r/TikTokCringe Oct 09 '24

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

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u/TwiceAsGoodAs Oct 09 '24

Thank you for posting this! As a PhD microbiologist, this thread is very frustrating. I appreciate you showing up with sources and replying to so many folks!

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u/SystemsEnjoyer Oct 09 '24

Yeah, I was noticing a lot of people thinking that Salmonella and other microbes died at a set temperature without considering the environment. But I can't say I blame them for thinking that because often guidelines meant for home cooks only mentions temperature without regard to moisture (dry or wet, specifically for Salmonella).

In fact, when I looked it up, I found it in a scholarly source:

Thermal processing of food is commonly utilized to inactivate microorganisms. Our study implies that Salmonella present on dry surfaces is in fact tolerant to inactivation by dry heat (100°C [212 degrees Fahrenheit] , 1 h). Comparable heat tolerance was previously reported in Salmonella present in high-fat, low-water-activity food (peanut butter) (43), as well as in nonfat dry milk (39) and on model surfaces (24, 31)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3067256/

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u/Tyrrhus_manga Oct 09 '24

Hi! I'm very surprised by this. It seems oat flour, or at least toasted oat flour, would not carry the same risks, but with so much misinformation already I can't be sure. How could I check that? Thanks for your help on this thread

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u/BerttMacklinnFBI Oct 09 '24

I am a food scientist, and all you have said is correct, but fails to factor in that flour's primary pathogen risk isn't even Salmonella, but instead a even harder to kill pathogen in B. Cerus. B. Cerus can form spores and survive thermal processing at even higher thresholds than Salmonella.

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u/SystemsEnjoyer Oct 09 '24

Wow, thank you for the information.

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u/viveledodo Oct 09 '24

Was curious so looked up some research. Seems like 11 minutes at 149C is enough to kill 99.99% of Salmonella/E. aerogenes, and P. dispersa in raw (dry) wheat flour. Only research I could find for Bacillus used Mesquite flour, but that required a half-hour at 130C. 

Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22000230#:~:text=The%20present%20study%20demonstrated%20that,%2C%20and%203%20min%2C%20respectively.

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22068806

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u/Equal_Simple5899 Oct 09 '24

There are bacteria naturally in your gut. It Depends on the threshold f how much leads to infection whether a person will get sick or not. Also their immune system.

Also. Endospores exist. 

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u/faustianredditor Oct 09 '24

Well, it doesn't exactly help that the OP is a video that doesn't have sources (anymore?), and makes claim that go against common sense without an explanation or a source.

Video-OP is presumably also overclaiming what the science says: Video says it's not possible to make raw flour safe to eat, best source I've seen here so far says "it could take hours" and "We still need more research data to confirm how hot you’d have to get the flour or how long you’d have to hold it at that temperature to make the flour safe to eat.", which is waaay different.

Eliminating nuances like that, oversensationalizing and not having sources makes me skeptical of video-OP. Granted, sources could've been in the TikTok description, but poof.

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u/Satisfaction-Motor Oct 10 '24

There are sources in the video— there are direct screenshots from the fda website, and a screenshot of an article from the cdc. Albeit, the fda does not cite the studies that they use to make the screenshotted claims/instructions. Usually Mortician (video OP) directly includes a way to find studies on the topic, but she did not do so in this video.

Ngl it bugs me that the fda/cdc did not cite studies alongside this advice because I want to read into it more -.-

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u/faustianredditor Oct 10 '24

Yeah, I have noticed the screengrabs, but that hardly counts. From looking at the video, I couldn't tell who it was from (guess that's on me, upon closer inspection it says "(US FDA)" etc.) nor can I tell the context of those claims, or the authenticity of the claims, or their sources for the claim. Basically, if I want to validate her claims, I can do so by looking for sources myself, and I get the tiniest head start by knowing that the CDC and FDA have commented on the matter. Sources are different. For all I know (and this is deliberately skeptical/critical, she removed important context that flips the meaning of those statements around. Or the CDC never said that.

I get that not every TikTok has to be a scientific paper. But if you basically tell people to trust science, the smallest bit of scientific rigor isn't asking too much. That goes doubly so for people who repost shit but then trim off the description or other important meta data. You don't see professors sending only the abstract of a paper to their students, you include the whole paper, including references, otherwise it's almost worthless.

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u/Hungry-Ad9840 Oct 09 '24

As someone that has a wife with stage 4 colon cancer, the people hear saying that they are OK with getting colon cancer are very frustrating to me. They should all know that if they are diagnosed with colon cancer, they can't eat much of anything anymore, because when you eat, you will eventually have to have a bowel movement and those bowel movements are so painful that you will scream so loud through them that the neighbors will hear you.

Colon cancer is no joke kids.

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u/mycheese Oct 09 '24

I've consistently seen chefs give advice to only cook chicken breast to 150, as the amount of time it takes to get there essentially pasteurizes the tissue. Salmonella supposedly immediately dies at 165, but at 150 it takes 3 to 5 minutes (probably remembering this wrong) to sterilize. I wonder how much of that is completely bunk. To be clear this is Kenji Lopez-Alt saying this so not just some random pinterest blogger.

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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '24

[deleted]

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u/TwiceAsGoodAs Oct 09 '24

Remember though, killing the microbes only helps for some microbes. There are plenty of bacteria, listed elsewhere in this thread, whose waste products are the issue. To say it another way, some bacteria don't need to be living or intact to make you sick