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‘Five Second Rule’ for Food on Floor Is Untrue, Study Finds
- roddux 10y agoI was under the impression that this was common knowledge? I knew it as the 3-second rule.
- petepete 10y agoVaries depending on the floor type, I believe.
- VLM 10y agoOn speed of pet dog. In Y seconds either the dog has determined it to be edible and its gone, or its inedible and should be tossed in the trash.
- dingaling 10y agoOr speed of toddler. We have cascading rules in our house: anything that hits the floor is his within three seconds or else it defaults to daddy, who has the remaining two seconds before the dog makes his move. Dinner-time incidents can turn violent quite quickly...
- VLM 10y agoLOL DnD style roll for initiative, sorry, Spot, your D20 rolled a 7 and the toddler got a natural 20 so ...
- pmontra 10y agoCommon knowledge is: if food falls on the floor and survives the impact you pick it up quickly, wash it, it's ok. If you find it after hours you trash it.
- StavrosK 10y agoI don't understand how someone can think this is true. Like, what, you drop your toast with jam on the floor, pick it up in a second, the jam is full of hairs/dust/debris and you figure it's fine?
- tbrake 10y agoNo, no one thinks that way with regards to any kind of food item with stickiness and the 5 second rule. The thought revolves around dry foods and the (mistaken) impression they're unlikely to accumulate any kind of debris and dust. Peanuts, pretzels, etc.
- thomasahle 10y agoThat's my impression too. You explain the rule to children, so they can pick up peanuts they drop on the floor, but don't go eating peanuts they find dropped by other people a long time ago.
- rantanplan 10y agoYour logic has many bugs. What's wrong with just explaining that they shouldn't eat stuff from the ground. Period?
- jerf 10y agoDo you have children? "Explaining they shouldn't do X" and "the child don't do X" are, ah, much less correlated than you might like. At times they can be downright reverse correlated.
- coldtea 10y ago>What's wrong with just explaining that they shouldn't eat stuff from the ground. Period? Wasting food for no good reason. And making them paranoid about germs.
- rantanplan 10y ago
- shlant 10y agoPsssshhhh Mythbusters busted that years ago: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/five-second-rule-minimyth/ http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/five-se...
- leereeves 10y agoSome people won't believe it unless a professor says so.
- MildlySerious 10y agoVsauce also talked about it over 3 years ago https://youtu.be/rYXdsOEWBj0 https://youtu.be/rYXdsOEWBj0
- fowlerpower 10y agoThe two second rule still applies though.
- praptak 10y agoI have strong anecdotal evidence that 'Five Second Rule' does not work on cat hair.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoThat's why you brush or rinse it off first depending on the food in question.
- jonlucc 10y agoI think you might have forgotten the most sanitizing procedure. Blowing on it. Works for NES cartridges and cat hair on a cookie.
- 6502nerdface 10y agoIt's important to always rinse cat hair before consuming it.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoI generally try to avoid consuming cat hair if I can... but at the point i'm consuming cat hair, I'm not sure rinsed is better. But on second read, I'm guessing you meant to rinse off the cat hair?
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoMy ancedotal evidence says it depends. A handful of candy dropped will have cat hair: A single piece, maybe not. I generally brush it off and eat it nevertheless.
- sickbeard 10y agolol, do people really believe that bugs are going "hold up! wait 5 seconds before attacking!?"
- overcast 10y agoI think the idea here is that a significant enough number to get you sick, haven't had a chance to set up shop. We eat germs all day, it's when we get too much at once that there is an issue.
- Shivetya 10y agoso while gummy bears are least likely to gather germs, how about hard candy? also, what are the differences compared to your hands? what about a communal candy jar or shared food space? while I understand the five second rule is just some silly fun I am still not convinced that much else is better. unless your using a completely sanitary environment with sterilized equipment you will always get some bacteria
- netsurfer912 10y ago"Study finds" Implies this is new knowledge and somehow news. I've known that this is crap for a pretty long time, as I hope have other people. A more accurate title for this article might have been "Study confirms that 5 second rule makes no sense"
- kyriakos 10y agoThey need a study to figure this one out?
- tomp 10y agoI always thought this was only a joke. I guess we've reached peak science.
- danilocesar 10y agoOMFG, there's a study for that....
- SFJulie 10y agoI wonder how human beings from centuries ago (and actual animals) have been able to survive without our clean like a lab environment? Would it be possible that we overstate quite a bit the danger of everything? I prefer my beer, cheeses non pasteurised and I prefer raw milk (after being boiled). And I think the food coming from puritans victorian inspired countries taste blend like the catholic religion. Most unhealthy illegal (by brits laws) traditional french cooking I have eaten from Québec was tasting like real fucking good FOOD. Hail to the artisinal food! fear not the propaganda from industrial food processors (unilever, procter&gamble, lactalis, nestlé ....) Be curious, fear not (except if you are pregnant) and resist the messages of fear.
