It seems like every day there’s a food item “called out” for making one sick, with diarrhea, salmonella, listeria, norovirus, etc. After all, humans can easily spread viruses during food prep, and food-borne bacteria thrives at room temperature.
While you won’t necessarily get sick from ingesting just a small amount of bacteria, bacteria can double in number at room temperature (40 to 140 degrees) in as few as 20 minutes. And eating a lot of bacteria laden foods can make you sick with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, or worse if your immune system is already compromised.
With winter around the corner, we’ll all be at home cooking so much more. And who wants to be to be suffering with colds, flu… AND food poisoning?
Here are the foods to AVOID over the coming months to stay well.
1. Raw Sprouts
Many food safety experts put raw sprouts (e.g. alfalfa) high on their list of foods to avoid. That’s because alfalfa seeds can be contaminated with bacteria like E. coli — a particularly dangerous situation as sprouts are rarely cooked to kill bacteria. One nutrition expert explains: “if you want to eat sprouts, make sure they’re thoroughly rinsed and cooked”.
2. Leftover Soups, Stews, and Stir-Fries
When you don’t act promptly getting leftover food from the hob or restaurant into your fridge (the goal is to do it in two hours or less), toxin-producing spores can develop on your food, ultimately leading to illness, Hedberg explains. Moist, hearty foods (like stews, stir-fries, and meat sauces) are most likely to host these spores if you don’t reheat your meal to the proper temperature (about 165 degrees, and yes, you need a food thermometer).
3. Leftover Rice
Your leftover rice could be harboring the toxin-producing Bacillus cereus, a type of bacteria that is picked up in rice fields that can survive even after cooking. Eating a few spores probably won’t trigger any symptoms, but the spores multiply as rice cools. Eating a lot of them can give you diarrhea within 15 hours of your last bite, or nausea and vomiting as soon as 30 minutes after eating, according to FoodSafety.gov. Try to eat your rice freshly cooked, and don’t hang onto your leftovers (that you store in the fridge, of course) for much longer than a day.
4. Fruit Salad
Compared to a single apple, fruit salads can be handled by multiple people and eaten in multiple sittings. So, the food is exposed to more pathogens and sits around for longer — all the more opportunity for bacteria to fester. Fruit salads also contain produce from multiple farms or orchards, which increases the likelihood of contamination somewhere along the way.
