"Is Takeout Safe?" and Other Food Safety Questions

Welcome! Today, I am very excited because we have licensed nutritionist Monica Reinagel with us. She's also the host of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Nutrition Diva. Click the audio player or the link to your favorite podcast app above to listen to the interview.

I'm very much looking forward to picking your brain today, Monica.

It's great to be here with you, Sabrina.

Obviously, most of us don't grow our own food in the home. We have to go out and get food somehow. So I was hoping we could talk about some of those food safety issues.

Absolutely. I should probably start with a little bit of a disclaimer though. Food safety and safe food handling are definitely part of our brief as nutrition professionals and dieticians. That's one of the things we cover, and we try to help consumers understand how to prevent, foodborne illness—things like not cross-contaminating your cutting boards in your kitchen or how to make sure that nobody gets salmonella from the potato salad at 4th of July. That's definitely one of the things that we include in our training and that we try to educate the public about.

We are really relying on the CDC and the infectious disease specialists—the virologists, the epidemiologists—to help us understand what the features of this virus are so we can give good advice.

But now, we have a novel virus that just kind of appeared on the scene about four or five months ago. We're still trying to figure out how it behaves, how it's transmitted. And that's put us in a little bit of an uncomfortable position of trying to give advice and answer questions with a really incomplete data set. So we are really relying on the CDC and the infectious disease specialists—the virologists, the epidemiologists—to help us understand what the features of this are so that we can give good advice. But we don't really have well-established best practices yet because we just haven't had enough time to develop those.

So, we're doing the best we can with kind of incomplete information. The guidance is changing rapidly as we learn more. So sometimes we have to correct. And you know, that's part of our job as science professionals and science communicators too, is to say, "Okay, that thing I said? We have new and better information now and we're going to give you advice and guidance."

Yeah. And that is my favorite thing about science. You get to keep poking at things and the data will lead you in the right direction. But I understand that some people get frustrated or that makes them uncomfortable with science because it makes it look or seem...

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