Food Safety: Tips for Eating Safely
Consuming contaminated food or drinks is the cause of so-called Foodborne Diseases. To prevent these diseases, it is important to adopt good hygiene practices. Here are some tips.
Eating well also means eating safely, so we will give you some essential tips that you should always keep in mind throughout all the stages that food goes through throughout its shelf life, from production to consumption, including storage, handling and preparation/cooking.
Certain behaviours in our daily lives can contaminate not only food, but also equipment, utensils, facilities and, consequently, people. Although many microorganisms are useful for food production – particularly cheese and yoghurt – and for improving health due to their ability to ferment substrates in the gastrointestinal tract, others are highly dangerous and can cause diseases or be fatal.
The degree of resistance of our immune system to microorganisms depends greatly on each human being – the host of the microorganism. People with a weak immune system – the so-called immunocompromised – are more susceptible to pathogenic microorganisms. Babies, pregnant women, the elderly and children also end up being at risk and more fragile groups, due to the reduced capacity of the body to defend itself. Knowing the factors that can enhance or inhibit the growth of microorganisms in food is half the battle towards a safe and healthy diet.
5 principles for safe eating
Personal hygiene: washing your hands:
If the pandemic has taught us anything good, it is the habit of washing our hands frequently, as they are one of the main means of transmitting microorganisms. Washing your hands correctly is essential to reducing the risk of contamination. Ideally, you should wash your hands as soon as you get home, before starting to prepare food, after touching raw foods such as fish, meat or seafood, after blowing your nose, after going to the bathroom, after handling the garbage or touching animals.
Separate raw and cooked foods:
Raw foods should be kept separate from cooked foods, as raw foods have a higher microbial load and can contaminate cooked and ready-to-eat foods. Therefore, you should use different utensils – such as knives or cutting boards – for raw foods and cooked foods. The same applies to storing raw foods in the refrigerator, which should be done in different containers. Raw foods should always be on the shelf below cooked or ready-to-eat foods.
Cook food thoroughly:
Food should be cooked at a temperature above 75ºC, as this is considered a safe temperature, above which most pathogenic microorganisms can be eliminated. It is important to check whether a large piece of meat or fish – a roast meat loaf, for example, or a fish in the oven weighing more than 1 kg – reaches this temperature inside (thermal centre) of the food. In the case of meat, make sure that its exudates are clear and not reddish. A kitchen thermometer is always an excellent tool to check whether or not the safe temperature has been reached.
The temperature at which food is kept is essential for its preservation. It is extremely important for the growth and multiplication speed of microorganisms in food, and this development is faster at room temperature. Food should be stored in the refrigerator at temperatures between 0 and 5˚C. As for defrosting food, it should be done inside the refrigerator and not at room temperature. Click Here for food safety course
Use safe water and raw materials:
You must ensure that the raw materials you use to prepare/cook food are of good quality and safe, particularly water. It is important to make sure that the water you use to cook is safe, otherwise it will be a source of pathogenic microorganisms and/or toxins. In order to minimize the risk, you can adopt some preventive measures, such as washing fruits and vegetables before preparing them and peeling them.
