I have been a firm believer of Five Second Rule, due to two reasons. First, I love food so anything that saves it from going to waste, is automatically dear to me. Second, five seconds go fast, very fast, so somehow it doesn’t make sense that any bacteria would be much more faster than five seconds.
But the recent study shows that Five Second Rule is false and no matter how fast we pick the food, we’ll be picking the bacteria with it as well. The two-year long study has been done by Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and his report named “Is The Five-Second Rule Real?” has been released online this month.
In the year 2014, it was reported by the researchers at Aston University’s School of Life and Health Sciences in England that the food picked up in a few seconds after being dropped is less likely to contain bacteria than if it is left on the floor for a longer period of time. This led to many believing that the food will be innocuous and can be consumed. But this is wrong, no matter how clean your floor is, any food that is dropped on the floor would have additional bacterias in it, therefore don’t consume it.
The study was conducted on four different surfaces- ceramic tile, carpet, stainless steel and wood – and with four different types of food – bread, strawberry gummy candy, cut watermelon and buttered bread. All of these food items were dropped from a height 5 inches onto different surface and they took exactly 2,560 measurements in order to take out the results.
The study also stated that the carpet has low rate of bacteria transmission, than compared to tile or stainless steel surface and transfer rate from wood varied. Apart from the surface and timings, the type of food also gave different results in different scenarios. Like: the transmission of bacteria in watermelon was higher due to the moisture present in it, than compared to the strawberry gummy candy.
So I don’t know about you, but I’m scrapping this Five Second Rule nonsense from my dictionary right now.
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22 September 2016
Jyotsna Amla