This is concerning.
In this day and age companies are always looking for ways to make life easier/help you become lazier. One successful way they’ve done this is by chopping up lettuce and putting them into bags.
If you’re prone to buying prepacked lettuce and salads you might want to swap them for a full iceberg on your next shopping trip.
It turns out supermarket bags of lettuce leaves are actually breeding grounds for salmonella, the type of bacteria that causes food poisoning.
According to new research broken salad leaves leak fluid into the bags which can increase the growth of salmonella by 110%.
“Salad leaves are cut during harvesting and we found that even microlitres of the juices (less than 1/200th of a teaspoon) which leach from the cut ends of the leaves enabled salmonella to grow in water, even when it was refrigerated.”
“These juices also helped the salmonella to attach itself to the salad leaves so strongly that vigorous washing could not remove the bacteria, and even enabled the pathogen to attach to the salad bag container.” Lead scientist Dr Primrose Freestone, from the University of Leicester’s Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation told the Telegraph.
Salmonella is mostly found in poultry and symptoms of this type of food poisoning include diarrhoea, fever, and abdominal cramps. Most people recover without treatment within four days,although it may be several months before your bowel habits are entirely normal.
