Five Second Rules Essay

You can almost taste the last chocolate truffle in the box. As you raise it to your lips, your mouth begins to water with delicious anticipation. And then -- oops! It slips out of your hand and lands (along with your sweet expectations) on the floor. But it's still intact. Do you a) apply the five second rule, pick up it, dust it off and eat it or b) throw it in the trash and head to the store for another box?
If you picked the second option, congratulations. You've just avoided consuming something covered with thousands of germs. If you picked choice A, however, you may be interested to know that the five second rule (no doubt invented by a kid eager to enjoy the last bite of his fallen Hershey bar) is a dirty little lie.
The idea that food scooped from the floor in less than five seconds would be free of germs was first disproved by high school student Jillian Clarke during her internship at the University of Illinois in 2003. Clarke coated tiles with E. coli bacteria and then proceeded to drop gummy bears and fudge-stripe cookies onto their surfaces. She not only found that bacteria certainly did jump onto the food in five seconds, she also uncovered some interesting facts about human behavior -- namely that women were more likely to eat food that had fallen than men, and that sweet treats were
The researchers tracked a potentially antibiotic-resistant human pathogen from a kitchen countertop to the hands of family members, but no one got sick. “It’s likely that we all carry around nasty pathogens all the time in our body,” Gilbert says. “People aren’t getting ill because of them.” So our immune systems are able to ward off many of the nastier bugs most of the time — as long as we’re relatively healthy. Gilbert believes that it’s only when our microflora are compromised or unbalanced that the bad bugs get the chance to attack