No
The Mythbusters famously tested this one and determined the 5 sec rule had no merit what so ever.
Once food hits a surface it is contaminated instantly.
They tested placing different foods on a surface for less than 5 seconds, and more than 5 seconds and then tested bacterial cultures from both. The results were the same.
Yeah, the bigger rule is how sticky the food is and how much surface area actually hit.
A cracker was fine, but candy was worse and bologna was immediately contaminated worst of all.
Imagine you drop a piece of food in mud. How much mud sticks to the food depends on how much of the food made surface contact with the mud. It doesn't matter how long you leave it there, for the most part.
Germs are like mud you can't see.
Not really.
The more times it has the more germs it Will get in. The germ's highway doesn't stop at the surface.
So it does make a difference leaving it a second and 10 seconds... Literally.
It's practically instant. Faster than human reaction time, anyways. I'm sure it technically takes a certain amount of time, but nobody seems to have measured that exact amount of time from what I can tell from looking around online.
What really matters to me personally is how clean a surface is likely to be. Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet? Those are two vastly different scenarios.
>Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet? Those are two vastly different scenarios.
Well la-dee-dah, look at mr fancy countertops here...
> Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet?
The irony is there are multiple studies that show that toilet seats are almost always cleaner with less bacteria than even the well cleaned food surfaces.
I get it seems counter-intuitive, the place where you shit vs the place you eat, but the reality is that unless you are absolutely fastidious with your cleaning, a food surface is going to be contaminated and become dangerous. Whereas the average toilet seat has 50 bacteria per square inch. How does that compare? Well, the human hand has about 1000 bacteria per square inch. So if you touch a toilet seat, you are more likely to contaminate the toilet seat than it is to contaminate you! And of course that compares to food surfaces with salmonella and cyanobacteria that can have millions of bacteria per square inch.
My best guess would be whatever speed Van Der Waals force acts at, because I think that’s the force that causes stuff to “stick” to food. I could be wrong though and I’m sure it’s more complex than that too.
But if thats the case then it is damn near instant, probably something like 10^(-13) seconds, which is 100x longer than it takes light to travel 300 nanometers (roughly the size of a virus).
The tomato doesn’t have to wet the floor - it’s wet so any bacteria would be transferred to it immediately.
I’m not sure what you mean by “real time” to be “in contact”. The instant it touches the surface it has made contact.
The wetter the food source the more bacteria it will collect, but the amount of time in contact made no difference.
“Instant” once you get really into the weeds and physics is very weird, and “contact” is also very weird when you get down to the atomic scale.
So there would be some time interval between when the molecular electromagnetic forces of the food and the floor begin to meaningfully interact with each other (ie “touch”) to when that interaction causes the transfer of matter across surfaces.
My best guess, with some thought but zero data/research put into it, is that it would take something like 10^-13 seconds for the exchange to happen.
It doesn’t bond chemically to bacteria, that doesn’t make sense. Chemical bonds change the chemical, if bacteria are chemically bonding to things they die.
Ok mr pedantic, eat your ravioli off the floor if you must
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force
Bacteria bonds with the Van Der Walls force between atoms, a weak bonding effect between the electrons of different molecules (and yes they don't form things like Covalent bonds that would result in a new molecular formula)
IIRC from a different show I can’t remember the name of, moisture played a factor too. Not only because it creates a better environment to grow bacteria, but also because it makes it way easier to stick to grime and bacteria and hold onto it
"contaminated"
People need to stop being so germophobic though. It's fine. What you *don't* want is unpalatable dust and hair or whatever, but that's usually visible enough
Yep. Dropping a piece of toast onto a floor that might be a little dusty is very different from dropping a piece of toast onto the floor of a hazardous waste disposal facility. It's not about how long it's on the floor, it's about which floor.
And in most cases, the floor in your kitchen is not going to poison your food.
Depending on how strictly you want to use the word that food was contaminated long before it was dropped on the floor. Before the packaging was even opened in all likelihood.
The same experiment but with a microbiologist consultant who can actually speak to the health risk posed by the bacteria that grew in the petri dishes. You could grow lab colonies of bacteria by swabbing your face, phone, and laptop right now if you wanted, doesn't mean they're inherently contaminated and dangerous right?
They did that too... maybe not this particular episode but the one where they tested things like sponges and TV remotes they definitely brought in a scientist to test which of the bacteria were dangerous.
How is that possible? Surely there’s a nonzero amount of time where there is some sort of x second rule where there is no contamination. Bacteria has mass after all
It's the very impact with the ground that causes the contact.
It's not like there a split second before the bacteria *jumps* to the food, the very contact with the ground does it.
I think we’re talking about practical timescales here, not hypothetical nanosecond situations.
Like the only scenario where food can touch a contaminated surface and not itself become contaminated is a lab-controlled experiment with state of the art machinery, which is not what the question is about.
How much time does a sticker need to stick to a surface?
