Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren foc obamb here day old pizza can be a
Speaker 1: welcome staple to college students, starving artists, and anyone who
Speaker 1: thought it was a brilliant idea to order that extra
Speaker 1: large double meat after coming home from the bar at
Speaker 1: two am, only to have sleepiness catch up with them
Speaker 1: halfway through the first slice. Cold pizza is a bona
Speaker 1: fide breakfast of champions. If refrigerated, leftover pizza will stay
Speaker 1: good for four days. But what about room temperature pizza?
Speaker 1: Will you get sick if you eat a few slices
Speaker 1: of the pepperoni that's sat in a greasy cardboard box
Speaker 1: next to your bed for the last eight hours? The
Speaker 1: official answer, don't risk it. The U s d A,
Speaker 1: that's the United States Department of Agriculture, published some food
Speaker 1: safety guidelines for students in which it answered this very question.
Speaker 1: According to them, you should throw away any leftover food
Speaker 1: that's been sitting out at room temperature for two hours
Speaker 1: or more, whether or not it contains meat. The reason
Speaker 1: is that harmful bacteria grow the fast just on foods
Speaker 1: that are in the danger zone temperatures between forty and
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. That's four point four
Speaker 1: and sixty degrees celsius. In that range, bacteria double in
Speaker 1: number every twenty minutes. Does that mean that every pizza
Speaker 1: is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria that will explode a number
Speaker 1: if the pie is left out for more than two hours.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Benjamin Chapman, a food safety specialist at North
Speaker 1: Carolina State University, told Life Hacker that leftover pizza hasn't
Speaker 1: made enough people sick to count as a public health risk.
Speaker 1: Chapman says that's probably because pizza toppings and crust are
Speaker 1: generally too dry to be bacteria friendly environments, and that
Speaker 1: tomato sauce is too acidic. Not all toppings are created equal,
Speaker 1: though Pepperoni is dry cured so it's built to last,
Speaker 1: but eating old veggie ingredients or moist chunks of chicken
Speaker 1: is probably pressing your luck. To get a sense of
Speaker 1: the general risk level of pizza, we turned to a
Speaker 1: public health report from Ontario, Canada. According to its review
Speaker 1: of global food poisoning data, aces, pizza has been implicated
Speaker 1: in a number of food born illness outbreaks worldwide, and
Speaker 1: that includes pizza of all types plain cheese, meat, and
Speaker 1: veggie in both restaurants and homes. For some perspective, though,
Speaker 1: that report cited a few hundred individual cases of food
Speaker 1: poisoning over more than a decade of worldwide pizza eating.
Speaker 1: In the U. S Alone, we eat an estimated three
Speaker 1: billion pizzas every year. So should you finish off those
Speaker 1: last two pieces of stuff? Crust Hawaiian from last night's
Speaker 1: of Poker game. The odds of getting sick are probably
Speaker 1: similar to the odds of drawing a royal flush, So
Speaker 1: the real question is are you feeling lucky? Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other toothsome topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.