From my understanding, this article is only about professional dishwashers used in restaurants and hotels etc. that use much higher concentrations and less rinsing than consumer dishwashers. They specifically mention that they could not repeat their findings on consumer dishwashers.
There's a lesson in that first few sentences. Of course eating out is risky as it's a black box where you get food for putting money in it. You're not guaranteed quality or safety in the more subtle sense
I have to disagree, a person should be (and, at least to an extent is) guaranteed safety when dining out. Food safety regulations serve this purpose. They are probably not sufficient, admittedly, and ought to be updated to address such concerns as this paper raises, but every so often it impresses me that we have found a way for total strangers to create a thing that you voluntarily ingest without a second thought. We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.
Your statement is different in that it contains a "should":
The reason food safety regulations exist and are much stricter than what you need to apply at home is partly because it affects people at scale, and partly because individuals have no control of it.
So exactly because dining out can be unsafe, food safety should be strictly regulated ("guaranteed").
It seems that the disagreement is mostly how many expectations someone can put into a "guarantee".
> We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.
I completely agree. But I also want to add that it's an unstable equilibrium:
Some years apart you get some scandal where someone kept meat mostly frozen for 30 years.
Some people don’t understand that there are the letter and spirit of the law, and then there are the application and enforcement, and there is some flux in the middle of it all. People are imperfect, and people are the ones washing dishes, preparing food, and enforcing the health code. Things slip through the cracks at a nonzero rate.
If that bothers you, you just have to remember the old adage: “if you want something done right, diy.”
So far, to my knowledge, I've gotten food poisoning from something I cooked for myself exactly once, and that's because my 12 year old dumbass brain thought microwaving a steak for a few minutes was a valid was a valid way to cook it
Almost every time I've actually gotten sick from food has been eating out. I've also seen some close calls like when my fiancee was served 'rare' pork... Which isn't a culinary thing.
Rare pork is most certainly a thing! You are missing out.
The scare of pork is the risk of trichinella. To such such a degree that some speculate that is why Muslims have codified it as haram.
Trichinella is practically non-existant in domestic pigs in EU due to regulation/industry.
In the US you should take more care. You should however remember that cooking food safely is not a magic temperature but a function of temperature and time. The threshold for pork is then 63C because mostly everything unwanted is dead at that temperature.
But if you keep it at a lower temperature but for a longer time you will have the same effect. An easy way to do this is using "sous vide". Simply put a water bath at a constant temperature. This has the advantage that if you vacuum your meat it can go into the water straight from the freezer without defrosting first. I usually add one hour to the sous vide time to allow for defrosting time.
So I usually sous vide pork chops (from the neck) at 54C for some hours and then pan sear to finish the crust. With quality pork I honestly find this superior to a regular bovine steak!
Exactly. It is surprisingly hard to give yourself food poisoning if you cook for yourself.
On the other hand, like you, essentially every food poisoning I've had was dining out. Suburbs with lax food safety enforcement, city with some of the most rigorous inspection regimes in the country, wherever.
Once my wife & I both got food poisoning ordering completely different food, as though the entire food station was contaminated.
> It is surprisingly hard to give yourself food poisoning if you cook for yourself.
It's not hard at all if you're cooking chicken. All it can take is reusing the cutting board without washing.
If you're careful about it, it's hard. But plenty of people aren't careful. They think the risk is "overblown", they assume salmonella in chicken is as rare as salmonella in eggs.
This makes it pretty easy. And then they think they caught a stomach flu or something.
It's extremely common to get food poisoning at home, and for many people/cases it is indistinguishable from the flu.
Who separates meats in their fridge and on their cutting boards, dates the opening times of items, etc? Similarly, a home dishwasher doesn't actually sterilize anything, which is why its safer AFA chemicals. It's just providing the hope that small doses of something you've already interacted with won't cause sickness.
But once you've been sick from some contamination you won't really notice it, but guests might. Some restaurants run the same way as typical homes, and will be universally contaminated and someone who eats out regularly with variety is going to have similar consequences to being a guest in houses all over town..
I'm self-administering (unwittingly) mild food poisoning pretty regularly because I can't throw away food, particularly food that I spent precious time on cooking it myself.
