By FMT’s Lifestyle Team

Crying over the proverbial ‘spilled milk’ is a no-no (too mainstream) – but go ahead and howl over the batch of Pisang Goreng that had tumbled from your plate and onto the floor, and could have still been salvaged under the universally-accepted ‘5-second rule.’ They’re goners, my friend. Why? Because SCIENCE, b**ch.

Bent on ruining everyone’s cherished floor-related eating habits, Michael Stevens, host of crazy-popular YouTube science video series ‘Vsauce’, recently broke the news to the world that the ‘5-second rule’ – which holds that bacteria take more than 5 seconds to latch onto food that has fallen to the floor – is totally bogus. Watch him and get totally floored:

Stevens crows (after chomping down on a banana he had plonked onto the floor): “Five seconds is way too long to wait. Bacteria adhere to dropped food almost immediately.”

The know-it-all life-shatterer references an episode of nerd evangelist MythBusters, and a report by the Journal of Applied Microbiology, which found that food that touches the floor for just five seconds can collect anywhere from 150 to 8,000 types of bacteria. Just for the heck of it, they also left food on the floor for 1 minute – and discovered that they rack up to 10 times more bacteria.

Many accidental floor gourmands are fooled by the spotlessness of their kitchen or living room floors into thinking that there couldn’t be more than 3 bacteria on them. This could be the reason why up to 70% of women and 50% of men (in the US, anyway) use the ‘five-second rule’ as an excuse to salvage irredeemable, floor-kissing food. (They’ll probably continue doing so, Michael Stevens or no).

And forget about frantically washing food which had briefly tangoed with the floor – the bacteria which had hopped on to it can’t be so easily dislodged. So let the (potato) chips fall where they may.

*Based on an article published in the world’s first meat-free dining portal, www.kindmeal.my.