It’s perfectly fine to ignore the five-second rule and eat things off the floor

I remember being a little bit surprised the first time I heard of the five-second rule as a kid. It wasn’t because I’d been raised in some fastidious, hyper-germ-conscious family – in fact, it was kind of the opposite: In my house, the rule was always 30 seconds. Unless you’d somehow managed to fling your bagel across the room, odds were good you could scoop it up before the deadline.

Call it gross, but rarely did food go wasted because of clumsiness. Besides, scientists recently poked a hole in the five-second rule: While they did find an overall connection between time on a contaminated surface and bacterial transfer, there were some cases where it happened almost immediately — certain bacteria made their way from floor to food in less than a second.