I’m NOT a 5 sec or 10 sec guy on dropped food…
But it seems that some scientists say I should be….
Everyone’s heard of the five-second rule. If you drop a piece of food on the floor, you have five seconds to pick it up and eat it. After that, the food gets covered in harmful bacteria and you have to thrown it away.
But how sound is this rule, scientifically speaking?
As it turns out, there’s a fair bit of research on the subject — and the upshot is that the potential risks of eating dropped food are fairly small, most of the time. Indeed, there might even be benefits from occasional bacteria exposure.
Now, we can’t exactly advocate that people eat off the floor. Nothing’s ever completely risk-free, and if you wanted to be extra-cautious, you should just throw that dropped piece of food out (especially if you drop it in a place where there’s lots of bacteria, like a hospital). But the scientific case for doing so is surprisingly thin….
image…foodnetwork.com