A recent study has disproved the validity of one of the most sacred food safety guidelines, the five-second rule. The study, Is the Five-Second Rule Real?, from this month’s edition of the American Society for Microbiology’s journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, found that bacteria will cling to food if it is dropped on the floor, no matter how fast you pick up it.
“I tend to follow the five-second rule. Then again, I am an irrational lunatic. It is clearly false,” said the director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center and medical ethicist Art Caplan on Boston Public Radio Tuesday. “It doesn’t take more than a nano-second to get bacteria and dirt or whatever to get on something you dropped on the floor,” he said.
Caplan went on to further say that the amount of bacteria that is left on food after picking it up from the floor will obviously depend on what floor it was dropped on. “If you are in a Grand Central Station bathroom terminal I probably wouldn’t believe the five-second rule,” he said.
Despite the five-second rule being debunked, Caplan says that eating food off the floor is not a kitchen health hazard that we should be worried about. In fact, Caplan said that young children build up their immunities by consuming small amounts of bacteria from the ground. “I am not advocating everybody lick their carpets for dinner, but in the kitchen, I think there are worse threats in cooking under cooked food, not cleaning utensils, and we get a lot of those outbreaks of microbial stomach intestinal disorders all the time. I don’t think it is the five-second rule that is really driving this,” Caplan said.
Listen to our interview with the director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center and medical ethicist Art Caplan above.
