Is It Really That Bad To Eat Cookie Dough?

What’s the worst that can happen?

The news is not eggs-cellent

Let’s crack into it:

Salmonella is a bacterium that infects millions of people each year, causing fever, stomach cramps, and diarrhea, and is the leading cause of hospitalizations and deaths from food poisoning. Chickens often carry it without symptoms, allowing it to spread into developing eggs and onto eggshells.

How it does things is quite well-developed: Salmonella survives stomach acid by producing acid shock proteins, then senses immune defenses in the intestines and activates pathogenicity islands that build a needle-like secretion system. This system injects effector proteins into intestinal cells, forcing them to engulf the bacteria, which then use the cells’ machinery to multiply and spread.

You might be wondering about symptoms and complications: infected intestinal cells release cytokines that trigger inflammation, recruiting white blood cells to attack infected cells and bacteria. This immune response causes fever and abdominal pain while damaging the intestinal lining, reducing water absorption and causing watery diarrhea that in an otherwise healthy person usually clears the infection within 2–7 days without antibiotics. Severe (and potentially deadly) dehydration can occur, especially in children and older people, and in some cases the bacteria spread through immune cells to other organs or the bloodstream.

Some kinds of Salmonella are worse than others. For example, Salmonella typhi spreads from person to person through poor sanitation and contaminated drinking water rather than from chickens, causing typhoid fever, which still kills over 100,000 people each year. Vaccines are available to prevent infection, but aren’t always as well-distributed as they could be.

On a practical level, reducing the risk of Salmonella includes washing your hands, avoiding unpasteurized milk, cooking meat and eggs thoroughly, and yes, avoiding raw cookie dough because the raw eggs can carry the bacteria.

The video gives the example of how the 2010 Iowa egg outbreak exposed unhygienic farming conditions, bribery of health officials, and mislabeled eggs, leading to thousands of illnesses, millions of recalled eggs, and jail sentences for industry executives. Since then (and until recently), the United States strengthened egg safety regulations (and even with recent huge cuts, Salmonella is one of the few things they still test for at the retail level), while many European countries have reduced Salmonella through vaccinating hens, and mandatory testing on farms themselves and before products reach store shelves.

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Take care!