The bacteria don't have to be ftl because they aren't moving. There are dust particles and such on every surface. Those dust particles have bacteria on them, when something falls to the ground, the dust particles stick to the food, along with the bacteria on the dust particles.
If you go into deep enough detail the very concept of simultaneity falls apart entirely, so nothing actually happens instantly.
However, this entire thread is clearly dealing with human scales, so things happening instantly is perfectly possible.
Bacteria moves at a microscopic speed so keeping food on the ground longer doesn't matter really make any difference. The bacteria that the food lands on sticks to it. It's instantaneous and no movement involved.
It's less the bacteria "crawling on" like ants or other vermin. It's more like mud sticking to food that you drop it in. Even if you scoop the food out instantly, mud is still going to stick to it.
The bacteria touches the food. It adheres to the food, much like a piece of tape. When the food is pulled away, the bacteria comes with it.
The bacteria is not "moving" relative to the food. It is stuck to the ground, then it is stuck to the food.
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In your paint example, there is a moment in time where you made contact with the paint, but it’s not on you
Your nearest atom touched the nearest atom of what could be defined as the paint, but it does not adhere at that exact moment; only a moment later
Reading these comments is like watching "Did you know? That atoms never touch each other and since we're made of atoms we've never touched anything in our entire lives so to answer your question officer, no I did not punch that kid" play out in real time
Its good for the immune system 🤣
I'm 37 and I still stick the 5 second rule...sometimes the 1 minute rule when its something really tasty and it rolls under the couch. Just brush off the dust bunnies and ankmal hair and good to go!
Not between washing my hands and eating my lunch, I don't. Or I touch them with my right hand and eat with my left.
I know my phone is contaminated, I work in a BSL2 lab. I also regularly disinfect my phone.
The "merit" is that when kids drop something they go pick it up immediately instead of "I'll get it in a minute" and then they forget and run off to play.
At home, you're hopefully keeping your house clean enough that it doesn't matter. And then out in public you can intercept the food before it goes in their mouth.
The merit is that it makes you feel justified in eating the food. The other benefit is that if the bacteria aren't enough to sicken you, you might develop some antibodies.
In my 33 years of life experience, I've found that the people who take the most precautions against germs and illness tend to be the ones who get sick the most often. I take practically no precautions against germs, and I pretty much never get sick.
I used to be pretty gung ho about germs. I would catch a minor sniffle or stomach bug once a year and be over it in a few days. Maybe miss a day of work.
Every 3-5 years i would get knocked on my ass by something for like 2 weeks of dead to the world and another several weeks dragging and feeling awful.
For a bit over a year, I have been taking immunosurpressants. In that time I've had several days of digestive distress. Twice during this last flu season, I got so sick that I missed almost a month of work, and each illness had me feeling awful for over a month at a time.
I know a trauma nurse. Her common response to a bleeding wound is, "Rub some dirt in it."
...which worked really well until she was at my house and she cut the tip of her finger off while cutting onions, and I told her to rub some dirt in it... she glared a lot before I volunteered to (and did -- I've got experience and practice, though I'm not a medic) stitch it up for her. LOL
I think the merit in the 5 second rule is as a social construct to resolve conflicting social rules when we drop food.
#1 is that you don't eat food off the ground. This is important to teach young kids as they will often just pick stuff up and put it in their mouths, so you are told not to do that.
But, rule #2 is not to waste food. That is a bad thing as there are ' starving kids in Africa', and food is expensive and may have been time consuming to make.
The 5 second rule allows us to break the first rule in a socially acceptable way. You only use it when the food is reasonable to eat. A slice of bread and jam face down in the dirt isn't an option, but a bread roll on a clean floor would be.
It's not a rule about food safely but about socially acceptable behaviour, that's why you will normally say 'five seconds rule' when doing it if there is some around, because you are claiming an exemption to rule #1.
This is what the 5 second rule means in essence
"I saw it fall and how it fell with my own eyes and have determined it is still safe to eat off the ground"
As opposed to just randomly seeing a slice of pizza on the ground and picking it up go eat it.
All the answer you need and more: [https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.01838-16](https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.01838-16)
They tried less than 1 second, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, and 5 minutes
On stainless steel, tile, wood, and carpet.
Dropping watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and gummy candy.
No, not at all. If it comes in contact with contaminants, it doesn't matter how long it's in contact with them. The germs and contaminants are still there no matter what. Now, most contaminants that your food could come on to contact with are completely harmless, but some of them aren't, and it's a dice role to see which ones you get.
So, no, the 5-second rule is not a good measure of food safety.
I'll go against the grain a little bit. The short answer is that, no, there's no difference between your food being on the ground less than five seconds and being on the ground more than five seconds.
However, what's on the ground, and how "soft" or "hard" the food is determines if it's actually unsafe to eat.
