Excerpted from the Nutrition and You! blog on boston.com.
Depending on your packed-lunch food safety habits, you could be setting yourself up for foodborne illness, better known as the dreaded food poisoning. Almost 50 million cases of foodborne illness occur annually in the United States, and sadly, they result in 3,000 deaths.
Comments
"Unfortunately, in a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Texas examined the lunch boxes of over 700 preschoolers and found that over 90 percent of the perishable items inside were at an unsafe temperature by the time the children were chowing down on their lunch". This does not mean that the food had spoiled, only that the temperature of the food was high enough for bacterial growth. I see no reference to studies that food had actually spoiled by the time it was ready to be eaten. The hours between packing and eating are so few that unless the food was spoiled to begin with, it most likely is not spoiled by lunch time. And maybe some bacterial growth is beneficial to help build immunity. After all, the human race survived for thousands of years before refridgeration.