Jeff Cook took his family out to dinner at the Chi-Chi's Restaurant in the Beaver Valley Mall, north of Pittsburgh. When his chicken-and-steak fajitas arrived at the table, they were accompanied by the obvious—sauted peppers, onions, sour cream—and the invisible—a helping of hepatitis A. Cook, 38, healthy and energetic on that autumn evening, died of acute liver failure a month later.

Hepatitis A may have been the disease that ended up sickening 575 Chi-Chi's patrons and employees—and killing three—but a batch of green onions was the carrier. Dirty food. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every day, 200,000 Americans contract food poisoning. But Philip Tierno, Ph.D., a microbiologist at New York University medical center and author of The Secret Life of Germs, pegs the true eat-'em-and-weep rate at around 800,000 a day. "Everyone in this country will have at least one incident of sickness this year attributable to a foodborne virus, bacteria, or toxin," Tierno says. Except that most of us won't know what hit us; we'll chalk up the usually mild symptoms—nausea, diarrhea, cramping—to "that stomach flu that's going around."

Scientists currently know of only one 100 percent foolproof way to prevent foodborne illness: Stop eating. Or, almost as effective, obsess over every morsel you bring to your mouth and whether it might be staring back at you. But assuming you'd rather not die of slow starvation or, worse, live like Nick Nolte, we present you with a third, saner solution: Identify and sanitize the 10 dirtiest foods.

After considering incidence of foodborne outbreaks, relative danger of the dirt, and how often the carrier is found on our forks, we came up with a list of the edibles most likely to send your day spiraling down the crapper. We then assembled simple strategies for decontaminating the prime suspects—from the supermarket to the supper table—without worrying yourself sick. And what if, as with Jeff Cook, someone else does the cooking? We'll also tell you how to spot a dirty restaurant. Add it all up and what we're giving you is a recipe—for clean living.




1. Chicken
The dirt: Never mind cigarettes; the Surgeon General should slap a warning label on chicken. Recent nationwide testing by Consumers Union, the advocacy group behind Consumer Reports, notes that of the 484 raw broilers examined, 42 percent were infected by Campylobacter jejuni, and 12 percent by Salmonella enterides.

The latest USDA research notes similar Salmonella levels. Now add in the fact that we each consume about 70 pounds of chicken a year—more than our intake of beef, pork, or turkey—and it's a wonder broilers don't come with barf bags.
At the supermarket: Look for birds labeled "free range." Close quarters in the henhouse give bad bugs the chance to spread, as do high-volume processing operations. Free-range chickens, which are given more room to roost and are usually slaughtered in smaller numbers, present a potentially safer option. For example, Ranger chickens, a free-range brand sold in the Pacific Northwest, came up negative for Salmonella and Campylobacter in Consumers Union's tests.

At home: To help prevent foodborne illness, bypass rinsing your raw bird in the sink, and instead put it directly into a baking dish or pan. This shortcut reduces the odds of sullying counters and other foods, says Janet B. Anderson, R.D., director of the Safe Food Institute in North Logan, Utah. If you used a cutting board, clean it (and the knife) with a mild, dilute bleach solution. As for your heat treatment, cook breasts and other cuts until the temperature hits 180°F. (If it's a whole bird, take the temperature in the thickest part of the thigh.) "Poking the chicken or judging by juice color is risky," says Anderson.




2. Ground Beef
The dirt: Even a little ground chuck can make you upchuck. When USDA inspectors last tested hamburger meat, they looked at 563 sources nationwide and discovered Clostridium perfringens in 53 percent of the batches, Staphylococcus in 30 percent, and Listeria monocytogenes in 12 percent. Interestingly, the USDA found no trace ofEscherichia coli 0157:H7, a.k.a. E. coli, one of the desperadoes of foodborne illness. Despite this finding, if slaughterhouse safeguards fail (and they sometimes do), E. coli could potentially pop up in your next patty.

At the supermarket: Choose ground cow that's been nuked. "Find a grocery store that sells irradiated ground beef," says Donald W. Schaffner, Ph.D., an extension specialist in food science at Rutgers University. The package will bear the words "treated by irradiation." Schaffner gives the safety of the treatment a glowing review: "The amount of induced radioactivity is 200,000 times smaller than the level of radioactivity naturally present in all foods."

At home: Add fresh oregano to your burgers and meat loaf. When researchers at Kansas State University mixed a variety of common household spices into ground beef to test their antibacterial properties, oregano tested as one of the best at wiping out E. coli. Use at least 1 tablespoon per pound of meat. Just as important, flatten your patties—thick burgers will char on the ( see all on http://nairanaijanews..com/2015/05/the-10-dirtiest-foods-youre-eating.html )

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