We’ve all heard it: If you drop food on the floor, you have five seconds to pick it up and eat it before it’s considered contaminated.
Just where it came from, no one knows, but the five-second rule is cited time and again when something someone wanted to eat ““ usually of the French fry or candy variety ““ falls on the floor to make picking it up and eating it okay.
But is the five-second rule legitimate ““ or safe?
Dr. John La Count, a pediatrician with St. Elizabeth Physicians’ Florence office, doesn’t think so.
“If you drop something and it touches the floor, I wouldn’t eat it,” he said. “A little dirt generally won’t hurt you, but if you wouldn’t eat off the surface your food has touched, I wouldn’t go by the five-second rule.”
Our immune systems are designed to handle most bacteria, La Count said, but surfaces are covered with millions and millions of bacteria, and there are viruses and stomach bugs that are going to slip through the cracks sometimes through surface contamination.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food-borne illnesses aren’t serious for most of the 76 million people in the U.S. who contract them each year, but of those cases, 300,000 people are hospitalized and 5,000 die.
Although most of those cases are among more susceptible populations, such as young children, older adults and those with weakened immune systems, the take-home message from La Count is the same: Why risk it?