Like a big pot of soup, some fried meat and whatever side dish like cooked cabbage. The idea is to spend the unpleasant cooking time once, put it all in the fridge then for a few days at least the whole effort is just to retrieve servings and heat them before eating.
Most of the times I finish what I cooked before starting to spoil but even spoiling isn't very sudden. Like I ate 5 days old soup yesterday and tasted a little funny but it was all good, no side effects. There's still a bowl left at the bottom of the pot today and by the time I'm hungry it's too late to start thinking and waiting for alternatives so what the heck. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I guess. Therefore it happens sometimes that I wakeup at 2 AM with an acute feeling that a bowel evacuation is imminent if you know what I mean :)
The trick is to once every couple of days when it's starting to get to that point where it'll go bad soon, take it out, and re-cook it somehow to kill any bacteria. This could be tossing soup back on the stove, or microwaving veggies steaming hot.
Also, it helps a lot to have strict sanitary standards for yourself, like always using a clean, fresh utensil to scoop out your servings. Or if you use the same one, start from the most-recently cooked food and end at the oldest, so you're not potentially introducing bacteria or mold from older stuff into newer stuff.
I eat leftovers sometimes up to maybe 10 days at max, but I am pretty good at avoiding any issues from it.
I presume you meant 'sous vide', aka stewing stuff in plastic bags. When talking about various chemical crap in food and around it, I find it hilarious that folks consider baking food they eat in plastic bag as something to not even pause and think about healthwise
Roasting meat in a microwave oven (without water in a covered glass vessel) is a valid cooking method, which provides tasty meat in a perfectly reproducible way and in a shorter time than traditional cooking.
Nevertheless, for good results it must be done at a low power (I use 440 W in a 1000 W oven) and a long time, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes for chicken, about 30 minutes for turkey and more for pork/beef. For organs, e.g. livers, hearts, gizzards, a somewhat shorter time is enough.
When done for the first time, experiments are needed to determine the optimal power and time, which depend on the type of oven and on the amount and kind of meat. Once determined, the results will always be the same and the meat is very tasty, because it loses nothing, except a part of the water content (roasted meat has typically 2/3 of the weight of raw meat, due to water loss).
The meat should be microwave-roasted after removing the bones, and preferably after being cut in bite-sized pieces, which will avoid too violent steam expulsions if the power level is set too high.
Note that it is a professional blackbox with regular oversight and heavy regulations (depending on area). Cooking at home is certainly transparent in comparison, it is also the work of a usually incompetent amateur with no proper training, zero oversight and zero regulations to adhere to.
Where I live, the former is far more trustworthy, with home dining only winning on price and ingredient choice - not safety.
Not a general solution by far, but for takeaway coffee I like to use a reCup reusable plastic cup: https://recup.de/mehrwegbecher/ that I never exchange and wash myself - Germany only so far, but you might find a similar product. Some places give a small discount for bringing your own cup.
> I can control what I use at home. I can't when I eat or drink out.
Of course you can, just pack a lunch. If your trip is longer than a day, then stop at grocery stores instead of restaurants. It's easy to avoid restaurants, so the failure to replicate this finding with residential dishwashers is good news. How could it be "even worse"?
> I can control what I use at home. I can't when I eat or drink out.
the same can be said about the enormous amounts of salt they put in food ... how do you insure people wash their hands when cooking? eating out is an exercise in trust.
Yes, but let me add my personal but - bottles for kids often have complex non leaking valves where detergent accumulates - as in you can see pieces of undissolved tablet every single time inside it. If missed it’ll affect little kids, every day, so be aware.
Constant debate between me and my significant other. She’s always annoyed that I go through and reorganize everything so that things drain and rinse properly.
This is not correct. It is about all dishwashers, but professional ones seem to lack a cleansing cycle after rinse aid is applied, thus the concentration of resulting rinse aid is higher. A consumer dishwasher is also used in their tests, but the concentration was much less than the professional dishwasher - however, they tested with 20g of rinse aid and used assumptions of the number and volume of washing cycles from their test dishwasher. A deviation of 10% difference in since water could increase the concentration significantly, by a factor of ~2 or more depending on the final rinsing stage.