- laksjd 10y agoShort answer: They didn't survive. IIRC a significant portion of all humans born in past centuries simply died as infants/children, usually from things that are trivially preventable today with basic hygiene, good nutrition and antibiotics/vaccines. Humanity as a species obviously survived because people simply had a lot of children to compensate the high mortality rates.
- SFJulie 10y agowell, I beg to differ, and quite a lot. I am a mover educated with a master in physics. My father is a physician. a Physician - physicist talk looks like this : Dad, medical studies are not science ; for instance fat are goods, then bad then good again. Son, Newton laws have been proven wrong by Einstein Dear dad, Newton laws are still valid in the right domain, something proven wrong may be proven wrong at the edge but not in its core, if medecine was science, fat would always be good most of the time, except when ... Yes, but we medics invented meta analysis that made the science better You are mainly comparing apple and potatoes without blinking, and you are surprised the results of your studies are hardly reproducible. Long story short; hygienists are leading medical science based on their religious believes (like Pasteur with alcohol) and believes are hardly a good way of leading studies, and I am used to live every day with a tenant of as soft science as psychology/philosophy/history that has a diabete type II for believing in the BS of his fellow «scientific» colleagues, and I do not know if I am angry or laughing.
- Houshalter 10y agoOf course it picks up bacteria. Bacteria are numerous and everywhere. But we've lived with them so long that we can deal with unsterile environments for the most part. Most people for most of history were not germaphobes, and didn't even know bacteria existed. If eating something off the floor had a high chance of killing you, the human race would not have survived this long. Only bacteria that have evolved to infect humans really scare me. So in a public place I probably would not pick something off the ground. But in my own house, I know no one there had tuberculosis. In my life I've eaten tons of berries and stuff that grow outside or even on the ground, and have never had a problem.
- overcast 10y agoMy philosophy is that I just don't waste food. Has nothing to do with "five second" rules. If I just spent time making an amazing sandwich, and it drops on the kitchen floor mostly intact. I'm sure as shit eating it. Obviously gloppy sauces, and subway tunnels, I'm not going to scrape off the ground. For the rest, that's why we have immune systems.
- dec0dedab0de 10y agoI thought it was the 5 minute rule. Or the "if you see food on the floor, and it wasn't there yesterday, it's good" rule.
- balabaster 10y agoOkay food that wasn't there yesterday is pushing the limits of comfort :D
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoIts absolutely true. I've already decided and I'm teaching my grandkids that, regardless of what Nana says.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gcatalfamo 10y agoI refuse to read the article. It can't be true someone believed that to a point a study had to be made.
- mbostleman 10y agoI wasn't aware that anyone took the "Five Second Rule" seriously. I thought everyone knew it was a sarcastic joke.
- mattaltieri 10y agoI'm pretty sure the "5 second rule" is just something people (like myself) use to justify doing something gross, such as eating something that was dropped; and at least in my case, I never believed for a minute that it was "sanitary" if it spent less than 5 seconds on the floor. It's more a mental thing ... if it's only been there for 5 seconds, it's cool. If it is longer than 5 seconds, well, then you're eating food that's been sitting on the floor. Now that I'm typing it, it makes even less sense -- but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it. I've made it 30+ years without side-effect ... ha
- setrofim_ 10y ago> but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it. I've made it 30+ years without side-effect ... ha If anything, it's probably been of some marginal benefit -- keeping your immune system on its toes.
- potatosoup 10y agoYeah, many of the comments talk about bacteria, evolution, our immune systems being able to deal with bacteria, and that is all fine and good. But what about chemicals and cleaning supplies? Eg the floors in a restaurant (and tables, too) get cleaned with some strong chemical products. That's definitely not food grade and no amount of evolving is going to help you deal with that. I see people put their forks, etc, on directly on table surfaces that were previously wiped with a cleaning cloth and I think that's careless. The floor would be even worse. Eating from your dog is fine and probably has health benefits. Eating from a (chemically cleaned) floor is still not.
- drb311 10y ago"I see people put their forks, etc, on tables" What? If you can't put your forks on the table where can you put them? I always put my fork on the table, that's what the tables for. How do you lay your table?!
- potatosoup 10y agoTypical setting would be on top of a plate, on top of a napkin, wrapped in a napkin, etc., never directly onto a table surface.
- CoryG89 10y agoAlso in breaking news: Stepping on Sidewalk Cracks Does Not Break Your Mother's Back
- nommm-nommm 10y agoNor is the floor lava.
- anotheryou 10y agoBetter safe than sorry! I'm not touching that! leaps from chair to chair
- blowski 10y agoSee also: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21945313 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21945313
- pjc50 10y agoIt's a social convention not a piece of 'folk physics'. You know it's dirty but you don't have to explicitly say that you don't care.
