Getting some bacteria with your food is the risk you take if you eat birthday cake after the candles have been blown out, dip a chip in salsa after someone else double-dips or eat toast that has fallen on the floor — yes, even just for five seconds.
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Paul Dawson, a food scientist and professor at Clemson University, has made it his mission for 30 years to understand how our common food habits may be increasing the spread of bacteria. Of course, the risk of becoming ill is typically low, but swapping bacteria through food can increase the chances.
Some commonly practiced food habits that may be dangerous :
1.Eating birthday cake after the candles have been blown out
Blowing out candles on a birthday cake is a tradition that some scholars say dates to ancient Greece. But because your mouth contains bacteria that can spread through blowing, the practice is pretty dirty. Paul Dawson said. “I don’t know the chance of this occurring, but in fact if someone is sick, carrying a disease, and blows on the birthday cake, there is going to be bacterial transfer.”
2. dipping a chip in salsa after someone else double-dips
Paul Dawson and his team put chips in three types of dip with different pH levels and consistencies: salsa, chocolate syrup and queso.
No mouth bacteria were found in the dips when chips were dipped only once. But when double-dipping occurred, there were much higher bacterial populations in the dip. And the type mattered: Salsa that had been double-dipped had five times more bacteria than the chocolate and cheese.
Dawson attributed this to some basic food science principles.
“Common sense tells you that if you bite it and dip it in the salsa and more of it falls back into the bowl and doesn’t stick to the chip, then there’s going to be more bacteria going back in the bowl with it,” he said.
Thick chocolate syrup and cheese dip are more likely to stay on a chip, resulting in less bacterial transfer.
3. Eating food that has fallen on the floor
Dawson and his students set out to understand the truth behind this food trope.
They spread salmonella bacteria on tile, carpet and wood. After five minutes, they put down bologna or bread and left it there for five, 30 or 60 seconds. They did the same thing after bacteria had been on the surface for two, four, eight and 24 hours.

“There was enough bacterial transfer in five seconds that from a practical standpoint, it’s not a really good idea to eat food from the floor,” Dawson said.
He said he doesn’t think it’s time on the floor that matters so much, but rather the type and amount of bacteria.
Donald Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University, conducted the only other peer-reviewed five-second rule study. His findings, published last year, confirmed Dawson’s and showed that longer contact times with a contaminated floor resulted in the transfer of more bacteria.
4. Sharing the same bowl of popcorn with others

Sharing a bowl of popcorn at movies, sporting events, fairs and concerts is common practice. And it seems to carry only a very low risk of bacterial transmission.
Dawson and his team spread a noninfectious E. coli strain on people’s hands and then measured how much was transferred to the popcorn they picked up and the kernels left in the bowl. Though they observed that bacteria transferred to both the popcorn in the hand and the popcorn in the bowl, the rate of transfer was only 0.2% and 0.0009%, respectively.
Of 136 tests, 24 resulted in no bacterial transfer to the popcorn at all.
5. Checking out the menu list
As soon as you sit down at a restaurant, the waiter hands over a menu. You flip through all the pages and check out the back to make sure you don’t miss anything delicious. But those restaurant menus are often not washed and can be another culprit in the spread of bacteria.
After collecting random samples of local restaurant menus and testing them for bacteria,Dawson and his team discovered that for the most part, there were low numbers of bacteria living on them. At busier restaurant times, higher numbers of bacteria were on menus than in less busy periods.
When the researchers contaminated the menus with E. coli, 11% of the bacteria were transferred to people’s hands. Low amounts of the bacteria were also able to survive on the menus over a period of one or two days.

Is eating bacteria actually bad?
Randy Worobo, a food microbiologist at Cornell University, agreed.
“I would say that a good rule is, if a person is sick, they really shouldn’t be sharing food or preparing food to share with other people,” he said. “You don’t want to end up like Typhoid Mary.”
Mary Mallon, who became known as Typhoid Mary, worked as cook in the early 1900s and spread typhoid to many people who ate her food despite never developing symptoms herself.
Worobo added that in situations involving bacteria on the floor, like the five-second rule and beer pong, most bacteria are probably normal organisms found in soil.
“But if ie has dripped and not been cleaned properly, that has the potential for campylobacter and salmonella to be present on the floor,” he said. “So safety really depends on what has been on the floor prior.”
How many of these habits are you guilty of?

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