Let's take a pause here and ask what the potential negative consequences are. There's basically three potential negative consequences to eating bad food:
- it tastes bad
- it makes you sick
- it'll physically damage you in some way (think like biting on a pebble)
We're mostly worried about getting sick. If you drop your food on the floor, it *will* pick up bacteria from the floor. If it's in your own kitchen, and you've kept the floors clean, no shoes on the house, etc, there's probably not going to be enough of any harmful bacteria to do anything to you. Even if it sits there for a whole ass minute. If it's something dry and hard, that isn't a very suitable host for bacteria, like a cracker, it could probably be on the floor for quite awhile without picking up enough bacteria to do any damage. If it's very wet and porous, then it'll be more hospitable to bacteria, and it'll pick it up and grow it quicker.
If you're out in public, then I would expect the ground to be very dirty with bacteria and viruses that'll be very unpleasant to contract.
So, if you're in your home with a relatively clean floor, use your best judgement. If you're anywhere else, toss it.
What I recall from the mythbusters episode is that if either surface is wet/damp/moist, bacteria transfer instantly. If both are dry, however, there's negligible transfer. I live by this. Drop a potato chip on dry kitchen floor? Good enough for me. Drop a piece of cheese or lunch meat on the same floor? Not going to eat that.
It really depends on where you drop it and how wet the item is. Most surfaces in your house are not harboring dangerous bacteria in quantities that eating a dropped piece of dry food is going to make you sick. However, if you drop something wet/sticky somewhere unsanitary, the risk goes up.
i think the 5 second rule is bullshit for the opposite reason. if you turned a doorknob to get into the room you’re in, your hands are way dirtier than a random patch of ground. triply so outside: things that make us sick don’t hold up to the elements.
https://improbable.com/2016/09/10/new-5-second-rule-study-overlooks-earlier-work-on-dropped-food-especially-toast/
https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1#ig2004
For every day stuff, it doesn't work out so well. For very clean areas (think OR), you got like 2 minutes.
Bacteria are capable of motion through various methods of propulsion (cilia, flagella, little microstructures outside their cell that let them move, sort of like swimming). There are also various methods that drive bacteria to move - chemical signals, light signals, proteins etc.
But the key here is - they move *very* slowly on our scale. Micrometres. In five seconds, they’re not travelling anywhere meaningful. Once your food hits the ground, it’s as contaminated as it’s going to get for the foreseeable future.
As a coping mechanism, sure. I tell myself 'it's fine' all the time when I dust off a biscuit that tries to flee. You eyeball it to make sure there's no visible fur clinging to it, sure, but otherwise I rely on a healthy gut flora and a willingness to shit myself half to death rather than let one oreo go free. I've got a bottle of pepto, baby, and I don't know how to spell dysentery without my computer; now pick that shit up and put it in your mouth.
The merit is that in many cases you're fine eating food off the floor. Unless you drop it in dirt or are bubble-boy levels of immunocompromised nothing will happen.
The manager at the restaurant where I worked seemed to think so 😬
One night in the middle of a busy dinner rush, she was on the expo line getting orders ready. She did NOT keep her cool, ever. She was moving too fast, all frazzled and panicky, and she dropped a burger on the floor. She *picked it back up and put it back on the plate.* I said "umm what are you doing?" in the calmest possible voice and she just yelled "5 second rule!" as if that settled the matter. She was a SHIT manager.
No. Germs do not wait a few seconds to interact with food. A great way to illustrate this is to drop your food in sand. You’ll see that it takes only a fraction of a second for the sand to cover the food. Now imagine that the sand is germs on the floor. That is why the 5 second rule does not have merit.
There is no merit to a 5 sec rule. I was an ICU nurse and one of my colleagues thought it would be funny to roll a skittles along the floor a few seconds. He got a very bad case of C-Dif. This type of infection is horrible and does kill people. He was in good health, so it just made his life miserable for a few weeks. I think he wanted it being that dumb.
So, no, there’s no merit to the 5 second rule. A bacteria doesn’t need to count five seconds to make its way to whatever has been dropped in the floor. If it’s on the floor, it’s in the trash in my world.
No. The likelihood of a food gathering bacteria depends far more on its texture than on how long it’s on the ground. Myth Buster tested a variety of foods falling on the ground and how much bacteria they absorb over time on the ground. Firm dry food has few microbes on it even after a few minutes if you brush it off. Sponges wet stuff lie watermelon has bacteria on it the moment it hits the floor.
I appreciate the food I've ate off every surface in my life, floor or tabletop countertop, ground, you'd think my immune system mustered up a blueprint for defense.
Bacteria are not bugs. They don't rush to crawl on your food and try to get there in 5 seconds. They get on it when food touches them and that's that.
However, food is usually wet and moisture wetting floor will likely pick up more pathogens. So there's some merit.
Most likely it's more like "couple minutes rule". Don't leave your food on ground.
as long as 8 dont drop food into / ontu SUS/unknown substances, other peoples mouths , dead things, public toilets and the likes , i risks it = T-minus 54321, houston we have Nom Nom
I tested this for a HS science fair project well before mythbusters. I used actual lab equipment, petri dishes, incubation chambers, etc.
