Dan's Papers - June 29, 2007 - Five Second Rule

We all know the rule. Drop some food onto the floor and, if you can pick it up within five seconds and eat it, it's okay. It's the five-second rule.

Now somebody has done a real-life scientific study about the five-second rule. The team that did this was at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. Heading the study was Anne Bernhard, an assistant professor of biology. And assisting her were two students, Molly Goettesche and Nicole Moin.

What they did was go to the school cafeteria with a basket of skittles and a basket of apple slices and drop these items onto the linoleum and leave them there for various intervals.

"It's a real-life study," professor Bernhard said. "About 2,000 students a day come through here. And the floor is cleaned occasionally by staff. We took a shot. That's real life."

After the certain interval, the skittles and apple slices were picked up and placed into a petri dish and stored overnight in a lab. Twenty-four hours later, the items were studied to see if they were contaminated. The results were tallied.

The food items were dropped and left on the floor for five seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes. It was found that the five-second rule is wrong. Nothing got contaminated with e-coli bacteria from the five-second drop, not from the ten second drop or even from the 30-second drop.

Those pieces of apple that got dropped and left for one minute, however, were covered with millions of colonies of bacteria the next day. And if you ate them then, they could make you sick.

For the skittles, even for those dropped for one minute, there were no colonies of bacteria. It was only at five minutes that the skittles got contaminated.

"The five second rule should be the 30-second rule," Professor Bernhardt concluded.

And then, in the report, there were caveats. The report was only good for apple slices and skittles. It might be different with jello, or pretzels or fried chicken. Who knew what happened when you tried to scoop up a scoop of ice cream? So don't try this at home. We cannot be held responsible for any damages incurred by anyone else who tries this experiment and gets sick.

Interestingly, there was a study done in 2003 about the five second rule, but it was not real life. In a lab, Julian Clarke, a high school intern at the University of Illinois, dropped various kinds of food on a linoleum floor that had previously been coated with a smear of e-coli bacteria. Using gummy bears and cookie pieces, Julian Clarke determined that the safety time was five seconds. When six seconds pass, it's too late. Bacteria everywhere. And this is probably where the original five-second rule had its beginnings.

However, in real life, people don't go around coating their kitchen floors with bacteria. So with the newer study, it turns out thirty seconds is more like it. Bon Appetit.

What I really want to know has to do with bottled water. Fiji Water is my favorite. They take it out from under the coral on the island of Fiji and they bring it by freighter to a bottling plant in America and then it gets to my grocer's shelf and then, for $2, to me.

I take a sip at 11 at night and screw the top back on. I set it down on the kitchen table. And then I leave it there. The next morning, I show up for breakfast and wonder - have the germs from my lips now contaminated my water? I just don't know. What if this were just later last night, say three a.m. when I got up instead of eight a.m.? Surely it would have been safe to drink at three a.m. under these circumstances.

There are an enormous number of variables associated with this. It could be some stranger who took the swig. It could be my son. It could be my girlfriend. It could be my dog. Each is different.

I could have left it there with the cap off. I could have left it with the cap off, but in the refrigerator. I could have left it with the cap on in the refrigerator.

I could have left it four hours or four days. How about two weeks? This is water from Fiji! All that way! I don't want it to have come all this way and then I just pour it down the sink.

This is a call to all you professors and assistant professors and interns out there in academialand. Let's get it done. I know, I know, the various possible results would fill a book. Help!