Restaurant Worker Hand Washing

To avoid the cancer-or-E-coli conundrum, we could ask a restaurant to instead steam or boil our meat—but they’d still have to handle it correctly. You know how bathrooms in restaurants have that sign saying that employees have to wash their hands? Well, researchers at Iowa State University sent trained observers to 16 restaurants in the Midwest to count how often, and how well, restaurant employees washed their hands as they prepared our food.

How did they do? Now note they measured hand washing compliance with the U.S. Food Code guidelines, which are pretty strict—like you’re supposed to wash your hands every single time you switch from preparing one food, to another; like from meat to veggies. So it’s hard to score 100%. At the same time, they had a researcher sitting there, watching them, with a clipboard, the whole time.

So, are you so cynical that you think they complied less than 20% of the time? 20% to 40%? 40% to 60%? 60% to 80%? Any optimists for 80% to 100%?

Well, it wasn’t 80%-100% of the time. Or 60%-80%. Or even 40%-60%. “Thus, there was 0% compliance with Food Code recommendations for hand washing procedures.”

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.

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• K. M. Sullivan, M. A. Erickson, C. B. Sandusky, and N. D. Barnard. Detection of PhIP in grilled chicken entrées at popular chain restaurants throughout California. Nutr Cancer, 60(5):592-602, 2008.
• C. Strohbehn, J. Sneed, P. Paez, and J. Meyer. Hand washing frequencies and procedures used in retail food services. J. Food Prot., 71(8):1641-1650, 2008.

• food poisoning
• foodborne illness
• hand washing