So, in their example, the results in consumer dishwashers fell in the 1:40,000 - 1:80,000 dilution range. But, that does not necessarily apply to a different brand of dishwasher with a different method of rinsing. A 10% savings in the rinse cycle water might move that ratio into the 1:20,000 - 1:40,000 range (which is within the range of having an significant effect). So, I interpret this as not dismissing of consumer dishwashers, but rather indicating more careful study is needed.
Every once in a while I grab a water cup, usually at a coffee shop, and I notice the cups smell a bit like bleach. Always struck me as weird, but I figured they wouldn't put them out that way if it wasn't safe
Almost universally, the people handling your food at time of service have the least amount of training in the food delivery chain.
Upscale restaurants will generally do a better job here with temperature control and regular inspections.
Having a food handlers card as a chef is generally required but not for expo or servers and questionable for line chefs outside of higher end establishments.
Bottom line, unless you’re at a Michelin or Beard restaurant you should expect you’re being exposed to more harmful stuff than you’d expect.
why would they? if you wanted someone trained in food chemistry then your coffee would cost 2x. hell, chances are the manager doesn't know much more, either.
they have dishwasher, they put cups in dishwasher, they run, they serve in clean cups.
it's clear from the article that this is an issue across the entire food service industry, and has nothing to do with whether or not your pimply faced barista knows what the safe level of rinse aid in pre-made clears is.
They know better than to drink out of the machines which were supposedly cleaned when they weren't there to know for sure.
In the best-run high-turnover locations where cleaning agents are used according to a rigorous schedule proven to prevent slime and bacteria, it might be even more likely to have exposure if the chemicals are habitually incompletely rinsed from the apparatus afterward.
At a small coffee shop they may not have a dishwasher and instead have a few buckets in series starting with a sanitizer solution bucket followed by a few progressive rinse buckets
At the time I got some 'hormone' ointment from my doctor ( this is really scary and amazing stuff btw, apply it before bed, next morning : completely restored fingers ).
I noticed the eczema returned as soon as I did wet cleaning in the house, so I converted to a staunch cleaning gloves wearer.
> When individual components of the rinse aid were investigated separately, alcohol ethoxylates elicited a strong toxic and barrier-damaging effect.
To clarify a bit, it's not professional dishwashers (the machines) but the soap / chemicals used for commercial dishwashing. Minor but important when thinking about the broader problem.
Mind you, it gets diluted but those end up in the water supply, as does many other knows and unknowns. For me, the question has not be what effect does Compound X or Compound Y have individually, but when in the wild what happens when you combine A to Z+? Then what?
That entirely depends on the stability of the compounds in waste water. They break seem to break down sufficiently quickly[1] that it was evaluated as a potential problem in sampling waste water to even determine their content.
Did you do the 'sniff-test'? I did, and do again from time to time, when elsewhere. In my experience I can smell that stuff on the dishes and glassware, even after having cleaned them by hand before, and even after a second run without detergent. On every consumer dishwasher, so far.
That alone was reason for me to avoid them, since decades. And this hasn't changed. And I have no 'super-nose'(I think).
I knew a guy who had an ugly, painful ulcer on the top of his foot for a few months after dripping some liquid commercial dishwasher detergent on his sneaker while refilling the dispenser.
Another interesting question is what countries they got their detergents from. Formulas may vary across the world based on what's allowed and what's not.
I expect it is also in the finish dishwasher detergent pods.
digging deeper the wikipedia article on ethoxylation says:
Ethoxylated fatty alcohols are often converted to the corresponding organosulfates, which can be easily deprotonated to give anionic surfactants such as sodium laureth sulfate.
Get yourself a big old tub of anhydrous citric acid from Amazon or wherever, make up a 10% solution and use that in place of rinse aid. Just check with your dishwasher manufacturer that it’s not going to cause issues first.
I got a new Miele unit a few months ago and the manual specifically advises the use of such a solution, with caution not to make it any stronger.
From my experience, this will eventually remove any printed on markings from your glassware; for example, all of the measuring lines on Pyrex cups, etc.
Does it have to be anhydrous? Seems like a waste to go for the more expensive stuff when you're going to dissolve it anyway. Food-grade citric acid monohydrate should be cheaper.
