Thursday, March 27, 2008
Almost everyone is guilty. You and your friends gather around a bowl of salsa or queso, and you find that after one bite, you still have a bit of chip left. So you dip again. Bad move: Double dipping spreads tons of bacteria.
Double dipping
Paul Dawson, a food microbiologist and professor at Clemson University, conducted a recent study with a team of undergraduates on the effects of double dipping. He says that three successive double dips spread about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the communal bowl. With each bite, a person piles approximately one to two grams of dip on a chip or cracker, and thus, consumes 50 to 100 bacteria from someone else’s mouth. Dawson says the type of dip makes a difference in the spread of bacteria. If a dip is more viscous, or thick, more dip sticks to the chip, leaving fewer bacteria remaining in the bowl. But with runny dips, lots of germs slide off the chip and are left floating behind. Thus, more bacteria loom in salsa than in cheese dip or bean dip.
Dawson says that simply turning a chip around after one bite may not be enough to prevent bacteria transfer. While this may lower the amount of bacteria from saliva, it increases the amount from your hands. He recommends getting a new chip every time. Buy smaller chips that accommodate one trip to the dip. And the next time you’re tempted by the aroma of warm queso at a party, look around at all the people sampling from that bowl. If you wouldn’t fancy kissing all of them, you should probably back away from the dip.
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