn't sticky or something wet, I would consider eating something that fell on the floor. I feel like that's why we have an immune system.
A certain someone showed me this article yesterday, and it has interested me greatly. If I was a parent, and the object that was dropped on the floor was a pacifier (that a baby sucks on alllllllll day long), I would definitely not stick it in the baby's mouth without a clean and proper wash. Baby's immune systems aren't as adaptive or as advances as the systems of teenagers and adults. Therefore, pacifiers and baby food should never follow the 5 second rule.
What really fascinates me is this quote from the Times study:
"With both wood and tile, more than 99 percent of the bacteria were transferred nearly immediately, and there was no difference by the time of contact."
I wonder how long is "nearly immediately."
A millisecond? A second?
Some food hits the ground for a second and BAM. Germ city?
The human body is indeed miraculous. First of all, most of the microorganisms cannot tolerate the acidity in our stomach, which has a pH of 1-2. Then, we have our awesome immune system that constantly works to fight off invaders. But our immune system already has to defend itself from countless invaders. After all, there are ten times more microorganisms living on and in your body than the number of cells that actually makes up you. So don't you think we should help ourselves out and not superfluously take in harmful germs that further burdens our defense mechanism? Our immune system has enough to deal with as it is, and we don't need to add extra stress by eating food off of the ground, even if it only touched the floor for a split second.
I personally have no interest in testing my immune system's limits. I would hate to end up getting sick and missing out on much more important things than that one piece of food that dropped on the floor...
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