The manual just said a citric acid solution so I guess whatever source will do. I suppose it’s just as easy to get a reasonably accurate concentration if you account for the water already present in monohydrate.
According to another comment - you're _not_ missing the printed ink on your dishes. If you are happy with the state that your dishes come out of the wash, then you are fine.
Vinegar can be a stronger acid than citric acid and has the potential to damage rubber sealings. That's why many manufacturers specifically advise against it.
Interesting. I’ve used 5% for as long as I can remember, seems to be recommended for that reason. Just never bothered to look into it before as my units haven’t shown any damage. Thanks!
Besides chemical properties, citric acid may turn out to be cheaper, especially if bought in large quantities.
But in the end, I think the cost savings of citric vs vinegar vs rinse aid is negligible. Usage should be about 5mL per wash (matches my experience), and even if you use fancy rinse aid, it is still a small fraction of the costs of running a dishwasher.
Note that the article is concerned about professional dishwashers, they didn't reproduce their findings on household dishwashers. Professional dishwashers are very different from household dishwashers, and they use much higher concentration of detergent and rinse aid.
I stopped using rinse-aid entirely on my 10-year old Bosch, and barely notice a difference. Maybe plastics come out a tad wetter than before, but they were never fully dry even with rinse-aid.
The last time an article like this went around, I decided to do the same thing with my Miele. The metal starting becoming stained pretty soon, and just recently I decided to switch to 7th Generation organic detergent powder. YMMV but wanted to share my anecdata for anyone considering the same.
How do you make "organic detergent"? Was it grown without synthetic pesticides, or...? I'm pretty skeptical of the word "organic" getting thrown around in marketing... so I'm really curious what makes a detergent qualify as organic.
Ok, this is posed to generate some sensationalist headlines. Do we get these concentrations with regular use in a dishwasher? Does it have cumulative exposure effects? Does it even reach the gut lining after digestion enzymes and acids?
From the summary it seems that they only investigated the dose dependent toxicity.
The summary says "detergent residue from professional dishwashers demonstrated the remnant of a significant amount of cytotoxic and epithelial barrier–damaging rinse aid remaining on washed and ready-to-use dishware", which might address the question about concentrations in regular use.
I interpreted it as "leftovers of a significant amount" not a "significant amount of leftovers", meaning that it was used in high quantities, but only remnants (in non significant amounts) were found.
You shouldn't assume remnant means "non significant", just "fewer"/"less than" what you started with. If only 5% of the substance remains (aka, the remnants) is still enough to cause problems, those are remnants by definition, but could still be significant amounts in terms of their (chance of) effects/impact.
Side note, those numbers are entirely arbitrary to illustrate the point, not meant to be indicative in anyway of how much is actually left in the processes above.
I stopped using extra shine mode on my Bosch dishwasher to save a little rinse aid. Noticed no difference. Vinegar ruined the seals and had to replace it.
Can someone who understands more about chemistry tell me where exactly which detergents use alcohol ethoxylates and how do I spot them from the label? Should I be concerned about this at home?
Household dishwashers are not affected because they usually have an additional wash cycle in the end. This study is about professional machines which wash dishes in mere minutes. So you can't do anything about it if you still want to eat at restaurants and don't want to bring your own dishes.
Always wondered what dishes look like with rinse aid and why people buy it. What am I missing? Are my dishes and glasses not sparkly enough without this aid?
Anyone noticed how they wash and rinse behind bars? It can be terrifying. The ones that don't use industrial dishwashers (bad as we're learning here) also just do a rapid sub 1 second dip into one sink with detergent chemicals, a sub 1 second dip onto a second water sink, and then upside down it goes on the shelf, ready to be reused.
How naive was I to think it's both cleaning well and not leaving dangerous chemicals as residue to mix onto a water or beer.
I might be generalising but in some countries (UK) it's common to not rinse soap/washing up liquid off dishes after washing them by hand. Being hypochondriac I was always curious about health aspects of this and feared something similar to what's described in the article.
I’m surprised that people don’t taste that in the food/drink they consume off their soapy dishes. It’s a distinct unpleasant taste that I tend to over rinse somewhat just to avoid, especially with cups/mugs where transfer is maximized.
I really want safety tests for consumer products to not be black/white.
