*Flashback Friday*

*This post originally appeared on The PediaBlog on September 23, 2016.

 

The Five-Second Rule

 

 

You know how it goes. You’re about to put a delicious bite of food into your mouth when it suddenly slips out of your fingers and goes “splatt” on the floor. Do you pick it up and throw it away? Remember, it’s delicious. Or, do you pick it up as quickly as you can, declare the “five-second rule,” pick off a speck of dirt (or dog hair) and pop it into your mouth? What do you do if it’s your baby’s pacifier that lands on the floor instead of a tasty morsel of food? Toddlers and children who come to our office for a sick visit, a checkup, or a shot will receive a pretzel stick if they are good. (Okay, everyone gets one!) Sometimes the pretzel stick gets dropped on the floor. “There is no five-second rule here,” I say as I race to pick up the broken pretzel, throw it out, and replace it with a new one before the child realizes what just happened. “Hold on tight!” I’ll say, and a smile returns to the child’s face, disaster narrowly averted.

Ben Guarino grosses us out with a look at a new study examining bacterial transfer on food dropped onto different floor surfaces from a height of 5 inches:

“The five-second rule is a significant oversimplification of what actually happens when bacteria transfer from a surface to food,” Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University biologist and an author of the research, said in a statement. “Bacteria can contaminate instantaneously.”

We know it does not make sense, but the five-second rule sticks anyway. As Monica Hesse wrote at The Washington Post in 2007: “The beauty of the five-second rule is that it is utterly pliable and that it is not about food so much as it is about yearning and disgust and gastronomic history and evolutionary wiring and the implicit social contract we make when we break (and drop) bread with other human beings.”

The five-second rule is the fulcrum on which we balance our aversion to spoiled grub with our desire to scarf down the tasty stuff, microbes be damned. (This is the point where we should mention there are 31 known pathogens responsible for an estimated 9 million cases of food-borne illness a year, according to the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention.)

 

The researchers studied different types of food dropped onto different types of surfaces for different intervals of time (including 5 seconds) and they found:

Although time was a factor — broadly speaking, the longer a food touched a surface the more bacteria it had — what was far more relevant was the composition of food or surface.

“Bacteria don’t have legs, they move with the moisture,” as Schaffner pointed out. Wet food, therefore, had the most risk of transfer. Watermelon soaked up the most bacteria, the Haribo candies the least.

To the surprise of the researchers, carpet transferred fewer bacteria than steel or tile. Wood was hard to pin down, showing a large variation.

 

There is no five-second rule. Hold on tight!

 

(Google Images)

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/09/23/flashback-friday-225/