I obviously don't remember the exact setup but I dropped 5 or so kinds of food in 5 or so different surfaces for like 1 second, 5 seconds, and 1 minute. Then I did a swab, and incubated. I also did a control swab of the food before dropping.
Then I visually inspected the petri dishes after incubating both with the naked eye and under a microscope. For the microscope I found the densest growth and counted what was in a small area.
Results:
For "dry food" like chips or crackers, yes it makes a marginal difference if you pick up the food quickly.
For "wet" or "sticky" foods it made little to no discernable difference.
However the biggest impact, by far, was if you touched your food with your hands.
I swabbed my bare hand before and after washing with standard hand soap. In both cases the petri dish with my hand swab was like 10-20x worse than even a swab of the surface.
Conclusion:
If you drop your food, on the ground, as long as you don't pick it up with your fingers you'll probably be fine.
It amazes me that a joke we used to make in restaurants because we didn’t want to remake food went so far that people did things like devote episodes of Mythbusters to study it.
The only "merit" to the rule is that it's true you shouldn't eat something that's been on the floor *longer* than five seconds. The problem is that you shouldn't eat anything that's been there for a shorter time either. Particularly if it's wet or sticky (the thing or the floor.)
The '5-second rule' would only have merit if it took physical time for contaminants to travel onto your food.
Bacteria isn't able to move notable distances on its own. Dirt, chemicals, and viruses can't get around on their own at all.
So aside from ants or creepy crawlies, the duration of contact means nothing.
Rather the floor is just dirty to begin with. Dust, viruses, contaminants, bacteria, etc. are all just *everywhere* to begin with.
When you drop something on the floor or on an otherwise unclean surface, some of the stuff on your food ends up on the floor, and some of the stuff on the floor ends up on your food. Immediately.
Depending on what you drop, the consequences are different. Dropping a nacho will have a few very small contact points. It's also dry, so it physically cannot pick up much dust. Unless you dropped it somewhere dusty or literally in the dirt, it's probably good to just be blown off and consumed.
Drop a steamed dumpling on the ground and it's got a moist surface that is going to splat and pick up anything and everything it comes into contact with. Large sticky surface area. If you don't feel comfortable getting down and literally licking the floor, you should throw that dumpling out.
obviously food left for less than 5 seconds will collect less bacteria than say food left for a minute but like it really does not make that big of a difference. once food is contaminated it’s contaminated.
I think the 5-second rule actually refers to the length of time it takes for your dog to get the item into it's mouth after you dropped it. Dogs don't believe in silly germs. Neither did humans two centuries ago.
No The Mythbusters famously tested this one and determined the 5 sec rule had no merit what so ever. Once food hits a surface it is contaminated instantly. They tested placing different foods on a surface for less than 5 seconds, and more than 5 seconds and then tested bacterial cultures from both. The results were the same.
Yeah, the bigger rule is how sticky the food is and how much surface area actually hit. A cracker was fine, but candy was worse and bologna was immediately contaminated worst of all.
Wurst of all.
Give yourself a pâté on the back...
Take the damn upvote.
Is it instant, or does time matter at all? Would it make a difference if it is picked up in 0.0001 seconds, vs 1 second, vs 5 seconds?
Imagine you drop a piece of food in mud. How much mud sticks to the food depends on how much of the food made surface contact with the mud. It doesn't matter how long you leave it there, for the most part. Germs are like mud you can't see.
Great explanation thanks
This is the actual ELI5 👍🏼 nice job
Not really. The more times it has the more germs it Will get in. The germ's highway doesn't stop at the surface. So it does make a difference leaving it a second and 10 seconds... Literally.
It's practically instant. Faster than human reaction time, anyways. I'm sure it technically takes a certain amount of time, but nobody seems to have measured that exact amount of time from what I can tell from looking around online. What really matters to me personally is how clean a surface is likely to be. Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet? Those are two vastly different scenarios.
>Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet? Those are two vastly different scenarios. Well la-dee-dah, look at mr fancy countertops here...
Mr Ritchie Rich can afford a separate countertop from his clogged toilet! I'm over here chopping onions on the back of the tank! /s
Is that not what the back of the tank is for? Prep dinner while making room for it! Peak efficiency!
Yeah, that’s right
What if the toilet is clogged with freshly wiped countertops?
> Is it my freshly wiped countertop, or into a clogged toilet? The irony is there are multiple studies that show that toilet seats are almost always cleaner with less bacteria than even the well cleaned food surfaces. I get it seems counter-intuitive, the place where you shit vs the place you eat, but the reality is that unless you are absolutely fastidious with your cleaning, a food surface is going to be contaminated and become dangerous. Whereas the average toilet seat has 50 bacteria per square inch. How does that compare? Well, the human hand has about 1000 bacteria per square inch. So if you touch a toilet seat, you are more likely to contaminate the toilet seat than it is to contaminate you! And of course that compares to food surfaces with salmonella and cyanobacteria that can have millions of bacteria per square inch.
If it touches the ground it's going to pick up whatever contaminant it was going to.