Instead, more and more tests should be necessary for the more people you want to sell your product to, and the more people use it.
Some toy you sell 1000 of to people at a craft fayre should require a simple declaration that you didn't knowingly use leaded paint, while something you sell 10 billion of (eg dishwasher tablets) should require a whole independent team of scientists to do every study they can think of the establish risk/benefit.
Interesting! I bought metal straws a while back for use at home, and I used to clean them in the dishwasher. After a while I realized that my stomach acted up almost every time I used them (regular aspartame sweetened sodas). It stopped when I started washing them by hand. My theory: There was detergent or rinse aid left inside. About as unscientific as you can get but I'm "certain"...
Off topic: this is my first time hearing of rinse aids. It really feels odd (to me) that such a thing would exist. I thought we all just used water and a napkin.
I also have no experience with dishwashers, so how different is dishwater detergent from regular dishwashing soap?
Rinse aid is a dishwasher-specific product. It “helps” by removing residual soap and water spots from a dishwasher cycle.
I use a brand of dishwasher tabs that are supposed to be more “natural” and never use rinse aid, to no ill effect. Personally I think the normal tablets and rinse aid are specifically designed to be used together.
I thought the study meant the stuff used at the end after washing. Here in Canada bars and restaurants after washing dishes must rinse dishes in a disinfectant bath and let the dishes air dry. The rinse aid sounds like something in the soap itself that helps the soap not stick to the final clean dishes.
It also seems to be the water used about 4 liters of water in commercial dishwashers vs 12 liters for household types. Commercial use less water, more powerful detergent, no water rinse.
Rinse aid is a detergent that helps remove the residue other detergents or minerals in the water might leave on dishes after washing. It's not needed for hand washing, where mechanical scrubbing & a rinse with clean water performs the same task.
Dishwasher detergent is a surfactant, but is not a soap. All soaps are detergents, not all detergents are soaps. Soaps form insoluble precipitates when used with "hard" water, dishwasher detergents don't do that. They're not good to touch directly (rather harsh on the skin, they'll remove all the oil) but since they don't form those precipitates they work in a wider variety of conditions than soaps do. They also tend to include some other components, like bleach. That helps them clean better without needing mechanical scrubbing, which dishwashers don't do.
>An exciting finding of the present study is that alcohol ethoxylates that are responsible for these toxic effects can be extracted from recently washed dishware and still kept the toxicity.
Interesting, my mother taught me to always rinse the soap off from my dishes thoroughly and look at that. Sometimes superstition is more useful than expert advice.
Momma was the expert, it was always pure superstition for people to think they didn't need to rinse, not just once but multiple times.
In the analytical chem lab, you can get an idea how suitable pyrexware is for future use by mathematically considering the quality of the final rinse water, the effective dilution ratio, and the number of times rinsed.
The offending ingredient (alcohol ephoxylate) is present in both my dishwasher pods and my rinse aid.
I might start skipping the rinse aid and I'll seek out dishwasher pods that don't have that ingredient.
But apparently it's more od an issue with "professional" (restaurant) dishwashers, which use less water and more chemicals. I gathered this from other comments and I don't know if it's true.
I've looked at the dishwasher detergents at a few of my local grocery stores, and all of them contain either ethoxylates or "fatty alcohol alkoxylates", which some brief googling tells me are a class of chemicals that include ethoxylates. I've been unable (even at specialty health food stores) to locate a dishwasher detergent that lacks this class of chemical. If you find a brand that doesn't contain it, please let me know.
I also looked at home-made detergent recipes, as we've had good luck making our laundry detergent, but the blog I looked at showed severe streaking and residue on their example dishwasher load. I can't say that appeals to me, either.
> Enterocytic liquid-liquid interfaces were established on permeable supports, and direct cellular cytotoxicity, transepithelial electrical resistance, paracellular flux, immunofluorescence staining, RNA-sequencing transcriptome, and targeted proteomics were performed.
The stuff restaurants use to wash dishes is really bad for your tummy and very often that stuff is still on the dishes, while you're eating off of them.
Scientists create a layer of intestinal epithelial cells in a lab, minus all the other components in your intestine, then expose them to high concentrations of detergent and rinse aid.