Is the 5 Second Rule Really a Myth?

We've all been eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the bathroom while peeing and then sneezed and accidentally dropped the sandwich in the toilet. The question is, if you pick it out of the toilet within five seconds is it still safe to eat? Generally I've found the answer to that question to be "No". It really all depends on what you drop the food into. It would be foolish to definitively say the 5 Second Rule is true or false because it should be used in a case by case basis.

If you drop a sandwich on your kitchen floor, then go ahead and pick it up and eat it. It doesn't have to be within five seconds it could be within a week depending on what's in the sandwich. If it's peanut butter and jelly you could probably get away with waiting around 5 to 8 DAYS before picking it up and eating it. If it's a tuna salad or something with mayonnaise then I'd recommend eating it within a day. That's the kitchen floor, but what happens when you're out on the sidewalks of a city and you drop your shishkebob into a pile of dog shit? Well then it really doesn't matter if you pick it up in a MILLISECOND because once it makes contact with the shit and there's shit visibly on it, seconds don't make a difference at all.

The 5-Second Rule also depends on how expensive the food you dropped is. If you drop a Dorito in a public bathroom, you'll just let it go, it's not worth the risk. But if you drop your family's Thanksgiving turkey on the floor and the dogs start gnawing away at it you can't just throw that out. When that happens you need to dust it off, make sure there's no broken glass on it and then re-baste and pretend like nothing ever happened. There is no real 5-Second Rule, it's something you need to feel instinctively like the decision of who to have sex with or who not to have sex with. Some people have good instincts, other people who are more desperate make mistakes and those mistakes can make them very, very sick.