i’ve always wondered this. i just toothpicked something that my toothbrush missed out and it’s made me think.
say you haven’t flossed in a while and have a bit of chicken you ate a few days ago stuck inbetween ur teeth that you didn’t know about. it’s definitely not fresh, so why doesn’t it make us sick?
is it not the same as eating something you left out for a while?
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I believe it technically could get you sick if it was contaminated, but it would be unlikely. The food you ate was probably cooked properly. Meanwhile, your body has defense mechanisms. Your mouth is not as suitable of an environment as an open piece of food.
There are multiple ways food could get you sick, but if we are talking about leaving food out, I’ll focus on the growth of organisms that can multiply.
Think about a piece of chicken with two salmonella bacteria as a pond with two bacteria. There’s a riddle they ask you in school: the bacteria double each day, and by day 30 the pond is covered. What percentage of the pond was covered on day 29?
The answer is half. The bacteria, when uninterrupted, will double, so half of the pond will then turn into the full pond the next day.
If you leave a piece of chicken out with salmonella in favorable living conditions it will multiply. This increases the chances of the bacteria getting past your bodies defenses. You can further assist your bodies defenses by cooking the food to the recommended temperature and time, so you lower the amount of bacteria that is alive.
It’s a numbers game. Small pieces of cooked food have a lower chance of being contaminated with an alive bacteria. With no bacteria there is no multiplying. If there were some bacteria that survived, now they have to get past your bodies defenses.
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