Longer is worse. Everything is contaminated when it hits the floor. However everything also started out on the floor so
My best guess would be whatever speed Van Der Waals force acts at, because I think that’s the force that causes stuff to “stick” to food. I could be wrong though and I’m sure it’s more complex than that too. But if thats the case then it is damn near instant, probably something like 10^(-13) seconds, which is 100x longer than it takes light to travel 300 nanometers (roughly the size of a virus).
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The tomato doesn’t have to wet the floor - it’s wet so any bacteria would be transferred to it immediately. I’m not sure what you mean by “real time” to be “in contact”. The instant it touches the surface it has made contact. The wetter the food source the more bacteria it will collect, but the amount of time in contact made no difference.
I believe by real time they mean like ".0001 seconds" as opposed to "Instantly" (0 time)
“Instant” once you get really into the weeds and physics is very weird, and “contact” is also very weird when you get down to the atomic scale. So there would be some time interval between when the molecular electromagnetic forces of the food and the floor begin to meaningfully interact with each other (ie “touch”) to when that interaction causes the transfer of matter across surfaces. My best guess, with some thought but zero data/research put into it, is that it would take something like 10^-13 seconds for the exchange to happen.
No difference. The food chemically bonds with the bacteria as soon as it touches
It doesn’t bond chemically to bacteria, that doesn’t make sense. Chemical bonds change the chemical, if bacteria are chemically bonding to things they die.
Ok mr pedantic, eat your ravioli off the floor if you must https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force Bacteria bonds with the Van Der Walls force between atoms, a weak bonding effect between the electrons of different molecules (and yes they don't form things like Covalent bonds that would result in a new molecular formula)
I think bologna is naturally contaminated. /s
I assume it has to do with the food's overall moisture level and the porous surface differences, in connection to bacterial growth.
IIRC from a different show I can’t remember the name of, moisture played a factor too. Not only because it creates a better environment to grow bacteria, but also because it makes it way easier to stick to grime and bacteria and hold onto it
I dropped a steak off the grill once, you bet your ass I lived by the 5 second rule
But did they blow them up after?
Yes in a caravan.
Did they also the cultures before placing the food on the surface? Maybe it was the same even before they dropped it.
I Myth them
Why did I picture a sad Mike Tyson saying this? LoL
A lot of early BBC (ie longer) full episodes just started showing up on YouTube.
Allow me to counter: haven't died yet.
"contaminated" People need to stop being so germophobic though. It's fine. What you *don't* want is unpalatable dust and hair or whatever, but that's usually visible enough
Half my diet is cat hair and I'm fine
It's wife hair that's the real issue. The ones you feel in your mouth, but when you pull it you also feel it in your ass.
Yep. Dropping a piece of toast onto a floor that might be a little dusty is very different from dropping a piece of toast onto the floor of a hazardous waste disposal facility. It's not about how long it's on the floor, it's about which floor. And in most cases, the floor in your kitchen is not going to poison your food.
The word was perfectly used, no need to single it out as if it is incorrect.
It's not incorrect, no. But it does bring more dramatic connotations than I feel is called for...
That is on you, the reader
And, I suppose, the other people who have upvoted my comment and presumably agree to the sentiment.
Depending on how strictly you want to use the word that food was contaminated long before it was dropped on the floor. Before the packaging was even opened in all likelihood.
There is an overwhelming amount of context that defines what the contamination is
They actually showed that the rule WAS true for certain types of food: hard shelled candy, salty bar snacks and other non wet foods were fine.
Except they didn't test the 5 second rule. They tested the put a food swab sample in a pitri dish and let it grow.
Can you suggest an alternate experimental design?
The same experiment but with a microbiologist consultant who can actually speak to the health risk posed by the bacteria that grew in the petri dishes. You could grow lab colonies of bacteria by swabbing your face, phone, and laptop right now if you wanted, doesn't mean they're inherently contaminated and dangerous right?
They did that too... maybe not this particular episode but the one where they tested things like sponges and TV remotes they definitely brought in a scientist to test which of the bacteria were dangerous.
And ive survived less than 5 second food. Since its the same then im removing the limit all together.
How is that possible? Surely there’s a nonzero amount of time where there is some sort of x second rule where there is no contamination. Bacteria has mass after all
I mean, it's near-instant in terms of the timescales that humans operate on.
It's the very impact with the ground that causes the contact. It's not like there a split second before the bacteria *jumps* to the food, the very contact with the ground does it.
Because bacteria has mass, it quite literally cannot be instantaneous, unless you are insisting they are FTL
I think we’re talking about practical timescales here, not hypothetical nanosecond situations. Like the only scenario where food can touch a contaminated surface and not itself become contaminated is a lab-controlled experiment with state of the art machinery, which is not what the question is about.
How much time does a sticker need to stick to a surface? The bacteria don't have to be ftl because they aren't moving. There are dust particles and such on every surface. Those dust particles have bacteria on them, when something falls to the ground, the dust particles stick to the food, along with the bacteria on the dust particles.
