Total Recall

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM · November 17, 2011 · Volume 6

4.7/5 - (9 votes)

Salmonella, the leading cause of food poisoning-related death, can survive most common egg cooking methods—including scrambled, over-easy, and sunny side up. Cross-contamination onto fingers, utensils, or kitchen surfaces may pose an additional threat.

Discuss

Transcript

Last year, a half billion eggs were recalled. The industry mantra remained: stop whining, completely cooked is completely safe. Notice, though, that they never tell you what “completely cooked” means. Research funded by the egg industry itself found that Salmonella can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods. Sunny side-up was the worst. The paper ends bluntly: “The sunny-side-up method should be considered unsafe.” May be the best-kept secret within the egg industry. They know it’s unsafe, but are they out there warning customers? Of course not. And this wasn’t funded by some consumer group, some anti-egg group, but by the American Egg Board itself.

Earlier research shows Salmonella can survive in omelets and French toast as well. Even boiling eggs up to eight minutes straight may be insufficient to eradicate the threat. Bottom line? If there are high enough titers of Salmonella, no standard cooking method provides complete Salmonella destruction.

Fine, but what if you do boil all your eggs for ten minutes? Even if you incinerate them, buying eggs is not completely safe, and this is why. Before you reduce your eggs safely to ash, Salmonella can get on your fingers, your kitchen utensils, and sometimes stays there even after washing.

No one in their right mind would eat raw eggs these days, but you whip up a cake batter, and Salmonella can end up on your counter 40 centimeters away from the mixing bowl. And then it just sits there, and could still potentially infect someone touching that kitchen surface a day later. So the day after you bake a cake all the way through—heck, you could burn the cake, and still, someone in our family could end up in the hospital, grabbing an apple sitting on the counter.

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 Peter Mellor.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Sources

Acknowledgements

Image thanks to Rosalyn Davis / Flickr

Topics

Last year, a half billion eggs were recalled. The industry mantra remained: stop whining, completely cooked is completely safe. Notice, though, that they never tell you what “completely cooked” means. Research funded by the egg industry itself found that Salmonella can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods. Sunny side-up was the worst. The paper ends bluntly: “The sunny-side-up method should be considered unsafe.” May be the best-kept secret within the egg industry. They know it’s unsafe, but are they out there warning customers? Of course not. And this wasn’t funded by some consumer group, some anti-egg group, but by the American Egg Board itself.

Earlier research shows Salmonella can survive in omelets and French toast as well. Even boiling eggs up to eight minutes straight may be insufficient to eradicate the threat. Bottom line? If there are high enough titers of Salmonella, no standard cooking method provides complete Salmonella destruction.

Fine, but what if you do boil all your eggs for ten minutes? Even if you incinerate them, buying eggs is not completely safe, and this is why. Before you reduce your eggs safely to ash, Salmonella can get on your fingers, your kitchen utensils, and sometimes stays there even after washing.

No one in their right mind would eat raw eggs these days, but you whip up a cake batter, and Salmonella can end up on your counter 40 centimeters away from the mixing bowl. And then it just sits there, and could still potentially infect someone touching that kitchen surface a day later. So the day after you bake a cake all the way through—heck, you could burn the cake, and still, someone in our family could end up in the hospital, grabbing an apple sitting on the counter.

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 Peter Mellor.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Image thanks to Rosalyn Davis / Flickr

Doctor's Note

Egg-borne Salmonella is a relatively new disease. Our grandparents could drink eggnog, and eat raw cookie dough, with wild abandon—without fear of joining the more than a thousand Americans who die every year from Salmonella poisoning. Before the industrial intensification of egg production, Salmonella Enteritidis was not even found in eggs in the United States. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, Salmonella Enteritidis-contaminated eggs were sickening an estimated 182,000 Americans annually. Factory farming practices, such as forced starvation molting, feeding live hens “spent hen meal,” and overcrowding hens into barren “battery” cages so small they can’t even spread their wings, have contributed to the epidemic of egg-borne Salmonella poisoning.

In fact, just today, a story broke on Good Morning America about Sparboe Farms—our country’s fifth largest egg producer and supplier (until today) for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins. An undercover investigation found what the FDA noted were serious violations of federal Salmonella regulations. See my other Factory Farming Practices videos for more on the subject.

For more context, check out my associated blog posts: Eggs, Cigarettes, and Atherosclerosis, and Why Is Selling Salmonella-Tainted Chicken Legal?

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