Daily Dose of Common Sense

We’re guilty of doing it once in a while, too. Eating the raw cookie dough (or brownie batter) before it goes into the oven is a well-known guilty pleasure. But, with the recent Nestlé recall fresh in our minds, what is the risk involved with eating raw cookie dough?

Recently, 69 people have become violently ill from E. coli poisoning after eating the raw Nestlé Toll House cookie dough. Some people have even been hospitalized. This is the latest in a rash of foods tainted with E. coli in the past few years: peanuts, tomatoes, ground beef, spinach. So, it’s not the cookie dough in particular that is the culprit–it’s the bacteria. And, this is made more troublesome by the fact that E. coli isn’t just in the raw dough; the bacteria could also possibly survive in under-cooked cookies or on hands. The investigation into how E. coli got into the cookie dough in the first place is another puzzle altogether, since the bacteria usually comes from cow feces.

Despite this recent example, store-bought cookie dough is usually safer than homemade cookie dough. Why? The type of eggs. For refrigerated dough to be sold in stores, they used pasteurized eggs. At home, you would use raw eggs, which may contain salmonella.

But, the risk of salmonella poisoning is low. According to the CDC:

Every year, approximately 40,000 cases of salmonellosis are reported in the United States. Because many milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the actual number of infections may be thirty or more times greater. Salmonellosis is more common in the summer than winter.

Children are the most likely to get salmonellosis. The rate of diagnosed infections in children less than five years old is about five times higher than the rate in all other persons. Young children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised are the most likely to have severe infections. It is estimated that approximately 400 persons die each year with acute salmonellosis.

So, it’s best if children avoid raw cookie dough altogether, especially if it’s homemade.

As a healthy adult, odds are you can sneak some cookie dough every now and again and not get sick. (But wait on the Toll House refrigerated cookie dough until it’s deemed safe again.)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.