To eat or not to eat; that is the question?
Tis the season to be in the kitchen with your kids whipping up the likes of Snowballs, Wintermint Wafers, and Peanut Butter Blossoms… fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
Of course, Christmas is not complete without baking a few batches of traditional chocolate chip cookies to dunk into a piping hot mug of cocoa.
And by dunk I mean plunge deep into the boiling hot abyss of the popular seasonal drink because if your cookie is undercooked this may be the only way you can heat it up to a point that it’s safe to consume.
If you want to experience a jolly holiday, then forget about giving into your kids’ whines to down a few teaspoons of raw cookie dough while you are in the process of bonding in the kitchen. According to a new report, you could be in for a world of hurt if you sneak in too many spoonfuls of uncooked cookie batter.
MSNBC revealed the details of the new study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it’s not pretty.
Actually, it is pretty… gross.
The report’s lead author, Dr. Karen Neil, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC, says ooey gooey raw cookie dough is chock full of germs, including E coli.
“What our report shows is that you shouldn’t eat cookie dough raw, no matter where it comes from,” Neil warns. “It’s supposed to be baked.”
The CDC’s study was initiated following the 2009 hospitalization of nearly three dozen people who had consumed raw cookie dough. After learning about the outbreak, government health experts were able to track down cookie dough manufacturing plants where E coli was present in multiple samples.
Whereas Neil and her colleagues were not able to pinpoint the exact ingredient that caused the severe illnesses, they claim that flour might have been the culprit since it does not go through the same processing to kill off bacteria that ingredients like pasteurized eggs, sugar, baking soda, and margarine do.
Bottom line: As tempting as it may be this holiday season, don’t be dipping into raw cookie dough, unless you want to spend Christmas hanging your head over a toilet instead of under some mistletoe.
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