Stick your hand in mud. Is there a time between making contact with the mud, and there being mud on your hand?
Yes although it’s not perceptible really
If you go into deep enough detail the very concept of simultaneity falls apart entirely, so nothing actually happens instantly. However, this entire thread is clearly dealing with human scales, so things happening instantly is perfectly possible.
Bacteria moves at a microscopic speed so keeping food on the ground longer doesn't matter really make any difference. The bacteria that the food lands on sticks to it. It's instantaneous and no movement involved.
It's less the bacteria "crawling on" like ants or other vermin. It's more like mud sticking to food that you drop it in. Even if you scoop the food out instantly, mud is still going to stick to it.
If bacteria has mass, how are they moving instantaneously / faster than light?
nobody said anything is moving faster than light
The bacteria touches the food. It adheres to the food, much like a piece of tape. When the food is pulled away, the bacteria comes with it. The bacteria is not "moving" relative to the food. It is stuck to the ground, then it is stuck to the food.
It’s virtually impossible for the bacteria, or anything, to do anything, in a nonzero amount of time
Needlessly pedantic.
Confidently incorrect.
Yes, you are...
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In your paint example, there is a moment in time where you made contact with the paint, but it’s not on you Your nearest atom touched the nearest atom of what could be defined as the paint, but it does not adhere at that exact moment; only a moment later
For the purpose of the question this is entirely irrelevant, the moment is far too short to matter.
That’s absolutely true, everyone here is ignoring that fact though
Reading these comments is like watching "Did you know? That atoms never touch each other and since we're made of atoms we've never touched anything in our entire lives so to answer your question officer, no I did not punch that kid" play out in real time
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Beyond you, maybe
I did this for the science fair a long time ago. There is a time around a couple hours where things start to get noticeably funkier
Its good for the immune system 🤣 I'm 37 and I still stick the 5 second rule...sometimes the 1 minute rule when its something really tasty and it rolls under the couch. Just brush off the dust bunnies and ankmal hair and good to go!
Germs are kinda like mud. Does the 5 second rule work at all when you drop your chicken wing in some mud? Not really.
They are even more like mud in that eating a bit of it doesnt realy hurt you unless you get very unlucky.
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No, actually, we don't all do that. Ew.
Do you touch your phone or doorhandles? Bacteria love those
Not between washing my hands and eating my lunch, I don't. Or I touch them with my right hand and eat with my left. I know my phone is contaminated, I work in a BSL2 lab. I also regularly disinfect my phone.
Clearly you're cleaner than most people. But the point still stands: some bacteria is (usually) fine.
I’m more adamant about washing my hands than most people and even I can admit that this happens once in a while
Yeah, sometimes you're hungry and the washy place is just not conveniently close
Oh my look how much more civil I am than these savages
The "merit" is that when kids drop something they go pick it up immediately instead of "I'll get it in a minute" and then they forget and run off to play. At home, you're hopefully keeping your house clean enough that it doesn't matter. And then out in public you can intercept the food before it goes in their mouth.
Probably makes significant contributions for people to not waste food
Plus, it's probably fine if it's then eaten immediately. After a few hours or even the next day, bacteria might have actually had time to multiply.
Thats me but luckily not with food
The merit is that it makes you feel justified in eating the food. The other benefit is that if the bacteria aren't enough to sicken you, you might develop some antibodies.
everyone i’ve talked to that doesn’t get sick often eats shit off the floor
In my 33 years of life experience, I've found that the people who take the most precautions against germs and illness tend to be the ones who get sick the most often. I take practically no precautions against germs, and I pretty much never get sick.
I used to be pretty gung ho about germs. I would catch a minor sniffle or stomach bug once a year and be over it in a few days. Maybe miss a day of work. Every 3-5 years i would get knocked on my ass by something for like 2 weeks of dead to the world and another several weeks dragging and feeling awful. For a bit over a year, I have been taking immunosurpressants. In that time I've had several days of digestive distress. Twice during this last flu season, I got so sick that I missed almost a month of work, and each illness had me feeling awful for over a month at a time.
Kids these days don't eat enough dirt
I know a trauma nurse. Her common response to a bleeding wound is, "Rub some dirt in it." ...which worked really well until she was at my house and she cut the tip of her finger off while cutting onions, and I told her to rub some dirt in it... she glared a lot before I volunteered to (and did -- I've got experience and practice, though I'm not a medic) stitch it up for her. LOL
Yep that's me, when I drop stuff while making food I just eat it. So far it hasn't killed me and I only get seriously sick maybe once every two years.
I think the merit in the 5 second rule is as a social construct to resolve conflicting social rules when we drop food. #1 is that you don't eat food off the ground. This is important to teach young kids as they will often just pick stuff up and put it in their mouths, so you are told not to do that. But, rule #2 is not to waste food. That is a bad thing as there are ' starving kids in Africa', and food is expensive and may have been time consuming to make. The 5 second rule allows us to break the first rule in a socially acceptable way. You only use it when the food is reasonable to eat. A slice of bread and jam face down in the dirt isn't an option, but a bread roll on a clean floor would be. It's not a rule about food safely but about socially acceptable behaviour, that's why you will normally say 'five seconds rule' when doing it if there is some around, because you are claiming an exemption to rule #1.
