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You know the “Five-Second Rule”? It says that when you drop a piece of delicious food, as long as you pick it up within five seconds it’s fine to eat. If it’s something less good, like a Circus Peanut, you should just toss it. (???)
A microbiologist on TikTok put the rule to the test. He put a petri dish on the ground for various time limits ranging from zero seconds to one minute . . . and then cultivated the samples to see which developed bacteria.
In his experiment, EVERY sample had evidence of microbial growth, showing that no amount of floor time is safe when it comes to contamination.
The samples didn’t all come back the same. But they did not trend worse the longer they’d been on the floor. The five-second dish had about the same amount of microbes as the sample that was left on the floor for a minute.
(Here’s the TikTok. One person joked, “Okay, but what if you blow the germs off AFTER you’ve dropped it?”)
(In a previous poll, 44% of people said they follow the Five-Second Rule. And the average person eats food off the floor FOUR times per month.)
