Fruits and vegetables poison more Americans than beef and chicken
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Every year, millions of Americans get sick from the things they eat and drink. But it's not always the foods you'd expect that poison people.
According to an estimate from the CDC, produce causes nearly half of all food-borne illnesses, while dairy and eggs cause 20 percent, meat and poultry are the culprits in only 22 percent of cases, and fish and shellfish just 6 percent.
To break down the numbers even further, a new CDC report from the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration looked at data on US outbreaks between 2008 and 2012. In order to really home in on what contributes to food poisoning, the researchers looked at outbreaks that were caused by one of four of the most common pathogens — E. coli, Campylobacter, salmonella, and listeria — and that could be attributed to a single food category. (Note: Many food-borne illnesses are never attributed to a source, and some are not caused by bacteria but instead things like mold, parasites, or allergies.)
The research team came to a counterintuitive finding: produce and eggs were the most common culprits of food poisoning — not beef, fish, or poultry.
Why is produce making so many people sick?
Food-borne outbreaks by different commodities, 2001–2010. You can see produce has for a while been the leading cause of food poisoning. (Via Center for Science in the Public Interest)
This paper wasn’t the first to come to the conclusion that more people are now sickened by their salads than by their hamburgers, and researchers have pointed to a number of different drivers of this trend.
First of all, there’s the obvious: we tend to eat produce raw. “So there’s no cook step to decrease any contamination that might be there as you have for some of the other foods,” explained Dr. Chris Braden, director of CDC’s division of food-borne, water-borne, and environmental diseases.
People are simply eating more fresh produce these days than they did just a few years ago. This means there’s more risk of exposure to pathogens that may be lurking in fruits and veggies.
Some of the processes farms have in place to clean produce actually trap bacteria in the plants, making them impossible to wash away. There are also types of bacteria that you simply can’t wash off, or the contamination happens in places you typically don’t splash with water, like inside the fruit or vegetable after entering through a core, opening, or bruise.
Cross-contamination on farms that harvest produce and raise animals, or in big processing facilities, is a problem. And sometimes it’s the food itself that’s the issue. Sprouts, for example, are seen by food-borne-illness experts as a public-health menace: As the CDC notes, “Sprouts are unique among foods in that the conditions for sprouting are also perfect for bacterial growth, and they are not cooked after that.”
What about eggs?
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Chickens at a hatchery in Alabama. (Buyenlarge/Getty)
Eggs are also a big source of food poisoning through salmonella. As you can see from our chart, they were the most common cause of food-borne illness in the sample the researchers looked at, and overall, they are the source of about one-fifth of the food poisoning cases in the US.
Chicken feces on the outer shell of an egg can make people sick, but the CDC says there’s a new challenge: in the 1980s, an “epidemic” of salmonella trapped inside clean eggshells started and still continues today. This type of salmonella infects the ovaries of hens, so it can’t just be cleaned away.
How not to get sick
There’s an easy way to avoid sickness from bad eggs: don’t eat them raw. Cooking will kill off most harmful bacteria. But if you can’t help yourself, here are some (lightly edited) tips from the FDA on how to minimize your risk of food poisoning:
- Buy produce that is not bruised or damaged.
- If you buy precut produce — pineapple chunks, bagged salad greens — select those that are refrigerated or iced.
- When packing your groceries, separate the fresh fruits and vegetables from meat, poultry, and seafood products.
- Store perishable fresh fruits and vegetables (like strawberries, lettuce, herbs, and mushrooms) in a clean refrigerator at a temperature of 40°F or below.
- Make sure to wash cutting boards, dishes, utensils, and countertops with soap and hot water between the preparation of raw meat, poultry, and seafood products and the preparation of produce that will not be cooked.
- If you use plastic or other non-porous cutting boards, run them through the dishwasher after use.
- Cut away any damaged or bruised areas on fresh fruits and vegetables before preparing and/or eating.
- Wash all produce thoroughly under running water before eating, cutting, or cooking.
- Even if you plan to peel the produce before eating, wash it first.
- Scrub firm produce such as melons and cucumbers with a clean produce brush.
- Dry produce with a clean cloth towel or paper towel to further reduce bacteria that may be present.
A couple of other things to keep in mind: the overall benefits of eating fresh produce massively outweigh the small risk of food poisoning.
"People really do need a balanced and nutritious diet, including fruits and vegetables, but there are some things they do," said Dr. Braden. These things are as simple as "cleaning, separating, chilling," he added. "Refrigeration is a great mitigator of the risk potential."
If you take these precautions, you can avoid being sickened by your food. And if you’re otherwise healthy, the chances that you’ll become really ill from the stuff you eat are even lower. So just be careful, and if you start showing the classic signs of food poisoning — diarrhea, cramps, vomiting, fever — see a doctor.
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