- balabaster 10y agoEr... Please tell me tax money wasn't wasted on this study. We all joke about it, but come on, are you really telling me someone wasted money studying this? We all know germ transfer is fairly immediate. My whole family spends much of our time filthy from living on and operating a farm, and I n your average shoes off household, you're less likely to get sick eating something that just fell on the floor than you are to get sick. That's not to say you won't get sick, it's also not to say that what you catch won't be fatal, but really... we all laugh and joke and yell "5 second rule!" before knowingly taking our lives in our own hands and guess what? So far, we're still all here and so far we spend a lot less time sick than many people we know. We know the 5 second rule is bullshit, we don't need a study to tell us that, we're not idiots. Some people are into adrenaline sports and driving wrecklessly, we play 5 second rule Russian roulette. It's good for your immune system, until it kills you.
- lekeve 10y ago> We know the 5 second rule is bullshit, we don't need a study to tell us that, we're not idiots. We may not be idiots... but there are plenty of idiots out there who believe this.
- balabaster 10y agoPlenty enough for me to get down voted for that comment :D
- pantulis 10y agoWell today I just dropped my cigarette to the street floor. I hesitated to pick it up but hey, it can't be worse than smoking itself.
- benlambert 10y agoThe question is not whether or not the food picks up bacteria, but how likely the bacteria is to endanger our health (and how likely a deficiency of bacterial exposure caused by being too careful is to endanger our health).
- cafard 10y agoNext up: "Stepping on Cracks Not Injurious to Mothers' Spines."
- jmulho 10y agoThe article did not provided much useful information about food born illness. Watermelon picks up more bacteria than a gummy bear when dropped on the floor. That is obvious. A couple of things that would be much more helpful to point out: 1) your kitchen floor is much less likely to be coated with salmonella if you avoid bringing raw chicken carcasses into your house, and 2) a major factor in the severity of food born illness is dose. It is much safer, for example, to pick up a piece of watermelon from the kitchen floor ant eat it immediately than it is to pick it up and toss it in a salad that you are taking to a picnic, giving any bacteria that was picked up hours to multiply at moderate temperatures before being eaten.
- S_A_P 10y agoThis study has been done a million times before, at the jr high and high school level and I thought everyone just kind of knew this already.
- alimbada 10y agoSad that someone had to do a study to find out something that people should know through common sense. On a related note, who cares? Kids eat mud and it doesn't kill them; a bit of food that fell on the floor that might have a speck of dust on it is unlikely to kill us.
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- michalskop 10y agoInterestingly, I have never heard about such a rule (being from Europe; is it probably a US-thing?)
- EA 10y agoBefore we had kids, if a bite of the most delectable piece of grilled steak touched the surface of our kitchen table, I would not eat that piece of steak. In my mind, it was contaminated and a great risk to eat. Now that we've got kids, I will eat that same piece of steak even if it falls on the floor. There's just so much good food on our floor now. Goldfish, Cheez-Its, bananas, etc. Perhaps marginally related, our kids are the healthiest in their classes.
- strictnein 10y ago> "Now that we've got kids, I will eat that same piece of steak even if it falls on the floor" ... after the kids have taken a couple of bites of it and the dog sniffed at it. At least in my world. But I draw the line at the dog actually taking a bite from it.
- tmp-20150107 10y agoOn that note, a friend of mine (unknowingly) used water he thought was clean, but that came from a glass my cat had been drinking from, to dissolve heroin for injecting. The resulting infection nearly caused him to lose his leg - the lab analysis of the wound revealed the infection was caused by cat-saliva bacteria. Anyway, just saying there are dangers from pets and allowing them to share your environment. Although, I let my cat take bites out of my food sometimes, and that seems OK so far.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> On that note, a friend of mine (unknowingly) used water he thought was clean, but that came from a glass my cat had been drinking from, to dissolve heroin for injecting. The resulting infection nearly caused him to lose his leg - the lab analysis of the wound revealed the infection was caused by cat-saliva bacteria. > Anyway, just saying there are dangers from pets and allowing them to share your environment. While that's true, the particular dangers from injecting cat saliva are usually pretty minor (not low harm, just low probability: you mostly run into them if you get bitten by a cat so that it draws blood, and you deal with them by treating that -- rare -- event as an emergency requiring immediate attention.) The real danger revealed by the incident you describe is using poor cleanliness standards when injecting drugs (in this case, recreational, but that's irrelevant to the hazard, though its probably a lot more common with recreational drug use than otherwise). You don't use water that you merely "think" is clean for any purpose associated with injection, whether its cleaning anything used in the process or, worse, actually injecting. > Although, I let my cat take bites out of my food sometimes, and that seems OK so far. You probably shouldn't, though ingesting material contaminated with cat saliva its still probably much safer than injecting it.
- DrSayre 10y agoI either heard about this article or read this article a few days ago... Which got me to thinking, did people actually think the 5 second rule was a real thing?
- kahrkunne 10y agoGuess I'm gonna be eating stuff that's been on the floor for longer now... ;-)