The Recipe Doctor
From low-fat recipes to recipes designed for persons with diabetes, Elaine Magee, MPH, RD, shares recipes and advice to create healthy meals that are guaranteed to please. [Editor's note: Elaine no longer contributes to Silver Planet, but we have made her archived blog entries available as a service to our readers.]
The Main Culprits in Food Poisoning
Beware the raw
What foods are most likely to lead to food poisoning?
If I’m in a questionable restaurant, particularly when I’m traveling, I tend to avoid meat and go vegetarian. This sounds like a good way to decrease the odds of food poisoning from contaminated meat, but it doesn’t eliminate it if the vegetables were in contact with anything that was also in contact with the contaminated meat (say a spoon or cutting board). Here are some facts to chew on before eating out:
FACT: Raw foods of animal origin are the most likely to be contaminated. This includes raw meat and poultry, raw eggs, unpasteurized milk, and raw shellfish.
FACT: Filter-feeding shellfish (such as scallops, oysters, clams) are particularly prone to contamination if pathogens are in their seawater, because they strain microbes from the sea over many months.
FACT: Foods/products that pool together the meat or foods from many individual animals are particularly hazardous because a pathogen present in any one of the animals may contaminate the whole batch. Here are some examples:
- Bulk raw milk: A glass of raw milk may contain milk from hundreds of cows.
- Pooled raw eggs: A single restaurant omelet may contain eggs from hundreds of chickens.
- Ground beef: A single hamburger may contain meat from hundreds of animals.
FACT: Fruits and vegetables eaten raw can also present a risk of food poisoning. Alfalfa sprouts and other raw sprouts pose a particular challenge, because (1) the conditions under which they are sprouted are ideal for growing microbes and (2) sprouts are usually eaten without further cooking.
Washing can decrease but not eliminate contamination. Recent outbreaks in raw spinach and other vegetables have shown that using dirty water for washing the produce after it is harvested can contaminate many boxes and bags of produce. Fresh manure used to fertilize vegetables can also contaminate them. Unpasteurized fruit juice can also be contaminated if pathogens are in or on the fruit that is used to make it.
By Elaine Magee, MPH, RD
The Recipe
Doctor Blog
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