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You may have come across someone who accidentally dropped their food on the floor and quickly picked it up while saying “five second rule”, implicating that the food is still in good condition to eat. The researchers at the Manchester Metropolitan University decided to test out this theory, in order to determine whether or not food gets contaminated once dropped for a few seconds.
They chose common items to test, such as pasta, ham, bread and dried fruit, and they dropped them for different periods of time and then swabbed them. The study found that foods with higher salt or sugar content were at minimal risk of picking up bacteria.
Another study conducted by Discovery Channels ‘Mythbusters’ program found that it didn’t matter whether the food was dropped for three or six seconds, the same amount of bacteria clung to the food. So next time you drop your food on the floor and decide to eat it, remember that it only takes as little as three seconds to pick up serious bacteria.