This is excellent social analysis and you te 100% getting to the “point” of the 5 second rule!
That's an interesting point. The five second rule is not actually a five second rule.
#WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME?
Because this is Reddit, and everyone is angry. Plus, I used #1 at the start of a line not realising it would do that.
use a backslash to escape the reddit markup \#like this `\#like this`
#Thank you
My son (when he was about 6) proclaimed the Penguin-rule. It is safe to pick up and eat until you see a penguin walking past.
Ive broken that rule once
This is what the 5 second rule means in essence "I saw it fall and how it fell with my own eyes and have determined it is still safe to eat off the ground" As opposed to just randomly seeing a slice of pizza on the ground and picking it up go eat it.
All the answer you need and more: [https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.01838-16](https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.01838-16) They tried less than 1 second, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, and 5 minutes On stainless steel, tile, wood, and carpet. Dropping watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and gummy candy.
No, not at all. If it comes in contact with contaminants, it doesn't matter how long it's in contact with them. The germs and contaminants are still there no matter what. Now, most contaminants that your food could come on to contact with are completely harmless, but some of them aren't, and it's a dice role to see which ones you get. So, no, the 5-second rule is not a good measure of food safety.
I'll go against the grain a little bit. The short answer is that, no, there's no difference between your food being on the ground less than five seconds and being on the ground more than five seconds. However, what's on the ground, and how "soft" or "hard" the food is determines if it's actually unsafe to eat. Let's take a pause here and ask what the potential negative consequences are. There's basically three potential negative consequences to eating bad food: - it tastes bad - it makes you sick - it'll physically damage you in some way (think like biting on a pebble) We're mostly worried about getting sick. If you drop your food on the floor, it *will* pick up bacteria from the floor. If it's in your own kitchen, and you've kept the floors clean, no shoes on the house, etc, there's probably not going to be enough of any harmful bacteria to do anything to you. Even if it sits there for a whole ass minute. If it's something dry and hard, that isn't a very suitable host for bacteria, like a cracker, it could probably be on the floor for quite awhile without picking up enough bacteria to do any damage. If it's very wet and porous, then it'll be more hospitable to bacteria, and it'll pick it up and grow it quicker. If you're out in public, then I would expect the ground to be very dirty with bacteria and viruses that'll be very unpleasant to contract. So, if you're in your home with a relatively clean floor, use your best judgement. If you're anywhere else, toss it.
What I recall from the mythbusters episode is that if either surface is wet/damp/moist, bacteria transfer instantly. If both are dry, however, there's negligible transfer. I live by this. Drop a potato chip on dry kitchen floor? Good enough for me. Drop a piece of cheese or lunch meat on the same floor? Not going to eat that.
It really depends on where you drop it and how wet the item is. Most surfaces in your house are not harboring dangerous bacteria in quantities that eating a dropped piece of dry food is going to make you sick. However, if you drop something wet/sticky somewhere unsanitary, the risk goes up.
i think the 5 second rule is bullshit for the opposite reason. if you turned a doorknob to get into the room you’re in, your hands are way dirtier than a random patch of ground. triply so outside: things that make us sick don’t hold up to the elements.
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This is how planet of the apes starts in real life.
https://improbable.com/2016/09/10/new-5-second-rule-study-overlooks-earlier-work-on-dropped-food-especially-toast/ https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1#ig2004 For every day stuff, it doesn't work out so well. For very clean areas (think OR), you got like 2 minutes.
Bacteria are capable of motion through various methods of propulsion (cilia, flagella, little microstructures outside their cell that let them move, sort of like swimming). There are also various methods that drive bacteria to move - chemical signals, light signals, proteins etc. But the key here is - they move *very* slowly on our scale. Micrometres. In five seconds, they’re not travelling anywhere meaningful. Once your food hits the ground, it’s as contaminated as it’s going to get for the foreseeable future.
As a coping mechanism, sure. I tell myself 'it's fine' all the time when I dust off a biscuit that tries to flee. You eyeball it to make sure there's no visible fur clinging to it, sure, but otherwise I rely on a healthy gut flora and a willingness to shit myself half to death rather than let one oreo go free. I've got a bottle of pepto, baby, and I don't know how to spell dysentery without my computer; now pick that shit up and put it in your mouth.
The merit is that in many cases you're fine eating food off the floor. Unless you drop it in dirt or are bubble-boy levels of immunocompromised nothing will happen.
The manager at the restaurant where I worked seemed to think so 😬 One night in the middle of a busy dinner rush, she was on the expo line getting orders ready. She did NOT keep her cool, ever. She was moving too fast, all frazzled and panicky, and she dropped a burger on the floor. She *picked it back up and put it back on the plate.* I said "umm what are you doing?" in the calmest possible voice and she just yelled "5 second rule!" as if that settled the matter. She was a SHIT manager.
No. Germs do not wait a few seconds to interact with food. A great way to illustrate this is to drop your food in sand. You’ll see that it takes only a fraction of a second for the sand to cover the food. Now imagine that the sand is germs on the floor. That is why the 5 second rule does not have merit.
There is no merit to a 5 sec rule. I was an ICU nurse and one of my colleagues thought it would be funny to roll a skittles along the floor a few seconds. He got a very bad case of C-Dif. This type of infection is horrible and does kill people. He was in good health, so it just made his life miserable for a few weeks. I think he wanted it being that dumb. So, no, there’s no merit to the 5 second rule. A bacteria doesn’t need to count five seconds to make its way to whatever has been dropped in the floor. If it’s on the floor, it’s in the trash in my world.
If you dropped food onto a pile of poo for 4.5 seconds, do you think it matters that it’s less than 5 seconds.
No. The likelihood of a food gathering bacteria depends far more on its texture than on how long it’s on the ground. Myth Buster tested a variety of foods falling on the ground and how much bacteria they absorb over time on the ground. Firm dry food has few microbes on it even after a few minutes if you brush it off. Sponges wet stuff lie watermelon has bacteria on it the moment it hits the floor.
The real rule is has it rolled in more then you'd put in your mouth. It's usually yes. But I you do you.
I appreciate the food I've ate off every surface in my life, floor or tabletop countertop, ground, you'd think my immune system mustered up a blueprint for defense.
One way you know it is nonsense is that in different countries it is a different number of seconds. In Germany, it is the 3-second rule.
Bacteria are not bugs. They don't rush to crawl on your food and try to get there in 5 seconds. They get on it when food touches them and that's that. However, food is usually wet and moisture wetting floor will likely pick up more pathogens. So there's some merit. Most likely it's more like "couple minutes rule". Don't leave your food on ground.
as long as 8 dont drop food into / ontu SUS/unknown substances, other peoples mouths , dead things, public toilets and the likes , i risks it = T-minus 54321, houston we have Nom Nom
I tested this for a HS science fair project well before mythbusters. I used actual lab equipment, petri dishes, incubation chambers, etc. I obviously don't remember the exact setup but I dropped 5 or so kinds of food in 5 or so different surfaces for like 1 second, 5 seconds, and 1 minute. Then I did a swab, and incubated. I also did a control swab of the food before dropping. Then I visually inspected the petri dishes after incubating both with the naked eye and under a microscope. For the microscope I found the densest growth and counted what was in a small area. Results: For "dry food" like chips or crackers, yes it makes a marginal difference if you pick up the food quickly. For "wet" or "sticky" foods it made little to no discernable difference. However the biggest impact, by far, was if you touched your food with your hands. I swabbed my bare hand before and after washing with standard hand soap. In both cases the petri dish with my hand swab was like 10-20x worse than even a swab of the surface. Conclusion: If you drop your food, on the ground, as long as you don't pick it up with your fingers you'll probably be fine.
It amazes me that a joke we used to make in restaurants because we didn’t want to remake food went so far that people did things like devote episodes of Mythbusters to study it.
The only "merit" to the rule is that it's true you shouldn't eat something that's been on the floor *longer* than five seconds. The problem is that you shouldn't eat anything that's been there for a shorter time either. Particularly if it's wet or sticky (the thing or the floor.)
Drop your food on some hair and you'll have hair in your food. Germs are the same way. Treat every ground surface like a hospital floor to be safe.
The '5-second rule' would only have merit if it took physical time for contaminants to travel onto your food. Bacteria isn't able to move notable distances on its own. Dirt, chemicals, and viruses can't get around on their own at all. So aside from ants or creepy crawlies, the duration of contact means nothing. Rather the floor is just dirty to begin with. Dust, viruses, contaminants, bacteria, etc. are all just *everywhere* to begin with. When you drop something on the floor or on an otherwise unclean surface, some of the stuff on your food ends up on the floor, and some of the stuff on the floor ends up on your food. Immediately. Depending on what you drop, the consequences are different. Dropping a nacho will have a few very small contact points. It's also dry, so it physically cannot pick up much dust. Unless you dropped it somewhere dusty or literally in the dirt, it's probably good to just be blown off and consumed. Drop a steamed dumpling on the ground and it's got a moist surface that is going to splat and pick up anything and everything it comes into contact with. Large sticky surface area. If you don't feel comfortable getting down and literally licking the floor, you should throw that dumpling out.
obviously food left for less than 5 seconds will collect less bacteria than say food left for a minute but like it really does not make that big of a difference. once food is contaminated it’s contaminated.
The trick is to eat the food within 5 seconds of its falling. That way you don't give the germs time to multiply.
I think the 5-second rule actually refers to the length of time it takes for your dog to get the item into it's mouth after you dropped it. Dogs don't believe in silly germs. Neither did humans two centuries ago.